How will the NDP get the West Coast Express to Chilliwack?

Four months after promising to extend the West Coast Express to Chilliwack, there’s no indication of how—or when—the provincial government will deliver on its commitment.

In its platform for last fall’s election, the NDP pledged to extend the West Coast Express to Chilliwack. The platform also promised a separate “new rail service” in the Fraser Valley. But details have been non-existent.

Despite the scale of the promises, the NDP did not issue a press release or hold a campaign event to focus attention on its commitments last fall. The pledge to expand the West Coast Express came in the form of a single short sentence. The promise hasn’t been mentioned since and there has been no explanation for how the government will technical challenges to any plan to run two-way passenger trains between Mission and Chilliwack.

(The NDP has since removed its platform from its website, but you can find an archived version here.)

Since the election, the government has repeatedly refused The Current’s requests for an interview with new Transportation and Transit Minister Mike Farnworth. The project was not mentioned in a mandate letter that sets out Farnworth’s priorities for the coming years.

In response to The Current’s queries, a communications staffer pointed to a long-running planning project—the Fraser Valley Integrated Planning Study—that was supposed to be complete and released over the winter. Last week, as The Current was asking about the project, the delivery date of that study was changed to Winter/Spring of 2025.

That study has yet to see the light of day, but the province said it “involves co-ordinating the movement of people and goods by rail, including the West Coast Express, and also considers how the potential expansion of rail service best aligns with broader regional planning.”

The word “potential” could suggest the expansion of rail service is not a sure thing, but a provincial spokesperson wrote that the work currently underway precedes major investments like rail. 

The spokesperson said the same due diligence process took place before the construction of the Surrey Langley SkyTrain and is also taking place for the SkyTrain extension to the University of British Columbia. The UBC extension project has been in the works for years, but the NDP promised again to complete it in its fall platform.

Although extending the West Coast Express to Chilliwack would be one of the largest rail projects in recent BC history, recent moves suggest it is not at the top of the NDP’s to-do list.

In January, provincial cabinet ministers received mandate letters from Premier David Eby in which he outlined their respective priorities. Although Farnworth’s letter directed him to extend the SkyTrain to UBC, it did not mention the West Coast Express extension. The letter did task Farnworth with identifying “affordable and efficient opportunities for expansion of SkyTrain, RapidBus, and rail service in the province to meet the transportation and goods movement needs of growing populations.”

Last year, Daily Hive published a 2021 preliminary government study that examined how existing railway corridors might be used to connect Fraser Valley communities to Vancouver. The study, which only considered options that would use existing rail networks, contemplated extending the West Coast Express to Abbotsford and creating a regional rail link along the Interurban corridor between Langley and Chilliwack. 

The NDP, in its election platform, seemed to promise both—or a combination of the two. In addition to the West Coast Express extension, it suggested it would work “jointly with CP Rail” to create a new rail service in the valley. The interurban corridor is primarily controlled by the Southern Railway of BC (SRY), which runs on the south side of the Fraser River and shares some tracks with CN Rail. 

It’s unclear how extending the West Coast Express from Abbotsford to Chilliwack would actually work.

The two communities are linked by two rail lines—one operated by CN, the other by SRY. The CN line is heavily used and has a single track that, crucially, carries only westbound trains. (Eastbound trains run on CP tracks on the north side of the Fraser River.) The SRY route is winding and, although it intersects major commercial areas in both Abbotsford and Chilliwack, its length would require users to accept lengthy commute times. Given that the West Coast Express currently takes one hour and 15 minutes to travel between Mission and downtown Vancouver, a Chilliwack-to-Vancouver West Coast Express trip that used the SRY tracks would take more than two hours.

Both routes would require using CPKC rail bridge over the Fraser River and reconfiguring connections with the CPKC lines.

(You can read our freight train mailbag for more details on how the three railways currently operate in the Fraser Valley.)

One possibility is that the West Coast Express trains wouldn’t actually come to Chilliwack. Instead, rapid buses could be used to “extend” the route. Doing so could be cheaper, more practical, and possibly even faster once Highway 1 is widened across Sumas Prairie. But buses may run contrary to the expectations of voters who heard the NDP promise to extend the West Coast Express—a well-known train route—last fall. Buses would also lack the comfort, ease and ability to avoid traffic snarls that residents would expect from rail travel.

Last fall’s West Coast Express promise seemed to represent a major—but relatively quiet—shift in the province’s attitude towards train travel in the Fraser Valley.

Technical work on the Fraser Valley Integrated Planning Study began in the fall of 2023. As recently as last January, then-provincial transportation minister Rob Fleming dismissed calls for rail connections into the valley, pointing to a lack of transit usage in the region. 

The government has not yet explained how urgently it plans to act on its most-recent promises. The planning study, when released, should provide an early indication of what a longer West Coast Express could actually look like. But given past projects and the scale of the promise, it’s unlikely work would start on the project before the next provincial election.