So what exactly needs to be done to get the railway on Vancouver Island up to snuff?
The main job, said Island Corridor Foundation head Graham Bruce, will be to replace rotten ties.
“The work that needs to be done is to replace a quarter of the ties, which works out to 104,000 of them between Victoria and Courtenay,” he said. “That’s the bulk of the work.”
Other than that, trestle bridges need to be refurbished, although a $500,000 study indicated they are not in as bad shape as was once believed.
“There’s more work than people anticipate,” Bruce said. “We’ve got to do all the bureaucratic work to put the funding in process and we’ve got to have a work plan, call for tenders and begin the work. All those steps need to have due diligence.”