The VIA Rail Station Committee has come up with an alternative route that they are hoping to present to VIA. This route would surely be unpopular with east basin cottage owners and others. It would see the station located south of the hamlet on Road 38 and Brewer Road, with the line then passing over the east basin of Sharbot Lake via a railway bridge system. A new mechanism for crossing the road would need to be built.Ī second route has also been discussed locally as an alternative. A bridge that allowed the former line to run under Road 38 was removed five years ago, thanks to a grant from the government of Ontario. The line would then cross Road 38 and heading east behind Granite Ridge Education Centre and head towards Highway 7.
The line would then run to Railway Heritage Park (across from the township office) stopping at a station located where the original Sharbot Lake rail station stood. That would mean passing through Sharbot Lake, limiting or entirely blocking access to the Sharbot Lake beach and the Sharbot Lake Family Health Team and passing within metres of many homes in the hamlet. VIA officials have have been planning for the line to follow an identical route to the one that the former CN Rail line from Peterborough to Ottawa. The Zoom group, now known as the Sharbot Lake Via Rail Station Committee, were concerned that the two ideas about VIA’s plans for the line as it passes through Sharbot Lake, that have been discussed thus far are both flawed. There has been nothing stated by VIA Rail about Shining Waters since the $71 million in funding was announced. Since that announcement took place, the Liberals were returned to power in the October 2019 election, but with a diminished mandate as a minority government, and COVID-19 hit a few months later. The projected cost of the new line is $4 billion ($6 billion for a fully electric line) in 2019 dollars. However, in June of last year, then Minister for Gender and Equality and International Development Maryam Monsef, who is the MP for Peterborough, announced $71 million in federal funding to complete the planning process for the Shining Waters line, over a two-year period. There was speculation in the spring of 2019 that funding for the line would be included in the federal pre-election budget, but that was not the case. In 2017 a proposed map of the line, which included a station in Sharbot Lake, was released by VIA.
The VIA Rail line, tentatively called the Shining Waters Line, has been the subject of intermittent, and limited, communication from VIA over several years. This past spring, an ongoing conversation among some of the business and tourism group activists about the potential for a VIA Rail passenger service, between Toronto and Ottawa coming through Sharbot Lake, became the subject of a Zoom-based set of meetings. They developed out of some of the conversations that have taken place at semi-annual social gatherings of business people from Sharbot Lake and neighbouring communities, organised by Wayne and Alison Robinson and Bill and Rosemarie Bowick. The Sharbot Lake Business Group and the Rural Frontenac Tourism Group have both sprung into existence over the last couple of years.
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