Opinion: B.C.'s passenger rail opportunity must include Surrey, with a Newton hub | Daily Hive

Opinion: B.C.'s passenger rail opportunity must include Surrey, with a hub in Newton

The Fraser Valley Heritage Railway Society's restored 1912 BCER interurban runs every Sunday on the original Cloverdale– Sullivan right-of-way. The corridor connects Newton, Sullivan, Cloverdale and Langley and historically reached Chilliwack. (Fraser Valley Heritage Railway Society)

Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by Mike Starchuk, the Imagine Surrey candidate for Mayor of Surrey in the October 2026 civic election. A former MLA for Surrey-Cloverdale and a 32-year veteran of the Surrey Fire Service, he has lived in Surrey for more than 50 years.

Every Sunday in Cloverdale, a wooden interurban car from 1912 rolls out from Highway 10 and 176A Street, blows its whistle at the level crossing, and trundles past the Serpentine River to Sullivan Park and back.

It’s a tourist ride today. A century ago, it was the way you got to work.

The B.C. Electric Railway’s Fraser Valley line — more than 100 km of electrified track from New Westminster through Newton, Sullivan, Cloverdale, Langley, Abbotsford, and on to Chilliwack — was once the longest interurban in Canada. We tore most of it out for cars. The tracks are still in the ground. The right-of-way is still protected. And every weekend, the volunteers of the Fraser Valley Heritage Railway Society prove the trains can still run on it.

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So when Premier David Eby and Transportation and Transit Minister Mike Farnworth talk about studying passenger rail for the Fraser Valley, my first reaction is: good. Thank you. Keep going. My second reaction, as someone who has spent more than 50 years in Surrey and 32 of them on its fire trucks, is this: we don’t have another decade for studies. We have a corridor.

The South of Fraser is where the demand is and where SkyTrain terminates

Surrey is on track to be the largest city in British Columbia. Anyone stuck on Highway 10, 64 Avenue, or King George at 5:15 p.m. on a Wednesday already knows it. We are growing faster than our public transit can keep up, and the growth isn’t only happening along the Fraser Highway corridor.

The Surrey-Langley SkyTrain extension — the project I helped advance as MLA for Surrey-Cloverdale — will be transformational when it opens. But look at the map. SkyTrain runs up the Fraser Highway spine. It does not touch Newton. It does not touch Cloverdale’s heart. It does not touch South Surrey or White Rock. And it stops at 203rd Street — leaving every commuter in Aldergrove, Abbotsford, and Chilliwack still reaching for the car keys.

At nearly $375 million per km, we can and should get SkyTrain to South Surrey. But for distances like Chilliwack, it doesn’t make sense. We need a different tool for a different job — and that tool is commuter rail, on the corridors we already own.

British Columbia Electric Railway Company Limited, Mainland System map (c. 1910s). (City of Vancouver Archives)

Other places solved this with rail they already had

Ontario’s GO Transit moves tens of millions of riders a year, mostly on old freight corridors. Metrolinx didn’t bulldoze Mississauga; it negotiated track-sharing with the freight railways and ran more trains, with two-way, all-day service on the Kitchener, Barrie, and Stouffville lines.

Seattle’s Sounder commuter rail runs on BNSF Railway track — the same operator that runs through White Rock and along the Peace Arch waterfront today — and moves nearly two million passengers a year.

Montreal’s Exo network stitches together five lines on existing freight corridors. California’s Caltrain and Metrolink do the same thing on a bigger scale.

And we already have a working pilot of our own. West Coast Express — five trains in, five trains out, weekday peak only — has been at capacity for years with no meaningful expansion since 1995. That ridership isn’t a ceiling. It is evidence that the demand is there, and we’ve been rationing it for three decades.

GO Train in Toronto. (Philip Lange/Shutterstock)

The province’s plan is studying; our plan should be building

The BC NDP made two commitments in the 2024 election: extend the West Coast Express to Chilliwack and create a new Fraser Valley rail service in partnership with the freight railway. The provincial government’s Fraser Valley Integrated Transportation Planning Study, which the government said would conclude in spring of last year, still has not been publicly released.

In his most recent comments to the media, Minister Farnworth was candid: the priorities right now are the SkyTrain extension to Langley and widening Highway 1, and the provincial government is “doing some work” on what Fraser Valley rail would require. As Mayor, I want to help that work get done and include Surrey at the centre of it.

Start with the corridor we never lost, and put Newton at the centre of a commuter rail line

Let’s start by restoring and extending the Cloverdale-Sullivan heritage interurban, operated today by the Fraser Valley Heritage Railway Society on B.C. Hydro’s protected passenger-rail right-of-way, with freight handled by Southern Railway of BC.

This would be Phase One of a real South Fraser commuter rail pilot. Modern, quiet, low- emission trains. Stations at Scott Road, Newton, Sullivan, Cloverdale and Langley City. Connect it east toward Aldergrove and Abbotsford on the existing Interurban alignment. Then study, in parallel, what a second branch down the BNSF corridor through Kennedy Heights and out to Peace Arch and White Rock could look like — because BNSF already runs trains there every day.

BCER interurban service through Cloverdale in the early 20th century. The same alignment is still preserved today. (City of Surrey Archives)

Commuter rail isn’t a replacement for the rest of Surrey’s public transit plan. It’s the spine that finally makes the rest of that plan work.

Imagine Surrey has already committed to the other pieces: Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) on King George Boulevard and Scott Road. Real east-west bus service that connects Newton, Fleetwood, and Guildford without forcing every trip to transfer in Surrey City Centre. A proper Highway 10 bus running from Cloverdale to Langley. And SkyTrain extended all the way through to South Surrey — via Newton — with planning starting as soon as possible to get the project moving.

Put a commuter line on the Interurban corridor, and every one of those projects gets stronger, because they all have somewhere to connect to. The east-west bus across 72 Avenue isn’t dropping you at a curb anymore — it’s dropping you at a train platform that can reach Downtown Vancouver in 45 minutes. The Highway 10 bus from Cloverdale doesn’t dead-end at a park-and-ride; it feeds the same line.

Anaheim Regional Intermodal Transit Center. (Kit Leong/Shutterstock)

That is what an intermodal station is. And Newton is where we can build one.

Picture it: a single integrated public transit hub at Newton built on the stretch of the Interurban right-of-way. Commuter rail platforms running east to Langley, Abbotsford, and eventually Chilliwack — and west to a direct SkyTrain transfer at Scott Road (and, if I am elected Mayor, Newton). SkyTrain running south from King George through Newton and on to South Surrey. A BRT terminal at street level for the King George and Scott Road spines. A bus loop route that connects seamlessly to BRT, SkyTrain, and commuter rail. Covered walkways between every mode. Real bike parking. Housing and shops built right above and around it, the way good public transit cities have done it for fifty years.

This isn’t a fantasy. It’s how Burnaby built Brentwood. It’s how Mississauga is rebuilding around Cooksville GO. It’s how every successful suburb in this country has stopped being a suburb and started being a city, in its own right. Newton has had the population, the demand and the rail corridor sitting underneath it the whole time. What it has never had is a city hall willing to demand it.

We already built it in 1910

Imagine a Cloverdale mom catching the 8:10 a.m. train for a quick ride to Sullivan instead of crawling up 64 Avenue and having to find parking. A Newton senior reaching Langley Centre on one train. A Kwantlen Polytechnic student cutting their commute between campuses in half.

Trains were once the backbone of Surrey’s transportation. We have an opportunity to bring it back, full steam ahead.

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