One Kamloops councillor says a multi-billion-dollar railcar investment by Alberta will add to a growing railway issue in the Tournament Capital.

Mike O’Reilly says Kamloops is shouldering a large burden for rail traffic already and will be even more, with Alberta now spending $3.7 billion to lease 4,400 rail cars from CP and CN, bringing an expected 125,000 barrels of crude oil per day to the B.C. coast.

“Forty-four-hundred new oil rail cars is an okay idea for Alberta, it’s not good for Kamloops at all. When they’re talking up at the rate of about 125,000 barrels of oil per day is what they’re going to be shipping via rail, and that’s going to be passing through Kamloops,” he says.

“And essentially anything coming from rail from the oil sands are going to pass through Kamloops, and that’s a concern. When you have neighborhoods such as Rayleigh, Dallas, Valleyview and even some areas of Brock that are basically dissected by a rail line, that’s a big safety concern.”

O’Reilly voiced the growing concern of rail traffic in Kamloops to Federal Infrastructure Minister Francois Philippe Champagne last week, when he was in town and speaking to TNRD board members.

Champagne indicated the federal government could fund overpasses in Kamloops once the city brings a formal request forward.

“Kamloops is carrying the brunt of the amount of new trade coming through all of Canada. Essentially anything going through the Port of Vancouver, in or out, is coming through Kamloops by rail and train. We don’t feel that the taxpayer of Kamloops should be paying for this,” O’Reilly says. “We haven’t changed anything on our end… it’s the length of the trains and the products on those trains that have changed.”