Kitchener to Stratford by Transit
With the launch of GO service to Stratford on July 6th, 2026, there are new options for people travelling between Stratford and Kitchener-Waterloo. That makes a total of four transit providers offering service between the two areas, each filling a particular niche. Combined they provide a service which is usable but unsatisfactory.
VIA Rail has been operating service to Stratford since their inception in 1976, but the service they offer has diminished from 5 trains a day 50 years ago to just one train a day in 2026.
Flixbus is a private, unsubsidized coach operator which recently began service to Stratford after the collapse of Greyhound. While they offer a surprisingly good service when they operate, it is infrequent. The service recently doubled to two daily round trips, 6 days a week.
PC Connect is a contracted transit service by Perth County, which runs minibuses between Stratford and Kitchener (as well as St Marys and London) 3 times a day, every day except Sundays.
GO’s new service serves a gap in the previous options. There was previously no weekday Toronto commuter service, and until very recently there was no reverse-peak trip available to Stratford on Sundays. The GO service fills both voids while simultaneously offering a convenient way of travelling from Toronto to Stratford matinee shows, and their $10 weekend pass offers an incredibly good deal for the service offered.
Over the past couple months, I found myself making a number of journeys between the two cities and had the opportunity to sample all four existing operators on their Kitchener-Stratford services. Below is what I observed, and at the bottom of this article are the current schedules.
PC Connect
PC Connect is the most frequent transit option, and charges $12 for journeys between Stratford and Kitchener, or $6 for journeys entirely within Perth County.
I boarded PC Connect on a Monday morning, taking the 9:40am trip from Stratford to Kitchener. The service recommends booking on the Blaise Transit app: this allows you to pay with card and to reserve a seat. The bus arrived at the Stratford Downie Street bus terminal a bit early from St Mary’s, with no passengers on board. I and two other passengers boarded: it seemed that reserving a spot was in fact unnecessary, leaving paying by card as being the main advantage of using the app. It might be that other trips are busier, as the more comfortable and faster Flixbus had left just an hour earlier. The three of us remained the only passengers for the duration of the trip, making stops in Shakespeare and New Hamburg. The bus departed a few minutes late as the driver took a call from his family, but the driver made up time quickly and we arrived at Shakespeare on-time. The bus makes a deviation to the community centre in Shakespeare: the driver took the deviation as though he had never seen anyone ever at that stop. We then continued onwards, pausing for a few minutes at the stop in New Hamburg before skipping downtown Kitchener and proceeding to Conestoga Mall.
Throughout the trip, the bus rattled and it felt like I could feel every pothole and bump in the road. It was by far the least comfortable vehicle of the three options I explored. When it arrived at Conestoga Mall, the bus didn’t enter the bus terminal, instead dropping passengers off by the side of the road next to the Ion stop. We then turned around via a roundabout and headed back towards downtown Kitchener, with the potholes of Lancaster Street bouncing the bus around even more. Upon seeing the crossing blocked by a CN switcher, the driver made a snap decision to detour via Breithaupt and Margaret streets and dropped off the one other passenger by the station, before driving me to the final stop at Central. I was the last passenger to get off.
The bus arrived in downtown Kitchener 15 minutes early despite our late departure, and while I was grateful for the rapid ride, I was left thoroughly rattled. Nevertheless, PC Connect fills a vital role in rural public transport, being the only carrier with multiple daily trips, and providing service to small towns between Stratford and Kitchener: notably, on Saturdays PC Connect is the only operator to serve New Hamburg despite it being within the Region of Waterloo, and the operator drove through New Hamburg like he seemed to expect he might be picking up passengers.
Flixbus
Flixbus ended up being my surprise favourite option for the balance of cost and comfort. When I rode it, it was running once a day, 6 days a week with no Tuesday service, and charged between $10 and $15 for the journey. This has since been increased to twice daily, with the new trip running to Conestoga College instead of downtown Kitchener, offering a more convenient option for Cambridge and south Kitchener residents. The bus has a bathroom, comfortable seats, and was busy but not too crowded. I was the only passenger to disembark in Stratford when I rode it.
I boarded the Flixbus at its usual stop across the street from the GO station. A small crowd had assembled for the 3:40 from Kitchener to Stratford: the bus was coming from Toronto and would continue past Stratford to London. I had not paid for a guaranteed no-seatmate and I found that that would have been unnecessary anyway, at least on that day. On previous trips from Kitchener to London I also found that the assigned seating was not enforced, and either found someone already sitting in my seat, or found that I could move freely to a seat pair that was unoccupied if the booking system had given me a seatmate (and there were empty seats). The bus had a washroom which I did not use on that trip. The journey itself was unremarkable: the vehicle was reasonably clean, the driver felt safe, and we kept to schedule. The bus stopped at Stratford Transit’s Downie Street terminal in Stratford, and I was the only passenger to disembark, and one person boarded to take my place for the remainder of the trip to London.
VIA Rail
VIA is the most comfortable option, but also by far the most expensive. Good ridership seemingly, friendly staff, but no real time or frequency advantages despite the cost.
I boarded the train on a Tuesday morning from the railway station in Stratford. As it was a pleasant day, I waited outdoors in the shelter. The station itself seemed to be undergoing renovations to allow some retail use in a portion of the station. The train arrived about 10 minutes late, and boarding swiftly commenced. VIA has both economy and business class, but as it was such a short journey only economy tickets were available. VIA economy itself has three tiers which are identical in on-train comfort but which offer different perks. I took the middle option, Economy Plus, which allowed me to select a seat, get a partial refund if I had to cancel, and gain VIA points at a slightly accelerated rate. The train itself was one of VIA’s newest Siemens sets, and the ride was at first buttery smooth. East of New Hamburg, however, we hit some rougher track which both slowed the train down and made for a bit of a wobbly ride. I was, however, able to comfortably work throughout the trip and I purchased a sandwich and coffee, both of which were rather bland but which nevertheless served to sustain me. We arrived at Kitchener after about 45 minutes, still about 10 minutes late.
GO Transit
I boarded with a group from TriTAG on the first Saturday that weekend GO Trains to Stratford were running. The train arrived about 5 minutes late into Kitchener. A crowd of people boarded, several people seemed unaware both that trains had been extended to Stratford and thought this was a Toronto-bound train, and that they had inadvertently purchased a ticket for the eastbound bus, not the train. Once boarded, the train proceeded at a slow pace between the station and Fischer-Hallman Rd: apparently the track owner, CN, had suddenly implemented a 12kph maintenance slow-zone in the area the week before. Nevertheless, once past Fischer-Hallman, the train gathered speed: first reaching 50kph until New Hamburg, and then accelerating to 90kph into Stratford. Unfortunately, from what we heard, it sounded like the CN dispatcher had made an error and allowed the eastbound VIA train to load at the station first, which necessitated a slow shuffling which forced the GO train to stay stationary for nearly 20 minutes. Had the dispatcher allowed GO to unload first, it could have quickly discharged its passengers and then pulled onto a side track.
Dispatching shenanigans aside (which will hopefully not be repeated), the train was a standard GO train: the double-decker coaches provide a smooth ride, with a washroom of variable cleanliness in each. The initial trip was busy but not crowded: there were plenty of seats to be had if one moved through the train. The trip back passed much less eventfully and there was a considerable crowd looking to board to continue to Toronto at Kitchener. The GO train also fills a niche that no other option really does, that of offering a good schedule for weekend day trips to the theatres of Stratford (or whatever other events happen to be convenient).
Comparison
So how do these options compare against each other? In terms of which one I would try and take given an option, I would take GO when feasible. The price is right, the trains are comfortable, and the schedule generally aligns with when I want to travel. However, it is also the least frequent option of the 4 transit options, only running once a day, and same-day trips from Kitchener to Stratford are not possible on GO on weekdays. VIA was the most comfortable option, but not by far — thanks to poor track condition east of New Hamburg. But even with VIA’s cheapest tickets, it’s still by far the most expensive option, and the extra comfort is not worth the doubling or more of the price unless you either really need that specific time or, like me, really enjoy travelling by train. Flixbus offers cheap, conveniently timed service and their buses are reasonably clean and comfortable. If I needed to travel when they offered service, I would travel with them. PC Connect is the most frequent transit option, but it leaves something to be desired in both comfort, directness, and reliability — anecdotally when others have tried to travel with them the service has been unreliable, with buses skipping stops.
What’s lacking from all these transit options is any sort of evening return from Stratford to Kitchener. While GO offers an early evening return to Kitchener (and Toronto), it’s too early to allow for a comfortable dinner after a show, or to return from an evening show. Before pandemic service reductions in 2020, VIA operated a reverse-peak train, running midday from Kitchener to Stratford and then returning, leaving Stratford at about 9pm and arriving in Kitchener 37 minutes later. However, that speed leads to another point: CN allowing the track west of Kitchener to decay has reduced VIA’s speed from a 28 minute journey in the 1970s, to a 37 minute journey in 2014 to a 48 minute journey today, and there seems to be no indication that VIA will be restoring their former service or that either the federal or provincial governments are interested in returning the line to its former state of good repair.
Hopefully the new GO service will be expanded and Metrolinx will purchase more of this corridor, to enable track upgrades to run more trains at much higher. But for the moment, this is a start.
Schedules between Kitchener and Stratford (as of July 6th, 2026). The Kitchener-Doon Flixbus service did not exist when I made my sample trips.
