A group of West Island politicians is taking their fight for better train service for the West Island to the province's finance and transport ministers.

Clifford Lincoln, who served as Lac-Saint-Louis MP as well as a Quebec cabinet minister before he retired from politics in 2004, led a group of West Island mayors Tuesday into a meeting with Raymond Bachand and Sam Hamad to ask for funding to improve train service for commuters living in the suburbs.

The Agence métropolitaine de transport has proposed spending more than $700 million to build new dedicated tracks for commuter trains, which could improve service, which is currently scarce due to sharing tracks with freight trains.

The group of mayors is lobbying for commuter service every 15 minutes during rush hour and every 30 minutes at off-peak hours from 6 a.m. to midnight between Ste. Anne de Bellevue and the Lucien L'Allier station.

It would bring the train service up to 43 trains in off-peak hours from the current five, and to 26 from 14 on weekends.

The plan comes with support; 12,000 people have signed a petition asking for better service.

"Laval's got good transit. They're putting money into the east end. What about us? It's about time," said Lincoln Tuesday.

The plan could take as many as 10,000 cars off the road daily, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and traffic congestion.

The mayors say they are concerned about more traffic slowdowns once work starts on the Turcot interchange, a project that isn't set to be complete until 2016.

"We want to press upon the government that it has to be done now. We have to start getting work done now," said Baie d'Urfe Mayor Maria Tutino.

Mayors also say they worry that industrial parks in the West Island are struggling to attract new investors.

"We describe the bus service to them, we describe the train service to them, and it's lucky that we have other assets that offset these deficiencies," said Pointe Claire Mayor Bill McMurchie.

Lincoln said Tuesday he was optimistic about the meeting in the provincial capital, adding that it was the first of many steps to bring better service to the West Island suburbs.

"We're not going to stop. We're going to keep going until we get 100 per cent justification for a fair demand," he said.