Greg Gormick has written for the general Canadian public, but this also is an opportunity for U.S. readers to compare and contrast.
wawa-news.com
Brief history of Canada's Federal Transport muddle
- Thread starter Willbridge
- Start date
Help Support Amtrak Unlimited Discussion Forum:
“One of these days, somebody will have to sit down and figure out what transportation we need, and what we can afford,” a member of the Board of Transport Commissioners told a reporter in 1961.Greg Gormick has written for the general Canadian public, but this also is an opportunity for U.S. readers to compare and contrast.
Railroaded: A National Train Wreck – Wawa-news.com
A few weeks ago I took VIA from Montreal to Toronto and returned and both legs were roughly 5h 15m for 330 miles which is comparable to Acela from Boston to Philadelphia. That is a corridor that would be ripe for true high speed but considering it is also a major freight line and has numerous grade crossings it becomes problematic.
Edmonton/Calgary should be a slam dunk but...............
Passenger rail between the US and Canada needs customs from both countries in place at Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and perhaps Windsor. The border check at Niagara Falls is especially painful.
fdaley
OBS Chief
What were the Christmas-season meltdowns referred to in the story?
Storm causes problems for VIA in Southern Ontario
More details on the current VIA situation in the corridor east of Toronto: https://www.cp24.com/news/stressed-beyond-belief-via-rail-passengers-stranded-on-trains-for-over-18-hours-amid-winter-storm-1.6208176
www.amtraktrains.com
CBC News released 2 videos this week on passenger rail in Canada
Specific to the first video regarding construction of the HFR line, this is not the first critique of the proposal and it is actually kinder than some of the others while still exposing it as a potential waste of money. The balancing act for rail supporters in Canada is whether to endorse the deeply flawed project versus the fact that something (anything) is being built. He correctly notes how the Windsor-Toronto portion was dropped for reasons of practicality and need, and also how Montreal-Quebec City was added for political support. The observation that Peterborough (and intermediate stops) need GO Train service that cannot be provided by HFR (without shared infrastructure) is also correct. What he missed is that the journey time between Toronto and Montreal will actually be longer on the new route than is possible on the current corridor. This is simply due to the routing via Ottawa. VIA (and CN previously) were perfectly capable of running trains between Toronto and Montreal in 4 hours or less because the CN line is the most direct route and does not run through Ottawa. VIA either runs separate trains to Montreal and Ottawa or divides them enroute.
The involvement of the two competing companies is interesting but likely not a factor. The present government has committed to the HFR proposal with Siemens equipment, therefore even if HSR makes more sense it is unlikely to change the direction. That said, with the cabinet minister responsible for the project having recently been shown the door I suppose anything is possible. The next election (2025, but could be sooner) will dictate the future of it more than anything that will happen in the interim. The polls currently favor a party that is likely to take an axe to spending, with this project an easy target. We will have to wait and see.
The involvement of the two competing companies is interesting but likely not a factor. The present government has committed to the HFR proposal with Siemens equipment, therefore even if HSR makes more sense it is unlikely to change the direction. That said, with the cabinet minister responsible for the project having recently been shown the door I suppose anything is possible. The next election (2025, but could be sooner) will dictate the future of it more than anything that will happen in the interim. The polls currently favor a party that is likely to take an axe to spending, with this project an easy target. We will have to wait and see.
@jiml - I didn't appreciate how Quebec officials would treat Alstom after they took over Bombardier Transportation but I should have.
Montreal/Toronto makes sense on every metric BUT I fully understand why Quebec wants high speed between Montreal and Quebec City.
Toronto/Ottawa/Montreal is another kettle of fish.
Toronto/London/Windsor - I believe we need to restore a VIA/Amtrak connection under the Detroit River using existing infrastructure and test the market as I belive a Toronto/Chicago run could work.
Before I reply to your post, I have to enphasize that I usually appreciate your posts and that I'm still grateful for you having taken the time to summarize the video, as I couldn't have possibly suffered through 17 minutes of apparently an awful lot of (to any expert in the field: painful) misconceptions. I sincerely hope you won't take any offense by my rebutal, but let's walk through your post point-by-point:
We can really see a tale of two provinces here: whereas the QC government under Philippe Couillard (joined by the mayors and respective business leaders of Quebec City, Trois-Rivieres and Montreal) lobbied hard and eventually succeeded in convincing the federal government to get Quebec-Montreal included in the initial scope of HFR (just to then make such extension all but economically infeasible, by needlessly surrendering the Mont-Royal tunnel to its rogue pension funds' REM scheme), the ON government ferociously defended its insincere HSR election stunt and Ontario media like the London Free Press bashed VIA for having the audacity of proposing any intercity passenger rail project at the same time as Wynne's HSR fantasies. Ontarians have nothing else than electing Wynne in 2014 to blame for Toronto-Windsor not being part of HFR...
Travel time is the distance covered divided by average speed. The detour via Ottawa only adds some 41 km (or 7.6%) compared to the 539 km long current alignment along the Kingston Subdivision. To compare, the Euclidean (i.e. "as the crow flies") distance between Berlin and Munich is 504 km and thus exactly the same as that between Toronto and Montreal, whereas the ICE achieves a minimum travel time of 3h56, despite covering an actual distance of 622 km and thus 42 km (or 7.2%) more than the HFR route (and only 11 km less than any of VIA's Montreal-Ottawa-Brockville-Toronto trains covered when they still operated MOT trains).
Nobody would argue that building a tunnel underneath Lake Ontario would be the best way to achieve a fast Toronto-Buffalo rail service just because the detour around the Lake adds some 80% compared to the Euclidean distance between the two cities (171 vs. 94 km or 106 vs. 58 mi). The main "trick" of the HFR proposal is to reorganize all Lakeshore services from Montreal-bound and Ottawa-bound trains to Express trains (which only stop at very few, large cities) and Local trains (which do the milk runs stopping at all intermediary stations). If you separate the Express markets in one train which serves Montreal-Ottawa and Ottawa-Toronto and another which serves Montreal-Toronto, you will end up with running twice the number of Express trains, while struggling to fill them...
That's your valid opinion which I of course respect, just like I personally would still have wished that the REM scheme had been shelved rather than building what I - and surprisingly few members of the rail professional community - see as a colossal waste of money and of a unique opportunity to integrate rather than further balkanize the already awfully incoherent transportation networks in Montreal...
Toronto-Windsor was never a part of the HFR project. The whole point of HFR was to define a project with the lowest-possible capital cost, which would still be a gamechanger for the Quebec-Windsor corridor. This naturally confined VIA to proposing a dedicated and upgraded Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto corridor, while T-W and Q-M were only seen as the next logical stages once HFR had been successfully implemented in TOM.
We can really see a tale of two provinces here: whereas the QC government under Philippe Couillard (joined by the mayors and respective business leaders of Quebec City, Trois-Rivieres and Montreal) lobbied hard and eventually succeeded in convincing the federal government to get Quebec-Montreal included in the initial scope of HFR (just to then make such extension all but economically infeasible, by needlessly surrendering the Mont-Royal tunnel to its rogue pension funds' REM scheme), the ON government ferociously defended its insincere HSR election stunt and Ontario media like the London Free Press bashed VIA for having the audacity of proposing any intercity passenger rail project at the same time as Wynne's HSR fantasies. Ontarians have nothing else than electing Wynne in 2014 to blame for Toronto-Windsor not being part of HFR...
This is most probably the point where I would have clicked away the video (assuming that I would have even lasted that long), as anyone who claims that a ROW which passes through 86 km (53 mi) of virtually uninhabited farmland and forests represents a viable corridor for Commuter Rail doesn't really give me much confidence that they have a clear and dependable understanding of what they are talking about:
Unless you expropriate Canadian National (Canada's third-largest corporation by market capitalization, which represents some 3.7% of Canada's GDP), the current speeds and travel times is what you get along the Kingston Subdivision - and that will remain significantly more than the 3h59 which VIA achieved on one single departure per day in the late 1990s and early 2000s (CN only ever advertised a travel time of 3h59 during its first - almost instantly aborted - launch of the Turbotrain in 1968. At the second - again very short-lived - launch in 1971 it was already 4h05 and during the final roll-out, this had already increased to 4h10).
Travel time is the distance covered divided by average speed. The detour via Ottawa only adds some 41 km (or 7.6%) compared to the 539 km long current alignment along the Kingston Subdivision. To compare, the Euclidean (i.e. "as the crow flies") distance between Berlin and Munich is 504 km and thus exactly the same as that between Toronto and Montreal, whereas the ICE achieves a minimum travel time of 3h56, despite covering an actual distance of 622 km and thus 42 km (or 7.2%) more than the HFR route (and only 11 km less than any of VIA's Montreal-Ottawa-Brockville-Toronto trains covered when they still operated MOT trains).
Nobody would argue that building a tunnel underneath Lake Ontario would be the best way to achieve a fast Toronto-Buffalo rail service just because the detour around the Lake adds some 80% compared to the Euclidean distance between the two cities (171 vs. 94 km or 106 vs. 58 mi). The main "trick" of the HFR proposal is to reorganize all Lakeshore services from Montreal-bound and Ottawa-bound trains to Express trains (which only stop at very few, large cities) and Local trains (which do the milk runs stopping at all intermediary stations). If you separate the Express markets in one train which serves Montreal-Ottawa and Ottawa-Toronto and another which serves Montreal-Toronto, you will end up with running twice the number of Express trains, while struggling to fill them...
The current order of 32 Siemens trainsets is only enough to ensure the continued operation of a timetable offering similar to what was offered pre-Covid. It includes an option of 16 additional trainsets as a provision for HFR, but nobody prevents the future HFR/HSR operators from choosing a different fleet instead, as there will still be enough legacy routes where the non-HSR trainsets could be deployed (and service be expanded, for instance in Southwestern Ontario). Similarly, all proponents are explicitly asked to submit a HFR proposal and a HSR proposal. The decision between HFR (Vmax=110-125 mph) or HSR (Vmax=160-200 mph) will therefore be only made when assessing the six proposals received (i.e. 3 HFR proposals and 3 HSR proposals from the 3 qualified proponents) and the choice between the two speed types will in the end almost solely depend on how much capital funding the potential investors (private or public) are willing to shell out...
The mortal danger of narrowing down the options you are presenting to any decision maker to only two alternatives (Do-Nothing and Go-all-the-way) is always that you have a good chance of ending up with the option to didn't prefer. Eliminating moderate solutions which could act as a compromise between competing interests is usually the preferred strategy of those secretly wishing to preserve the Status Quo, not of those who actually crave to see progress…
Last edited:
That was all I had to say about this video (and, again, I hope I didn't offend anyone!), but Terry Johnson from Transport Action Canada wrote a much more nuanced and concise critique of said video:
@Urban Sky
Rather than engage in a protracted back-and-forth on points that could be debated endlessly and are influenced by regional and political biases, let me say there are several points that we essentially agree on. I respect your opinions equally and was amused by your take on the REM, which has been lavished with praise by rail and transit writers and vloggers alike. It did seem like a lot of money was spent for limited return. I lack the regional perspective to know for sure but such decisions are not limited to Montreal to be sure. (GO Transit's future reroute of the Lakeshore East line off CN onto CP at Oshawa comes to mind.) As noted previously, sometimes it is difficult to not "jump on the bandwagon" when progress of any kind is made. If it wasn't clear that is why I can neither endorse nor condemn the HFR project. Anything is better than nothing. Still, if HFR is to be choice are there better or cheaper options?
Rather than engage in a protracted back-and-forth on points that could be debated endlessly and are influenced by regional and political biases, let me say there are several points that we essentially agree on. I respect your opinions equally and was amused by your take on the REM, which has been lavished with praise by rail and transit writers and vloggers alike. It did seem like a lot of money was spent for limited return. I lack the regional perspective to know for sure but such decisions are not limited to Montreal to be sure. (GO Transit's future reroute of the Lakeshore East line off CN onto CP at Oshawa comes to mind.) As noted previously, sometimes it is difficult to not "jump on the bandwagon" when progress of any kind is made. If it wasn't clear that is why I can neither endorse nor condemn the HFR project. Anything is better than nothing. Still, if HFR is to be choice are there better or cheaper options?
You are touching a crucial thing here: as I can confirm with my own experience of having switched employers twice in the last two years (once by choice and once by necessity), everyone with a certain level of expertise in the operational, technological, commercial, economic and/or political constraints faced by railroads can easily find a lucrative career in either operating, planning, building or overseeing railroad activities or in advising any stakeholders concerned. Virtually no such Subject Matter Experts will therefore feel tempted to rely on "creating content" for a living and catering to railfans by telling them that their fantasies and conspiracy theories have a similar (or even: superior!) merit to the knowledge which is accumulated and shared across the professional networks of the railroad industry and which shapes the way in which railway infrastructure is planned, designed, built and operated.
There is of course nothing wrong with creating, watching or promoting such videos, but we should not mistake this kind of railfan entertainment as anything which creates a profound understanding of the complexities which determine whether a proposed solution is feasible and viable in the real world or not. This is why I'm so puzzled that a well-reputed public media service like the CBC would blur so much the borders between Entertainment and Information by seemingly treating these videos as the latter...
***
For those who prefer the medium of user-created video contents, but appreciate reliable information, there are actually quite a few railway professionals who love to share their knowledge publicly. Regrettably, but also rather understandably, very few find the time, energy and motivation to run their own Youtube Channels and nurture a small fan community as permanent way engineer Gareth Dennis admirably does. Nevertheless, other professionals like electrification engineer Garry Keenor or signalling engineer Tyson Moore can be found with their more or less regular appearances on the Youtube channels of other content creators specialized in (rail) transportation topics...
Last edited:
