VIA Rail

[lenaitch]

I would think that one mainline with passing tracks for hourly (ish) service would require military-style scheduling precision and it wouldn't take much to throw it off. Even something as simple as a longer dwell time at a station because of whatever legitimate reason, ROW maintenance or even weather. Toss in a couple of trains per day stopping at interim stations, as mused in an earlier post. As mentioned, a lot of money is going to be chewed up bypassing the Agincourt Yard and providing adequate routing within Toronto.

 

[nfitz]

One point we are trying to zero in on is the Montreal to Quebec City line, this seems like a segment with low passenger numbers. Does it make sense to instead only focus in on Toronto-Ottawa-Montréal and ignore Quebec City?

I'd think ridership on Toronto to Montreal via Ottawa would be roughtly a magnitude higher than Montreal to Quebec City - just look at the node sizes.

They most certainly should be focusing on just the single route.

If they extend, I'd have thought ridership to London almost as significant as to Quebec City - with a lot shorter route.

 

[crs1026]

Thanks Paul,
One point we are trying to zero in on is the Montreal to Quebec City line, this seems like a segment with low passenger numbers. Does it make sense to instead only focus in on Toronto-Ottawa-Montréal and ignore Quebec City?

It depends. I’m not clear on what you are collecting data about.
If you are trying to define the universe of passenger trips that are happening between Toronto and Quebec City - certainly there will be lots of people riding HFR Montreal-Quebec, so they ought to be in that universe.
But if you are trying to capture only trips that are in the universe of originating in the Pickering Airport catchment area, there will be fewer trips between that catchment area and Quebec City, versus trips to Ottawa or Montreal. So you could discount that market.... although I would not write it out altogether.

- Paul

 

[crs1026]

I would think that one mainline with passing tracks for hourly (ish) service would require military-style scheduling precision and it wouldn't take much to throw it off. Even something as simple as a longer dwell time at a station because of whatever legitimate reason, ROW maintenance or even weather. Toss in a couple of trains per day stopping at interim stations, as mused in an earlier post. As mentioned, a lot of money is going to be chewed up bypassing the Agincourt Yard and providing adequate routing within Toronto.

I almost miss a certain past participant who would wax poetic about what a high tech signalling system could do to optimise meets. In this case, his point might be valid.

If you buy the 7-mile spacing thing, the time between sidings at 100 mph is 3 minutes 49 seconds. So even a marginally late train could be accommodated by moving the meeting point one siding up the line. It would help to have a technology solution to make those decisions rapidly. Such predictive systems do exist.

I agree, North American railroads have never run like Swiss trains, and we shouldn’t bank on that... but there are solutions.

- Paul

 

[kEiThZ]

I'd think ridership on Toronto to Montreal via Ottawa would be roughtly a magnitude higher than Montreal to Quebec City - just look at the node sizes.

Disagree. Travel demand is not entirely a function of node sizes. It’s also about the relationship between the nodes. I struggle to see how the provincial capital and the province’s biggest city, about 250 km apart would have less travel than two metros with different cultural orientations that are 500 km apart. At minimum, they are in the same ballpark. Not an order of magnitude.

VIA itself is planning 18 trains per day between Montreal and Quebec City. This is 20% more than the 15 being planned for Toronto to Montreal via Ottawa. I think they see substantial opportunity here to divert riders from both flying and driving.

If they extend, I'd have thought ridership to London almost as significant as to Quebec City - with a lot shorter route.

I agree that Toronto-Kitchner-London probably has more potential than Montreal-Quebec City. But Toronto has also has to sort out what it wants to do on this route and where GO will fit in.

 

[nfitz]

Disagree. Travel demand is not entirely a function of node sizes. It’s also about the relationship between the nodes. I struggle to see how the provincial capital and the province’s biggest city, about 250 km apart would have less travel than two metros with different cultural orientations that are 500 km apart. At minimum, they are in the same ballpark. Not an order of magnitude.

The same ballpark? Someone has the numbers somewhere. There's no way that Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto numbers are in the same ballbark as Montreal-QC.

I thought Montreal-Ottawa alone was as big, if not bigger. And Ottawa-Toronto is much bigger. And then there's the Montreal-Toronto passengers. Didn't someone print the actual numbers recently? And then look at the populations. QC metro area is only 800,000. The area around Toronto is over ten times that. Montreal is pushing 5 million. And Ottawa-Gatineau is 1.3 million.

Yeah, Montreal to Quebec City might do more trips per capita - but they'd have to do more than ten times the number of trips per capita to be in the same ballpark.

I'm guessing here ... and haven't seen any real data since the 1980s - but an order of magnitude feels right.

 

[lenaitch]

I almost miss a certain past participant who would wax poetic about what a high tech signalling system could do to optimise meets. In this case, his point might be valid.

If you buy the 7-mile spacing thing, the time between sidings at 100 mph is 3 minutes 49 seconds. So even a marginally late train could be accommodated by moving the meeting point one siding up the line. It would help to have a technology solution to make those decisions rapidly. Such predictive systems do exist.

I agree, North American railroads have never run like Swiss trains, and we shouldn’t bank on that... but there are solutions.

- Paul

That would be a lot of high-speed turnouts! It might almost suggest that, in areas where the ROW and terrain reasonably permit, to simply construct fewer but longer passing tracks. I believe that's what CP did with their double tracked Kam and Ignace subs; they downgraded the two-track mainline to single with some very, very long sidings. I imagine they did that because the maintenance standards are different.

 

[Urban Sky]

Dear Rail nerds, the pro Pickering airport nerds are looking for some input of passenger numbers on the HFR rail routes , Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal. We have come up with an estimate of base numbers, as well as how a Pickering station could pump those numbers, looking for some input on our estimates. Note, we are all volunteers, not corporate jokers, but do have some access to several of the private business cases. None of these have taken the impact of a Pickering station into account.

Via Rail and Pickering Airport – Harmony by the Numbers

Written by Ted Nickerson Sorry Folks, the Via Rail project for Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec City High Frequency Rail passenger service does not mean Pickering Airport is not needed nor can it be …

pickeringairport.org

A firm nod towards my signature (as in: please note that I'm expressing nothing but my own interpretation of what synergies there might be lying between HFR and the Pickering Airport):

First off, I'm no fan at all of the aviation industry, as they are responsible for some of the most obscene destruction of our species' own livelihood (heavily taxed by the taxpayer to the point where people don't only choose the plane because it's the fastest mode, but also because its ticket prices make it often the cheaper than other, much more appropriate chances) and building additional infrastructure (just as with roads and cars) just encourages further, highly unsustainable growth. That said, I have to fly myself regularly to see my family and friends which live in my native Germany, even though I'm planning to limit myself to one return-flight per year in the future, following the call of clima activist Greta Thunberg to boycott aviation.

That said, in order to reduce road traffic to and from the airports and the demand or the need for short-haul flights, there needs to be a strong integration of the airports within the transit and rail networks. Also, rail advocates are painfully aware of the highly detrimental effect of not anticipating future expansion needs when planning transportation (or other) infrastructure which often violates former ROWs. As you write yourself in the article you've linked, you don't anticipate that Pickering Airport would be built before HFR (and god forbid that you will be proven wrong!), so this is more a question of making provisions for a future stop at the airport.

With this preamble, I would like to share the following brainstorming activity:

Source: DurhamRegion.com

• Assuming that above map is still representative of your plans, I would believe that you can forget about the Y-shaped tracks into a rail station next to your planned airport terminal, at least where it concerns HFR trains, as this would add at least 10 minutes to their runtime, while a platform built and served along the Havelock Subdivision should at least halve that travel time penalty. You also seem to be unaware of how long your train station would have to be, especially if it was to host GO trains. Thankfully, all what a future station along the Havelock Subdivision would require at this point is to simply plan the HFR infrastructure with such a future station in mind, which only means placing signals or switches in a way so that they won't need to be moved later and should cause no non-negligible additional costs.
• For understandable reasons, you seem to believe that passengers will rather connect from downtown Toronto (i.e. GTHA-based passengers substituting the car to access Pickering Airport) than from Ottawa or Montreal (i.e. passengers substituting a connection flight), but the problem is that Transport Canada classifies VIA Rail as "intercity" rail, which prevents VIA from selling more tickets than there are seats on that particular departure. This means that whereas there will presumably be an abundance of seats available for downtown-to-airport travellers in the early morning or in the evenings, there might be a shortage at a time which might be the most critical for Pickering Airport: the afternoon peak around 5 pm, as any intercity rail operator who can sell every seat only once will rather sell it to someone paying $100* for Toronto-Ottawa than $10* for Toronto-Pickering. (*all these ticket prices are completely arbitrary and only provided for illustrative purposes)
• In order to solve the previous point, you would need to attract much more riders which are willing to travel between a Pickering Airport rail station and HFR destinations east of it, which will require an abundance of affordable parking spaces and a convenient integration into the regional road (and especially transit networks, with the first (affordable parking) being in short supply at almost every airport, while the third (transit integration) is a common weakness of the kind of secondary metropolitan airports like the one you are hoping to build. This would allow to sell the same seat for $10* to a Toronto-Pickering passenger and for $100* for a Pickering-Ottawa passenger. Otherwise, the afternoon peak downtown-to-airport connection could be offered by a future GO service (potentially extended to Peterborough), which would anyways be most likely to offer service during that time of the day.
• Unless you are on a Shinkansen line in Japan, any intercity service will offer frequencies which are inferior to that what downtown-to-airport rail links commonly offer (for which UPX with its 15 minute headways is a very typical example). The same frequency which your future passengers might consider as "frequent" for connecting towards Ottawa or Montreal, would be considered as "painfully infrequent" to connect towards downtown Toronto.

With all of that said (and despite my at-best luke-warm enthusiasm for Pickering Airport), I deeply appreciate your support for HFR and your determination to see HFR as an opportunity rather than threat for your vision!

Thanks - teach me to write from memory! I was off by a country mile.

You sounded so certain that I didn't even doubt your claim. It was only when I checked the report for explanations as to why the costs had been so sky-high that I re-checked the table...

The point is not that double track is wrong, it’s that there can’t be much room for much of it in the base HFR budget. Nor does there need to be - but the upgrading costs if it ever is needed will be substantial.

Indeed, but your over-inflated cost figure made the whole HFR costing (wrongly) appear implausible...

I almost miss a certain past participant who would wax poetic about what a high tech signalling system could do to optimise meets. In this case, his point might be valid.

You won't be surprised then that it was of course said deer friend @steveintoronto, who provided two professional/academic articles about maintaining high frequencies on (partly) single-tracked infrastructure:

I'm still searching, but found this paper on High Speed:

http://www.railway-technical.com/books-papers--articles/high-speed-railway-capacity.pdf

It doesn't directly answer the point of opposing headways using single track, but the methodology would be the same, just compounded.

Still searching for the ICE case(s).

Edit to Add:


The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada and VIA Rail Canada Incorporated for their support of this study.
Copyright © 1987 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191260787900239

Attempting to gain entire paper.

Edit: Author's publisher has approved I get full access to the above paper. Have confirmation, will read and quote sections later.

Meantime, finding a lot more on-line on this:

• http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mice.12083/abstract

Given that the second paper is older than myself (and arguably the most relevant when discussing single-track meets), I've uploaded the Petersen et Taylor (1987) article here.

In addition, @steveintoronto also identified the following two impressive examples of high-frequency single-track operations (both of which I have witnessed myself):

ICE, Braunschweig-Wolfsburg (One ICE and one RE (Regional Express) train per hour and direction):

This is the timetable with 6 trains per hour and direction (the orange trains overtake the preceding train at Uji) on what is a single-tracked line between Momoyama and Uji (all stations equipped with passing loops, but single-tracked sections are up to 2.2 km long):

It is posts like the above which make me highly regret his forced absence from this forum...

 

[Streety McCarface]

A firm nod at my signature (as in: please note that I'm expressing nothing but my own interpretation of what synergies there might be lying between HFR and the Pickering Airport):

First off, I'm no fan at all of the aviation industry, as they are responsible for some of the most obscene destruction of our species' own livelihood (heavily taxed by the taxpayer to the point where people don't only choose the plane because it's the fastest mode, but also because its ticket prices make it often the cheaper than other, much more appropriate chances) and building additional infrastructure (just as with roads and cars) just encourages further, highly unsustainable growth. That said, I have to fly myself regularly to see my family and friends which live in my native Germany, even though I'm planning to limit myself to one return-flight per year in the future, following the call of clima activist Greta Thunberg to boycott aviation.

I wouldn't hate air travel that much, it's actually quite efficient per person (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#Example_values), but usually, people are travelling such long distances that it looks like fuel is wasted significantly.

 

[nfitz]

I wouldn't hate air travel that much, it's actually quite efficient per person (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#Example_values) ...

Looking at the numbers, "quite efficient" for a full plane, is significantly lower than any other mode, full car, full bus, or (presumably) full train.

 

[Streety McCarface]

Looking at the numbers, "quite efficient" for a full plane, is significantly lower than any other mode, full car, full bus, or (presumably) full train.

But planes are almost always full, when is a car (or even a coach bus for that matter) ever full?

Buses have an advantage, but you can't bus over the Atlantic. A lot of those don't include capital pollution from the construction of roads, rail lines, and the vehicles themselves. I would assume that if you included the pollution associated with building a 4K mile-long road would be much higher than that of LAX and EWR combined.

 

[Urban Sky]

Looking at the numbers, "quite efficient" for a full plane, is significantly lower than any other mode, full car, full bus, or (presumably) full train.

Exactly! This is one of the many cases where people use an average figure (e.g. per passenger or per vehicle- or passenger-km) to draw conclusions which would require a marginal figure (e.g. for an additional passenger or passenger-km): the question of which modes we should encourage should be driven by the elasticity between growth in traffic and growth in greenhouse gas emissions of all the modes available, the train is by far the most insensitive to increases in the transport volume, as it can accept additional passengers at almost no additional environmental cost by using empty seats, accepting standees, adding cars or using bilevel equipment...

But even when looking at per-seat fuel efficiencies: a reasonably efficient car takes 10 liters per 100 km, which (at 5 seats) translates into 2 liters per 100 km, which is less than all but one of the dozens of fuel-efficiency figures provided in that Wikipedia article. The problem with road transport is less its fuel-efficiency than their pitifully low load factor (something like 1.3 passengers per car, which translates to a load factor of 26% with a five-seater) and in general small vehicle sizes (the result of road passengers' strong preference to travel individually rather than in groups).

But planes are almost always full, when is a car (or even a coach bus for that matter) ever full?

If you compare an individual vehicle (e.g. the personal car) with a mass vehicle (e.g. the commercial airline plane), then of course the load factor is favourable of the latter. If you compare the fuel-efficiency between commercial planes and the bus or between the private car and the private plane, it becomes clear how ridiculously wasteful aviation is (at least on those distances where bus or rail may still be practical).

Buses have an advantage, but you can't bus over the Atlantic.

Indeed, there are segments in the aviation industry, for which there are no practical alternatives, but these account only for a rather small proportion of passenger air traffic, which accounts for 2% of all "human-induced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions" and 12% of all transportation-related emissions. Note that these figures are used by the aviation industry itself, while some scientists place the aviation industry's footprint at 5% of all human activities affecting climate change, which is absolutely shocking, considering how marginal aviation is to the world's everyday transportation needs with less than 3% of the global population having flown at all in 2017.

A lot of those don't include capital pollution from the construction of roads, rail lines, and the vehicles themselves. I would assume that if you included the pollution associated with building a 4K mile-long road would be much higher than that of LAX and EWR combined.

All of these environmental effects could be "internalised" if a "carbon tax" was introduced globally to offset the entire environmental costs caused by transportation (and other consumer) choices. Guess which transportation industry is among the most resistant against having its users pay for the consequences of their unsustainable transportation choices?

 

[nfitz]

But planes are almost always full, when is a car (or even a coach bus for that matter) ever full?

Planes are certainly fuller but I wouldn't say "almost always full" - the 2017 average was only 81% - which is certainly higher than the 70% it used to be a few years ago.

It's that planes being so grossly inefficient in the first place, that pushes load factors so high! And probably higher than average on routes where there is serious competition from other more efficient modes - such as Montreal to Toronto.

 

[kEiThZ]

I wouldn't hate air travel that much, it's actually quite efficient per person (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#Example_values), but usually, people are travelling such long distances that it looks like fuel is wasted significantly.

1) Those efficiency numbers are usually based on aircraft capacity that is not commonly employed by airlines. You wouldn't regularly fly on an airline with 29" seat pitch, for example.

2) Those efficiency numbers usually assume 100% load factor, when realistic load factors are 80-90% on the busiest of routes. So while an individual flight may look "full" to you, the next one or the earlier one might have gone out at 70%. Average network wide load factors for most airlines are around 85% these days.

3) Airlines almost never prioritize fuel efficiency over other factors like frequency or slot control. They will fly smaller and less efficient aircraft to offer increased frequencies to business travelers or retain slots at an airport (to keep out the competition).

4) Even energy hogging HSR is >75% more efficient than air travel. Let alone plodders like a VIA train.

5) Rail can be fully electrified to eliminate all local emissions. Air travel can't.

I'm an aerospace engineer who fully believes we need to reserve air travel only for situations where rail is impractical. Given population patterns in Canada, we could eliminate a mass chunk of air travel by building proper rail in a handful of corridors (Windsor-Quebec, Calgary-Edmonton, etc.).

 

[robmausser]

A firm nod towards my signature (as in: please note that I'm expressing nothing but my own interpretation of what synergies there might be lying between HFR and the Pickering Airport):

First off, I'm no fan at all of the aviation industry, as they are responsible for some of the most obscene destruction of our species' own livelihood (heavily taxed by the taxpayer to the point where people don't only choose the plane because it's the fastest mode, but also because its ticket prices make it often the cheaper than other, much more appropriate chances) and building additional infrastructure (just as with roads and cars) just encourages further, highly unsustainable growth. That said, I have to fly myself regularly to see my family and friends which live in my native Germany, even though I'm planning to limit myself to one return-flight per year in the future, following the call of clima activist Greta Thunberg to boycott aviation.

That said, in order to reduce road traffic to and from the airports and the demand or the need for short-haul flights, there needs to be a strong integration of the airports within the transit and rail networks. Also, rail advocates are painfully aware of the highly detrimental effect of not anticipating future expansion needs when planning transportation (or other) infrastructure which often violates former ROWs. As you write yourself in the article you've linked, you don't anticipate that Pickering Airport would be built before HFR (and god forbid that you will be proven wrong!), so this is more a question of making provisions for a future stop at the airport.

With this preamble, I would like to share the following brainstorming activity:

Source: DurhamRegion.com

• Assuming that above map is still representative of your plans, I would believe that you can forget about the Y-shaped tracks into a rail station next to your planned airport terminal, at least where it concerns HFR trains, as this would add at least 10 minutes to their runtime, while a platform built and served along the Havelock Subdivision should at least halve that travel time penalty. You also seem to be unaware of how long your train station would have to be, especially if it was to host GO trains. Thankfully, all what a future station along the Havelock Subdivision would require at this point is to simply plan the HFR infrastructure with such a future station in mind, which only means placing signals or switches in a way so that they won't need to be moved later and should cause no non-negligible additional costs.
• For understandable reasons, you seem to believe that passengers will rather connect from downtown Toronto (i.e. GTHA-based passengers substituting the car to access Pickering Airport) than from Ottawa or Montreal (i.e. passengers substituting a connection flight), but the problem is that Transport Canada classifies VIA Rail as "intercity" rail, which prevents VIA from selling more tickets than there are seats on that particular departure. This means that whereas there will presumably be an abundance of seats available for downtown-to-airport travellers in the early morning or in the evenings, there might be a shortage at a time which might be the most critical for Pickering Airport: the afternoon peak around 5 pm, as any intercity rail operator who can sell every seat only once will rather sell it to someone paying $100* for Toronto-Ottawa than $10* for Toronto-Pickering. (*all these ticket prices are completely arbitrary and only provided for illustrative purposes)
• In order to solve the previous point, you would need to attract much more riders which are willing to travel between a Pickering Airport rail station and HFR destinations east of it, which will require an abundance of affordable parking spaces and a convenient integration into the regional road (and especially transit networks, with the first (affordable parking) being in short supply at almost every airport, while the third (transit integration) is a common weakness of the kind of secondary metropolitan airports like the one you are hoping to build. This would allow to sell the same seat for $10* to a Toronto-Pickering passenger and for $100* for a Pickering-Ottawa passenger. Otherwise, the afternoon peak downtown-to-airport connection could be offered by a future GO service (potentially extended to Peterborough), which would anyways be most likely to offer service during that time of the day.
• Unless you are on a Shinkansen line in Japan, any intercity service will offer frequencies which are inferior to that what downtown-to-airport rail links commonly offer (for which UPX with its 15 minute headways is a very typical example). The same frequency which your future passengers might consider as "frequent" for connecting towards Ottawa or Montreal, would be considered as "painfully infrequent" to connect towards downtown Toronto.

With all of that said (and despite my at-best luke-warm enthusiasm for Pickering Airport), I deeply appreciate your support for HFR and your determination to see HFR as an opportunity rather than threat for your vision!



You sounded so certain that I didn't even doubt your claim. It was only when I checked the report for explanations as to why the costs had been so sky-high that I re-checked the table...


Indeed, but your over-inflated cost figure made the whole HFR costing (wrongly) appear implausible...



You won't be surprised then that it was of course said deer friend @steveintoronto, who provided two professional/academic articles about maintaining high frequencies on (partly) single-tracked infrastructure:

Given that the second paper is older than myself (and arguably the most relevant when discussing single-track meets), I've uploaded the Petersen et Taylor (1987) article here.

In addition, @steveintoronto also identified the following two impressive examples of high-frequency single-track operations (both of which I have witnessed myself):


It is posts like the above which make me highly regret his forced absence from this forum...

I could see a need still to have the current UPX extended to Pickering airport, with the same service levels from downtown. Call it the PUPX (Pearson-Union-Pickering Express)

Doesnt mean a VIA stop cant still exist at Pickering, but it would probably be more like a stop that you'd have to transfer to a People Mover or something, I cant see it going right into the station on that "Y" track like mentioned above. That would shave too much time.

The only issue with the airport train along this corridor of course is service levels, working around VIA. But if there is a track into the airport like in the graphic above, it would be used as a passing track of sorts.