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The CIB expanded the exploration of the Calgary-Banff business case to include an international airport link. Would be interesting to see if they are that adventorous for HFR!

In travel time conversations, we're missing the frequency side of the speed equation. Having the potential to add enough capacity that 99% of the time one can just show up and get on the next train is significant, as is having the next train being within an hour. That flexibility doesn't exist...

By the time capacity is a problem, we’ll have automated vehicles good enough for normal speed operation in a somewhat controlled environment like the mi-way, and then until much higher capacity there is little reason to use higher capacity vehicles instead of more vehicles. Hence why these...

A major cost if you’ve automated the guidance is differential road ware. Turns out rails are really good at handling loads over and over in exactly the same place. So you have to build the roads used to a much higher standard, as you can see in the Medillin example.

It did certainly contributed maybe a bit to the Harper government’s election prospects. A brilliant piece of micro targeting that contributed to C wins except for 1 in London, 1 in Guelph, and Windsor’s 2 NDP bastions that cost them almost nothing. So yeah. Skepticism warranted!

I had forgotten this for the JPO mandate: “track work in Montreal’s Mont-Royal Tunnel to enable VIA Rail Canada’s heavy rail trains to operate on this segment of the Réseau express métropolitain (REM) light rail system” This type of track sharing isn’t uncommon in Japan, even if pretty rare...

No. Why would it?

Not for the budget. The money doesn’t need to be voted by parliament. I bet it comes as early as possible - once daily vaccine updates are boring and hopefully after the hospital crunch is past so it doesn’t look tone deaf.

Why do you think the public would want to give a subsidy? Plus then you lose competition between the two companies on the maintenance side.

Catenary is pretty expensive if you have to justify the cost on the efficiency delta alone. Electricity is already pretty cheap compared to diesel.

In this case, Canada might be special! Last time looked at Canada, at least on the provincial and federal levels, taxation from auto use aligns quite well with spending on operating and investment - at least since our fiscal crunch in the early to mid-90s. (this is going to cause problems with...

At one point the Canadian government's policy objective was to move airports far from cities because they were loud and going to get even louder because they were going to be serviced by super sonic airliners! The government flirted with STOL ports as an alternative to service urban point to...

The point is for those long distance trains the infrastructure which would be used to support hydrogen for marginal uses where you wouldn't build a dedicated ecosystem will already exist, so they'll be able to leverage existing infrastructure instead of building a dedicated one. Can't really...

True, with current tech. But if we're going all in on hydrogen for long distance services (which we are), the marginal cost of hydrogen for less than optimal services will be way less just due to economies of scale. It will also be easier to implement, and cheaper on an incremental basis since...

It comes back to: for Canada what crisis would this be trying to solve? We have competition to most destinations. We have profitable operations. We have low and dropping freight rates. We have more tonne-kms of freight by rail than the entire EU. We have the highest freight rail modal share in...

Sure it does make sense - if there was demand there, and if demand was interferring with line haul freight operations. We see with CP's freight traffic through Toronto that there is rather minimal demand connecting east of Toronto and west of Toronto even! It is more like airports and services...

That is the key: at present. When embarking on a 10 year project with 50 year implications, we have to look at long terms. Even just running the electrical infrastructure over northern Ontario would be a crazy project (electrifiying corridors without populations means building out a suitable...

The big issue is systems to set up the split in many countries has come as a result of crisis: railways not making enough revenue to cover the maintenance of the networks. In Australia the problem was different states having incompatible systems, plus a economic problems on their state networks...

I doubt electrification will happen except for eventual HSR. Even for metrolinx's projects I bet hydrogen catches up and gets adopted instead. It has gone from pretty hypothetical (gadget bahn), to commercial pilots in the mean time.

The issue in the corridor wouldn't be capacity exactly, but coordination, and not having preferred timeslots, and not having best access to associated facilities, without interfering with the line. Certainly having unencumbered operational control and plenty of ROW capacity for future expansion...