The 407 has transit as well. The GO bus routes there already serve over 10,000 riders per weekday. And there is aready a transitway planned along the 407, I'm nto sure how much room there will be left for freight rail traffic after that.
Don't forget that this proposal is only a western extension of the CN York Subdivsion, not a proposal for an entirely new line. The line already exists between Brampton and Pickering.
The initial segment (read: only likely segment) of the 407 transitway is between Jane and Kennedy, which is within the portion of the corridor where the parallel freight line already exists.
I've abandoned my idea of removing CP traffic through the middle of Toronto given the above constraints. Unless a merger/bankruptcy/buyout happens, CP will never hand over its trackage.
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So, was this idea worth resurrecting?
Yes, I think so. The CP idea would be incredibly difficult for the reasons stated above, not to mention that there wouldn't be enough capacity on the CN York Subdivision to handle CP traffic anyway.
But with CP off the table, I think it looks pretty good.
I don't think people should underestimate the value of this project. At the moment, the CN's main line is shared with GO and VIA between Georgetown and Brampton, which will pose a severe threat to passenger services due to capacity constraints through Brampton Station. There are only 2 tracks to be shared among all these important trains, and no easy way to add any more.
Unless we fix that bottleneck, we will be suffering from terrible service on GO and VIA services through there for the foreseeable future. That would really suck, because there is huge potential for a frequent regional rail service from Toronto to London, serving cities such as Brampton, Georgetown, Guelph and Kitchener/Waterloo.
Although it would be expensive to build new freight tracks, it would also be expensive not to. We would have to spend piles of money building as many tracks as possible on the Weston subdivision to handle all that traffic (which would all get stuck going through Brampton anyway). With freight out of the picture, the Weston sub could work just fine as a double tracked line with some passing sidings allow express trains to pass locals. We would then only have to electrify 2 tracks, instead of 3 or 4, cutting electrification costs. Maintenance would also be lower because there would be fewer tracks and wires to maintain.
Northern Light, your concerns are certainly valid, but I don't think some are that severe.
I don't think the intention of this line is to
entirely remove freight trains from the central railway lines, but rather to divert the main line traffic. It's fine to have a few local freight trains to serve industries, but having major transcontinental freight traffic share tracks with passenger trains is much more problematic. I think that the two biggest destinations for CN trains in the GTA are the Brampton Intermodal terminal and MacMillan Yard. Both are located on the freight-only CN York Sub, so if we extended the line further west, all the mainline freight traffic would be completely separated from passenger trains.
It's true that we can add capacity by adding more tracks to existing rail lines, but that's not that easy, and it's nowhere near as effective. Two single-use double tracked railways have higher capacity than a single quad-tracked railway shared between freight and passenger uses. There would also be higher maintenance cost and more disruptions. Most rail corridors don't have enough room for all the trains we'd like to run through them. Expanding the corridors themselves is outrageously expensive because it involves acquiring urban properties, much more expensive than a new greenfield route. Construction is also much more difficult in active rail corridors because slow and wasteful methods have to be used in order to allow trains to keep running.