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Alto - High Speed Rail (Toronto-Quebec City)

Is it possible to make the argument that enough people from Belleville/Kingston would be willing to drive / commute to a HSR station (e.g. drive ~30 minutes from Belleville to Tweed which doesn't sound horrible; ~60 minutes from Kingston to Tweed which isn't as exciting) instead of taking VIA Rail in their own respective cities? Though, if this is the case, this may also require some sort of upgrade in the local highways in order to handle that increased traffic.

As in the Montabaur example, yes its population is ~10-15K, but you have 200K+ people within a 30 or so minute drive in Koblenz & its surrounding towns, and the station is located right beside a major highway.
 
a2z said:
Is it possible to make the argument that enough people from Belleville/Kingston would be willing to drive / commute to a HSR station (e.g. drive ~30 minutes from Belleville to Tweed which doesn't sound horrible; ~60 minutes from Kingston to Tweed which isn't as exciting) instead of taking VIA Rail in their own respective cities? Though, if this is the case, this may also require some sort of upgrade in the local highways in order to handle that increased traffic.
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??? Why would they do that? Have you driven on those roads?
 
nfitz said:
??? Why would they do that? Have you driven on those roads?
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Whoops I saw that it was 2-lanes and for some reason immediately thought of the 2-lane connection between Kitchener & Guelph that enough people apparently think is a deathtrap (but in hindsight, yeah, that isn't close enough to being a good comparable since the latter will have multiples of traffic; even Waterloo/Kitchener-Stratford or Stratford-London should have much more traffic than something like Belleville-Tweed and those routes don't require more than 2 lanes)

I was making the assumption that traffic would be "rush-hour"-oriented (e.g. large traffic northbound & minimal traffic southbound during the mornings, and vice versa in the evenings) that could perhaps require a third passing lane at times or something.
 
David_Brown said:
I live in Tweed. I’m all for it! 😀
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I hadn't realized that the old CP alignment dropped all the way south to Tweed - I thought it was closer to Highway 7 there. Gosh, that might make Tweed the biggest town then - over 6,000! But only 1,500 or so in the main town.

This has to be one spot where I'd think they'd be looking to move the alignment further north, so it isn't winding around the lake. (the old alignment is the east-west one. The north went to Bannockburn and Bancroft, while the south (southeast) went to the mainline and Yarker.
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I can't imagine that using the old Sharbot Lake alignment is going to work either. The huge tight curve doesn't help. Surely they'll try something north of 7. Or more radically, stay on the existing (orange) CP track which passes south of Sharbot Lake (the lake) and head off west from it crosses Crow Lake Road and rejoin the alignment near Arden or something. (again, its the east-west lines below. The line due north of Sharbot Lake was the line to Renfrew, and the one due south was the generally along Highway 38 to Harrowsmith and Kingston).
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To be honest, if you want to skip Kingston and run through Ottawa to Montreal, while already using parts of the CP Winchester and Belleville subdivision, I'd just stay on the Belleville all the way from Smith Falls to Belleville, and then run alongside the CN line to Oshawa and Toronto. But if it was me, I'd do the whole thing on CN to Montreal, use the existing VIA tracks in and out of Ottawa, and build VIA-fast like Greenfield alignment from Kingston Mills to Forfar Station (and then we'd have a real Bastard line ... and I expect that joke will be lost on just about everyone here) and reactivate the CN Smith Falls subdivision from there to Smiths Falls.
 
I can’t see using the exact CP alignment thru Tweed due to curvature and intrusion into the town itself. It’s someplace where a diversion and/or elevated segment makes sense.

But more to the point…. belleville deserves good local service of its own, more convenient to ride a conventional train from Belleville station than drive to Tweed to ride Alto. This underlines just hoow important preserving the legacy service is… we are hearing not a word about that.

- Paul
 
crs1026 said:
But more to the point…. belleville deserves good local service of its own, more convenient to ride a conventional train from Belleville station than drive to Tweed to ride Alto.
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Perhaps I should have said that too - obviously few in Belleville is driving to Tweed, and no one in Kingston is driving to Sharbot Lake!!! I assume that was mostly a joke.

Gosh driving to Sharbot Lake ... it's an hour at the best of times, and absolutely miserable in bad weather. Of course no one is driving that to catch a train! You'd just drive the 2 hours to Ottawa, or the 2.5 hours to Toronto if you do that.

And I thought moving the train station to the current location was a bad idea! I loved that old station.
 
Alto's CEO gave an interview to the Toronto Star where he provided an update on the project and its prospect's after Ottawa included it on its list of possible nation building projects.

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OTTAWA — A high-speed rail project connecting Toronto to Quebec City has more “credibility” after being put on a list of possible “nation-building” projects, according to the company’s CEO, allowing it to be built faster and potentially cheaper than before.

The Alto high-speed rail project, connecting Toronto with Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City, was announced earlier this year by then-prime minister Justin Trudeau who pledged $3.9 billion over six years to fund the design and engineering work for a new dedicated rail line with trains capable of travelling as fast as 300 kilometres an hour. VIA trains in that corridor can currently travel at a maximum of half that speed and are often delayed because they share tracks with freight trains.
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Martin Imbleau, president and CEO of Alto, said there is still much work to do but he believes the planning phase of the project could now be cut in half to four years.

“Being able to say that the project could start construction in five years has a big push in terms of credibility,” he said.
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Imbleau said the rail line would be constructed in four phases, and the first phase would take seven to eight years, with the whole project being wrapped up in 14 or 15 years.
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He said without a firm timeline, potential suppliers were reluctant to engage with Alto, but it has seen significant interest since Carney’s designation last week. He said suppliers will have to retool in many cases to supply the project and this is a signal to start that work.
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“We need 4,000 kilometres of high-carbon-density steel tracks. None, not one metre of that track, can be produced today in Canada and we need a 4,000-kilometre supply,” he said.
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https://www.thestar.com/politics/fe...cle_6006d71a-e300-4fdd-94ed-c4cc372f166c.html
 
I'm Very glad ALTOs CEO did this interview, because I saw the media go on a weeks-long tirade questioning the validity of including those "tier 2" projects that seem so far off.


The supply chain needed to build this line litrally doesnt exist in this country and as a supplier would you potential waste millions of dollars staffing up and changing supply chains if you're pretty sure the thing will be canceled by whomever comes next ? - designating alto for fast tracking might give suppliers the confidence to take the project seriously
 
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