High Speed Rail: London - Kitchener-Waterloo - Pearson Airport - Toronto

[Streety McCarface]

^There's this trifling and bothersome factor called "cost":
https://www.economist.com/the-econo...hy-japan-leads-the-world-in-high-speed-trains

It's not like building HSR in Japan is especially cheap, it's not (the Hokuriku shinkansen will cost 30 billion for 120km), and the claim that the HSR lines make only 30% of JR east's revenue makes perfect sense. JR east operates 1,125 km of shinkansen track out of 7,527 km of railway track, in other words, 30% of revenue for 15% of the track.

I know nothing about Japan or it’s high speed rail.......so your posting here intrigued me....you made a compellling argument that our proposed HSR was very similar to Jōetsu Shinkansen.....so I thought i’d look it up and the first thing I saw was this map and I have to ask, what are populations of all those dots in between the two terminal stations and how are they able to have so many dots in between when we were told that station spacing was so crucial to HSR that we need to skip the biggest municipality outside of Toronto in the corridor?View attachment 156015

Weirdly enough, lots of those stations have fairly small populations comparable to those along our proposed HSR line.

Niigata: 800K
Tsubame: 80K
Nagaoka: 275K
Urasa: 43K
Echigo-Yuzawa (Yuzawa): 8K
Jomo-Kogen: 800 daily users (Town is very small)

Stations shared with the Hokuriku shinkansen
Takasaki: 370K
Honjyo-Waseda: 75K
Kumagaya: 199K

Shared with Tohoku, Hokkaido, Hokuriku, Yamagata Mini, and Akita Mini-shinkansen lines
Omiya/Ueno/Tokyo: Greater Tokyo Area (40M +)

The main stations along the proposed HSR line have as follows:

Detroit: 670K
Windsor: 220K
Chatham-Kent: 105K
London: 390K
Stratford/Woodstock: 32K
Waterloo Region: 523K + 70K students
Guelph: 120K
Brampton: 570K

One thing to note, however, is that Japan's expressways have extremely high tolls -- probably around 100$ to travel to Niigata from Tokyo. For many, the train's high cost is justified in this manner. One also has to consider the densities of the towns when compared to each other and the time the Joetsu line has had to allow its ridership levels to mature.

Another interesting thing to note is that a lot of these smaller stations are not served by all trains. Japan runs lots of superexpress services on this line. It's also worth noting that outside of peak season (winter, due to skiing), trains only arrive every hour or so, so you don't need super high-frequency HSR to use it.

 

[TOareaFan]

The main stations along the proposed HSR line have as follows:

Detroit: 670K
Windsor: 220K
Chatham-Kent: 105K
London: 390K
Stratford/Woodstock: 32K
Waterloo Region: 523K + 70K students
Guelph: 120K
Brampton: 570K

.

Maybe your understanding of Japan is greater than your understanding of the proposed HSR in Ontario?

1. counting Detroit as a stop because it is close to Windsor and only separated by a river and an intenstional border;
2. There are no stops planned for Stratford/Woodstock or Brampton (pop now we’ll over $600k).
3 There is a stop planned for Malton/Pearson.

The more I read about Jōetsu Shinkansen it really is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.

 

[Streety McCarface]

Maybe your understanding of Japan is greater than your understanding of the proposed HSR in Ontario?

1. counting Detroit as a stop because it is close to Windsor and only separated by a river and an intenstional border;
2. There are no stops planned for Stratford/Woodstock or Brampton (pop now we’ll over $600k).
3 There is a stop planned for Malton/Pearson.

The more I read about Jōetsu Shinkansen it really is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.

I included detroit to talk about potential development, as well as Stratford/woodstock to give ideas on what could be served. Currently, there is an unused rail tunnel in windsor for freight. If it were repurposed for hsr, the city could easily see service. With Brampton, I included that because it is over 20 km from Union station, which is honestly a fair distance for a station given that Ueno is only 5 km from Tokyo station and Omiya is a good 25. I tried to make the comparison to the potential of the line running at speeds proposed by the province as a way of showing how it could actually work. If they add more stations (but treat them as express stations), there is definitely ridership potential, especially considering that many stations in Japan see fewer than 1000 daily riders in towns of less than 10K.

With the Joetsu shinkansen, express service is provided on the Toki/Max Toki services while the tanigawa service stops at all stations. Something similar can be introduced here, where some trains don't stop at Chatham, Stratford/Woodstock, Guelph, or even Brampton and Malton. Again, I was just providing an example of similar corridors where the line is successful. Canada and Japan are a lot different and more studying needs to be done with all options considered.

I should also note that the current shinkansen is paralleled by a rail line of the same name (Which has this really cool station named Doai Station), so if Japan can run 2+ rail services along the same corridor (with a significant portion being in tunnels), why can't canada do the same with fewer geotechnical challenges?

 

[steveintoronto]

Interesting addition to the story of HSR in Ontario.

The person in charge of HS2 (Britain) seem to be coming here. I haven't seen an announcement from Metrolinx yet.

https://www.ft.com/content/6ed43b94-b02a-11e8-99ca-68cf89602132

Excellent heads-up! Glad to see you reading the 'pink one' (salmon actually, but I digress) Your link would bar those without subscription, so allow me to use Fair Use Doctrine to post the relevant info with full accreditation:
HS2 suffers fresh high-profile departure
Third of HS2’s board has left in past year as concerns mount about cost overruns

Financial Times
Josh Spero and Gill Plimmer
September 4, 2018

[...]
Mr Griffiths will move from the UK to Canada at the end of the year to become programme director on the $40bn Metrolinx scheme in Toronto, the largest public transit investment in Canadian history. [...]

HS2 always has struck me as being a 'fast bridge too far'. And the FT has been scrupulous in chronicling it:

There's more than just Mr Griffiths sampling the local pastures, however. I met one of his cohorts w/ family on the UPX a few weeks back, albeit he claimed to be working with...mmmm...'a very large US consulting/engineering firm' on the project.

These people will work well with Verster, but as to how they fit with the political masters remains to be seen.

 

[TOareaFan]

I included detroit to talk about potential development, as well as Stratford/woodstock to give ideas on what could be served. Currently, there is an unused rail tunnel in windsor for freight. If it were repurposed for hsr, the city could easily see service. With Brampton, I included that because it is over 20 km from Union station, which is honestly a fair distance for a station given that Ueno is only 5 km from Tokyo station and Omiya is a good 25. I tried to make the comparison to the potential of the line running at speeds proposed by the province as a way of showing how it could actually work. If they add more stations (but treat them as express stations), there is definitely ridership potential, especially considering that many stations in Japan see fewer than 1000 daily riders in towns of less than 10K.

With the Joetsu shinkansen, express service is provided on the Toki/Max Toki services while the tanigawa service stops at all stations. Something similar can be introduced here, where some trains don't stop at Chatham, Stratford/Woodstock, Guelph, or even Brampton and Malton. Again, I was just providing an example of similar corridors where the line is successful. Canada and Japan are a lot different and more studying needs to be done with all options considered.

I should also note that the current shinkansen is paralleled by a rail line of the same name (Which has this really cool station named Doai Station), so if Japan can run 2+ rail services along the same corridor (with a significant portion being in tunnels), why can't canada do the same with fewer geotechnical challenges?

So you are talking about a fantasy plan that you think might make HSR work in the corridor.....that is fine but you kept using the word proposed which made me think you were talking about the former government’s proposed HSR which may, or may not, have been killed by the current government.

 

[Urban Sky]

^There's this trifling and bothersome factor called "cost":
https://www.economist.com/the-econo...hy-japan-leads-the-world-in-high-speed-trains

The main point to take away from Steve's excellent article is that it was the need for increased capacity which was the main motivator for developing HSR just like everywhere else in the world and just like everywhere else, the possibility for faster travel times was only a welcome side effect:
"Trains symbolise modernity in Japan. During the Meiji restoration in the late 19th century, when Japan modernised at break-neck speed, the high technology of the day was the locomotive. By the 1930s the first railway trunk route, linking Tokyo with cities such as Nagoya, Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe, had become heavily congested. The first high-speed railway, known as the Shinkansen ("new mainline"), cut journeys between Tokyo and Osaka by two hours (from six to four) when it opened in 1964. This made it competitive with air travel, an industry which Japan had eschewed after the second world war, to avoid inadvertently stoking fears of rearmament."

The exception was of course Spain, where the construction of infrastructure (not just of HSR, but also highways and airports) to extremely unsustainable levels almost bankrupted the country. At the same time, it should not be forgotten that Japan had two exceptional factors which facilitated the decison: already dense development around the existing rail lines (which made expanding the ROWs less affordable) and the legacy network being narrow gauge (which limited the travel speeds and thus travel time savings which could be achieved by upgrading the existing tracks).

Needless to say, these factors did not apply to other HSR nations like Italy, France or Germany and even less so to the Kitchener Corridor (especially the three-quarters which lie west of Georgetown and Silver Junction). It indeed seems to me that those people most enthusiastic about HSR in SWO are rather unaware about how their desired corridor (and the country and province in which it is located) compares to other HSR corridors in the world...

 

[Streety McCarface]

So you are talking about a fantasy plan that you think might make HSR work in the corridor.....that is fine but you kept using the word proposed which made me think you were talking about the former government’s proposed HSR which may, or may not, have been killed by the current government.

Not necessarily a fantasy plan (with the exception of the Detroit section) but I guess I should have been clearer. Even without a direct connection to detroit, there are still public transit options between the two cities, so it's not like ridership from Detroit won't be present assuming the line gets built (which it won't given the PCs and high costs).

 

[lenaitch]

Currently, there is an unused rail tunnel in windsor for freight.

The Detroit-Windsor rail tunnel is unused?

 

[Streety McCarface]

The Detroit-Windsor rail tunnel is unused?

There are twin tunnels, one has been modified by CP for updated freight usage (double stack freight, triple stack cars, etc) while the second tunnel has had absolutely no adjustments made to it whatsoever. In Sarnia, they mitigated this problem by building a new tunnel (now the old St Clair tunnel remains unused). There's a lot of infrastructure down there that is seemingly wasted. Of course, there's a good chance both tunnels are past their design lives, however, a study pertaining to modifications could be done to repurpose the tunnels for other uses (like HSR)

This video goes into it quite a bit:

They say that the second tunnel (the tunnel that wasn't modified) can still be used by trains that don't have oversized vehicles on them, however, based on all videos available on youtube of transit through the tunnel, it seems as though the second tunnel is barely ever used, if used at all.

 

[timio]

The original tunnel in Sarnia has been mostly filled in, with the portals preserved for historical value only.

Somewhat related, the pedestrian bridge just east of the tunnels is being closed permanently.

 

[ssiguy2]

HSR will not go ahead.

It is an extremely expensive project and now there is little political gain. London and Windsor didn`t vote in any PC MPPs so Ford will see little point in investing such huge sums especially in the midst of a cost cutting budget.

 

[kEiThZ]

Not to London. But I've always been curious what the case to Waterloo would look like.

 

[Streety McCarface]

Not to London. But I've always been curious what the case to Waterloo would look like.

In that case, just build RER to Waterloo with super express services. The distance is too small to warrant its own high speed rail line.

 

[kEiThZ]

In that case, just build RER to Waterloo with super express services. The distance is too small to warrant its own high speed rail line.

I'd agree with that. It'd go a long way to making Waterloo more palatable as an exurb and to do business it. They need a relatively frequent and somewhat speedy connection to Pearson and the core. Doesn't have to be HSR. But also shouldn't be a 2 hr long GO Train ride that only runs every few hours.

 

[Streety McCarface]

I'd agree with that. It'd go a long way to making Waterloo more palatable as an exurb and to do business it. They need a relatively frequent and somewhat speedy connection to Pearson and the core.

There's also the potential for HSR to be a catalyst for urban development outside of Waterloo in the future, potentially creating urban sprawl outside the greenbelt area, which would seriously hurt a lot of greenspace and worsen the transit density problems the region currently has. If HSR is built, the greenbelt would need to be extended to encompass Waterloo and surrounding towns.