I notice that it is harder and harder to get access to the Globe's "locked" content - Google News used to be a nice back door. But anyone with a TPL or academic library card can get in.
Here's John Barber's take, which is, scrap VIA and go it with the US.
Build high-speed trains to corridors that count
John Barber. The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Ont.: May 23, 2007. pg. A.15
The Conference Board of Canada says the federal government should consider the feasibility of high-speed passenger trains linking Canadian cities, including those of the so-called Quebec City-Windsor Corridor, but the sensible citizen has concerns.
Will this latest effort prove to be another tragedy, the last in a long series of dashed hopes and disappointments with high-speed rail? Or will it, like the rest of Ottawa's transportation policy, end instead as ignoble farce? Either outcome is all too possible, anything else less than likely.
The sad history of this appealing idea is nothing other than the destruction of passenger rail in Canada, read backward. From the moment the corridor first emerged as a prime candidate for fast electric trains, Ottawa accelerated its abandonment of passenger rail with equal and opposite force. As Europe and even the U.S. moved ahead, Via Rail's innovations became steadily sketchier and less successful, to the point now that its premium cars are pulled by vintage diesel locomotives at half the speed they were intended to travel.
The end of the process is a federal government with such little capacity and basic know-how it would be better off out of the game entirely. For Torontonians especially, the best hope for fast rail begins with the end of the national project.
Blowing up Via Rail for starters need not be considered destructive. The federal government no longer runs freight trains or airlines. Its retreat from airport management was the best thing that ever happened to air travellers, especially the millions who pass through Toronto. The decision to offload ports was equally inspired, although less well implemented, compromised as it was by such absurdities as the creation of the Toronto Port Authority.
The same new beginning is needed in passenger rail.
Among its immediate benefits, the end of Via will end the current fixation on the corridor the Crown corporation once dreamed about creating, but never did. It's about time. Who wants to go to Windsor or Quebec City, anyway?
The corridor might have made sense a generation ago, just as the route structure of the Canadian National Railway made some kind of sense when it was a Crown corporation used by Ottawa to protect and promote an east-west national economy. Privatized in the free-trading 21st-century, it quickly integrated into a seamless continental system that shows no evidence of national borders. To remain viable in eastern Canada, passenger trains must follow along.
What Toronto needs are fast trains to New York and Chicago, not Quebec City and Windsor. Rather than once again helping to demonstrate the futility of national leadership by investing hope in a renewed national effort, Toronto should join other cities and regions to plan a modern system. A good beginning would be to join Buffalo and western New York State in a campaign to hook up with Amtrak's Acela Express, a network of high-speed electric trains serving the rich Northeast Corridor - the corridor that counts.
The U.S. at least has fast electric trains, although Bushism has made their future uncertain. The best locomotive conceivably available for a made-in-Canada system is Bombardier's turbine-powered Jet Train, a cut-rate alternative the company promoted after policy-makers nixed the superior technology the company hoped to import from Europe. The same history of shortsighted decision-making has ensured that all the old impediments to fast trains - the need to use old track and to share it with freight traffic - will remain in place to hobble any new efforts.
The promise of fast trains is too great to leave it so blighted.
