EastYorkTTCFan
Senior Member
maybe it was a car that was used when the flying Scotsman was in North American because it had to be fitted out to run here and to be able to connect with North American equipment.
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VIA Rail
- Thread starter ehlow
- Start date
Allandale25
Senior Member
VIA Venture fleet news for Toronto trips:
buff.ly
Ventures are Coming! The Ventures are Coming!
No, it's not the British that are coming ( see also Paul Revere - Revolutionary War), although the new Siemens Venture sets are revolution...
buff.ly
CapitalSeven
Senior Member
A Globe & Mail article today has the HFR CEO discussing the plan, as well as quotes from a previous exec. The most interesting part is a discussion of using the CP line between Smith's Falls and Coteau, calling it "a line linking Toronto and Montreal that bypasses Ottawa and incorporates high-speed segments." He acknowledges that running all trains through Fallowfield/Ottawa is an obstacle to bringing travel times to Montreal down to an enticing level, and that the trade off is an expanded cost and scope. It's clear that VIA/HFR has not prescribed an answer to this issue, but is rather leaving it up to the proponent consortia to propose solutions, one of which will be selected. That's not exactly new information, but it seems more frankly stated here than before. Perhaps it's a change of direction in a process that has been very opaque for years.
Northern Light
Superstar
cplchanb
Senior Member
what a low bar to set. they were at about 3.5hrs back when the LRC first started and now we're struggling to even meet 4hrs... they will struggle to make ends meet since the car is still faster point to point.
Urban Sky
Senior Member
They are talking about Toronto-Montreal, not Toronto-Ottawa. Also, the shortest travel time which was ever scheduled between Toronto and Ottawa was 3:46 (Train 646 in the 2014-01-01 schedule)…
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roger1818
Senior Member
When was Toronto-Montreal ever 3.5 hours? IRRC the fastest was 3h59m and that was only one express train a day.
cplchanb
Senior Member
regardless to aim for a bar set in the 80s is outright embarrassing and a waste of money. we are in the 21st century and we are only aspiring for performances set 4 decades ago?! and yet we call ourselves a developed country
and worthy of being in the G7... even third world countries have better performing rail than we do.
cplchanb
Senior Member
i was referring to that too...
roger1818
Senior Member
So your preference is spend the money on roads instead and let passenger rail waste away in Canada?
When in history was there ever 18 trains a day between Toronto and Montreal (or Ottawa)? 4 direct trains a day and 1 train with a connection in Brockville is hardly the great service your faded memory romances. Waiting multiple hours for a fast train results in slower travel overall.
We have to start somewhere. History has shown that all or nothing likely will result in nothing.
cplchanb
Senior Member
At what part did i advocate for cars? My whole argument is that we are not solving the problem because the performance targets is too low to attract any new riders.
High frequency still needs to be fast to a 21st century standard. Via will still be losing money overall if they cant take drivers off the road and passenger off airplanes.
We did. we were under 4hrs 40 years ago. we had the turbo train, we had electric. we just regressed thanks to the oil barons killing rail and our freight rails not giving a damn about sharing infrastructure.
dont say we havnt started because we are still stuck in the 70s with rail infrastructure and what is proposed only takes us to the 80/90s compared to Morocco, Egypt and even IRAN whom we mock and ridicule as a terrorist state.
If youre concerned about all or nothing just look at what weve done incrementally... look at the Line 4 of TTC... forever a stub line all due to politics. we have literally 1 chance this CENTURY to build something expansive so we better do something that will last this century and not be stuck with the previous.
micheal_can
Senior Member
There is no reason we cannot have higher speeds like the past. We don't due to excuses. They are not reasons as they were self inflicted.
Urban Sky
Senior Member
I’m not sure to which parallel universe you are referring, but the minimum scheduled travel times of neither Toronto-Montreal nor Toronto-Ottawa have ever (neither in the 1980s nor in any other decade) been anywhere close to 3.5 hours…
cplchanb
Senior Member
In the article they said they were aiming for under 4hrs. Fine I was wrong, they couldn't do it in 3.5 but they did do it in 3:5x back with the lrcs. Therefore my comment is still valid.
Then again Europe and Asia already were able to cover the similar distance in 3.5hrs during that time period so either way we are still aiming for a performance target set in the 80s/90s
Stop trying to make excuses for the bare minimum that will be obsolete before it even begins service. Remember they are building something that will take until the 2030s to finish its not a quick start like brightline that can be incrementally upgraded. As I mentioned this is a once in a century endeavor that will set us up for the next 50 years
Urban Sky
Senior Member
All I needed to say about that highly exaggerated and unconstructive fixation on that 3:59 figure was already said in this post from just over 2 years ago:
Just to put things into perspective:Toronto is the largest metropolitan center in Canada (5.9 million in 2016) and Montreal the second-largest (4.1 million), whereas Berlin is the largest city in (and capital of) Germany (3.5 million in 2015) and Munich is its third-largest city (1.5 million).
When measuring a straight line (euclidean distance - or "as the crow flies"), Toronto's Union Station and Montreal's Gare Centrale are 504.5 km apart, whereas the respective main stations (Hauptbahnhof in German) of Berlin and Munich are 504.2 km apart.
In 1977, when VIA took over the passenger rail services of CN and CP, the fastest scheduled train between Toronto and Montreal was 4:30h, whereas between Berlin and Munich it was ... *drumroll* ... 8:45h (yes, almost twice as much!).
In 1989, when the Berlin wall fell, it was still 4:30h between Toronto and Montreal, but even 9:43h (i.e. more than twice as much!) between Berlin and Munich.
In 1992, when the collapsed GDR had been absorbed by the Federal Republic of Germany, the fastest travel time between Toronto and Montreal had fallen to 3:59h and (thanks to some urgent repairs on the dramatically under-maintained rail network in the former GDR) to 8:47h between Berlin and Munich.
In 2006, the fastest travel time between Toronto and Montreal increased to 4:15h, whereas it decreased to 5:49h between Berlin and Munich (thanks to the opening of the North-South mainline with its tunnel underneath Berlin - thus avoiding the detour via Berlin-Schönefeld Airport - and of various High Speed Lines just in time for the FIFA World Cup 2006, which upgraded speeds on 77.4 km to 300 km/h and on another 194.4 km to 200 km/h).
Finally, in December 2017, the fastest travel time between Toronto and Montreal increased further to 4:49h and was overtaken (for the first time!) by Berlin-Munich, which decreased to 3:58h, thanks to the opening of the final (but most crucial) piece of the Berlin-Nuremberg HSR axis: the 107 km long HSL Erfurt-Ebensfeld.
This means that Germany had to first invest a total of $22.7 billion in 2021 dollars (€3.6 billion by 2006 for Nuremberg-Munich and €10 billion by 2017 for Berlin-Nuremberg) to upgrade 73% of the route to at least 200 km/h and 40% even to 300 km/h, until they finally beat (by only a heartbeat!) what Toronto-Montreal had achieved for a few days during the ill-fated first passenger service trials of the Turbo Train in 1968/69 and then in regular revenue service with the LRC trains between October 1992 and May 1999 and again between May 2000 and May 2005.
So, why did Germany have to invest so much money to match the travel time which Canada achieved (over virtually the same - euclidean - distance!) almost exactly 50 years before? It's because the Kingston Subdivision is so incredibly direct: 539 km length between two points 504.5 km apart equals a detour of just 7% compared to the straight line, whereas the fastest route between Berlin and Munich (via Halle-Erfurt-Nuremberg-Ingolstadt) is still 622.0 km long, which equals a detour of 23% (compared to the straight line of 504.2 km) and is in fact only 11 km shorter than the 633 km which #51 covers between Montreal and Toronto as the only remaining M-O-T train:
Compiled from: timetable data obtained from official VIA schedules and the Fernbahn.de timetable database, as well as infrastructure data obtained from DB Netze.
Notes: above break down of speed limits refers to the design speed of the respective segments (a bit like Canada's track classes impose certain speed limits), while ignoring any more local speed limits (e.g. for tight curves). Also, the 80.8 km of 200 km/h infrastructure shown for the years 1977-2005 opened between Donauwörth, Augsburg and Munich between 1965 and 1977; however, equipment capable of reaching at least 200 km/h rather than just 140-160 km/h only seems to have been used from 1994 onwards. Finally, the fastest travel time has been found between München Hauptbahnhof and either Berlin Zoologischer Garten (for years 1977-1991 and 1993), Berlin Ostbahnhof (for years 1992 and 1994-2005, confusingly called "Hauptbahnhof" between 1987 and 1998) and the new Berlin Hauptbahnhof (for all years since its opening in 2006).
***
Why do I write all of this? Because the tragic of Canada's passenger rail sector is that whereas Germany continuously improved the travel time between Berlin and Munich (less than 9 hours by 1992, less than 8 by 1994, 7 by 2000, 6 by 2006 and less than 4 by 2018), we are paralyzed in this country, because at some point, the track was cleared from all other passenger and freight trains, so that one measly train per day (and direction) could achieve the travel time of 3:59h (or at least on paper, as more than the absolute minimum in track switches would make this travel time infeasible).
Therefore, no, the biggest liability of HFR (or any attempt to fix the Corridor at a price tag which doesn't instantly kill the project) is not the targeted travel time between Toronto and Montreal (even today's 4:49h is almost an hour faster than what was ever achieved between Berlin and Munich before the 108 km long and 300 km/h fast HSL Erfurt-Ebensfeld opened in December 2017), it's the historical coincidence that that distance has at some point been covered at just under 4 hours.
In other words: we can't have faster train service now because we once had even faster train service (even if it was just one train per day). If HFR fails and we'll still have just a pathetic 6 trains per day between this country's two largest cities in 10 and 15 years' time, then it will be mostly because of that 3:59h. I'm afraid that we will never achieve a service standard which is remotely comparable with what similar corridors in Europe receive, unless we stop compulsively talking about that stupid figure. It doesn't have the slightest effect on the benefits which any improvement to the current passenger rail services would bring...
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