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Apologies and me automatically reading Toronto-Ottawa, where you clearly wrote "Montreal-Ottawa", could indeed point in that direction...
We must be careful not to conflate the GTAA with the airline companies. Therein lies a huge difference. There's also the premium air-freight aspect. The "Pearson Study" was heavy (pun intended) with the freight factor, and the depth of the surrounding area fed from that freight hub. HFR+ to Pearson and Ottawa-Montreal by rail? CP and CN couldn't come close for premium rush delivery.
https://www.globalrailnews.com/2016...nental-train-combines-passengers-and-freight/CRRC high-speed ‘intercontinental’ train combines passengers and freight
September 23, 2016
China’s CRRC has presented a concept intercontinental high-speed electric multiple unit (EMU) which it hopes will “open up new markets” for the company.
The double-deck train will carry passengers on the upper level and freight below.
In promotional material presented at this year’s InnoTrans trade fair, CRRC said the EMU is “adapted to suit various climates and environments, as well different railway systems and standards”.
During the exhibition, China Railway group announced that the construction of eight new north-south corridors and eight east-west routes would almost double the size of the country’s high-speed rail network by 2025.
The intercontinental EMU could aid growth in rail traffic between China and Europe, with freight volumes in particular increasing in recent years.
http://www.caixinglobal.com/2017-07-04/101110134.html
https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/re...35272833/?ref=http://www.theglobeandmail.com&
China shows off double-decker “Intercontinental” for Beijing-to-Berlin line
26 September 2016 | By GCR Staff
China Railway Rolling Stock (CRRC) has announced that it is working on an “intercontinental” high-speed train with two decks: an upper for passengers and a lower for freight.
The company presented the model at the InnoTrans trade show in Berlin, which ended yesterday.
The idea is to make the train more like a passenger aircraft, with the cargo space used to transport luggage, high-value products and express parcels. According to CRRC, the train can deal with harsh environments and will be compatible with railway systems in different countries. The aim is to produce trains that can operate on continent-sized networks, such as the one envisaged for Central Asia, Iran and Europe.
Railway Gazette reports that five prototypes of the “Intercon” are already in operationin China. CRRC expects to start full-scale production before the end of this year, and a 250km/h variant is expected to enter service in 2017.
CRRC also demonstrated a “smart window” concept, in which passengers can access information using a touch-screen heads-up display.
Earlier this month, the completion of a line between Zhengzhou in central China with Xuzhou, north of Shanghai, brought the total length of the domestic high-speed network to 20,000km.
Huang Xin of the China Railway Corporation told Xinhua agency that the first 10,000km of the system took 11 years to build, after which it doubled in three years, and is expected to double again by 2025, before reaching 45,000km in 2030.
During the InnoTrans conference, China Railway group announced that this doubling would take the form of eight north-south corridorsand eight east-west routes.
Image: The double-decker is a variant of the CRH family of trains. This is the first-class cabin of a CRH3 (Creative Commons)
My point was that your expectations in an editorial article of a mainstream and generalist newspaper bewilder me. Given the quality of the rest of the editorial and the fact that even you concede that there are actors in the aviation industry which might indeed regard HFR more as a threat than an opportunity, I find calling the author "incompetent" slightly exaggerated and an unnecessary distraction from all the other points he is making and may be worth discussing as well. Also (you may correct me if I'm wrong), I assume that your expertise in journalism is somewhat weaker than it is in engineering...
Do people even flying from Montreal-Ottawa, unless they are connecting to a different flight? It's only 170 km from Dorval to Ottawa ... 180 km the way the 417 goes so far south. You'd be faster to keeping driving past the Airport, and you'd be in downtown Ottawa perhaps before your plane has even taken off at Dorval.
May I ask you how much "common sense" you have to assess the points made in any other of his most recent articles (see list below)?
In short: You have every right to disagree with the author, but your critique of his article does nothing to back your challenge of his competence as a journalist.The Globe And Mail said:
Is it really that ridiculous? Public funds are by definition limited and anyone applying for them therefore is by definition in competition for those limited resources. If Steve is correct that the CIB is to leverage public funds by private funds in the ratio 1:4, then the maximum investment volume available through the CIB is still limited to five times whatever the federal government is willing to provide to the CIB. Yes, private pension funds are currently desperately searching for sufficiently sized infrastructure projects, but if I read his editorial correctly, his investment recommendation only referred to the federal government, not private investors...
Not even necessary to check flights on a flight-by-flight basis, at least not for Air Canada:
Where did this 95 minute figure come from? I know I provided such a figure, but it only referred to historic VIA schedules and an indication of what the current right-of-way is capable of, even in absence of any substantial infrastructure upgrades...
It's a good question, and I delved quickly on that last night when posting what I did, found no specs, and took a deeper look now, still no specs on pallet/pod dimensions, but a massive amount on the derivation of the design. It's originally Siemens:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Railways_CRH3
I'll try it one last time: the reason why I'm so annoyed at you here (just like I was at nfitz last week) is that calling professionals "incompetent" undermines any open debate as it completely discredits every single argument these professionals are making. We are all spending our free time here to debate topics on which we place a much higher importance than other people do and I perceive attempts to flat-out discredit entire authors rather than bothering to ask yourself whether you even have all information needed to correctly understand and to objectively judge their arguments and opinions as a rather cheap way of promoting the arguments and opinions of your own. Finally, your repeated failure in acknowledging the difference between an opinion piece and an actual news article does not exactly support your presumption of the necessary authority to assess the journalistic competence of one of the lead journalists of this countries' largest newspaper...
According to the Infrastructure Canada website, the new infrastructure bank is indeed to be equipped with $35 billion by the federal government, but of these, only $5 billions seem to have been earmarked exclusively for Public Transit infrastructure so far. Also, governments (of any colour) tend to aggregate continuous investments over a longer period into one lump sum (which is like aggregating the combined salary of a multi-year contract into one total amount in a job offer, just to make it sound larger), as exemplified in a different article on the Infrastructure Canada website (emphasis added):
The irony is that I don't even believe myself that the author is right in this part of his assessment, but this is exactly what your discrediting of his competency forces anyone wanting to use any part of the author's analysis to support his own point to do: you oblige them to first prove that even though some of the points made by the author might be flawed or even false, making them was not absurd or ridiculous (and that his analysis therefore might still be valid in other points) before they can use any other parts of his analysis to support their actual argument, as denying the credibility of a source inevitably compromises the credibility of the person who ares to use that source...
The minimum scheduled travel time is currently 113 minutes (or 1:53h: Train 34, dep. OTTW 11:35, arr. MTRL 13:28 - I took it just yesterday on Labour Day...) and the average is 2:01h (plus a delay of more than 10 minutes for 15.1% of all trains on this route). I disagree that cutting travel times by half is necessary (or the only way) to make inter-city commuting by rail popular on this route, but I appreciate your viewpoints and arguments and will continue to allow them to challenge mine...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/omnitrax-demanded-fix-rail-line-1.4273012
http://lexpert.ca/article/banking-on-infrastructure/?p=1&sitecode=lexBanking on Infrastructure
There’s concern about the newly announced Canada Infrastructure Bank. But if it’s done right, the CIB could provide a much-needed boost to spending.
Aug 25, 2017by Elizabeth Raymer 2017 Lexpert Special Edition - Infrastructure
(Actual print edition of this is available on-line at this link, http://lexpert.ca/article/lexpert-p...nd-mails-report-on-business/?p=1&sitecode=lex )
CANADA IS CONSIDERED best in class in the P3 market, and the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships’ (CCPPP) annual conference is world-renowned, Minister of Infrastructure and Communities Amarjeet Sohi told attendees of a CCPPP luncheon in Toronto in April. “P3s will continue to play a critical role as we develop Infrastructure across the country,” Sohi said. “We have seen the value the private sector has brought to the table” in terms of quality and delivery.
The federal government plans to leverage those P3s in its ambitious plans for Infrastructure investing. In the government’s Budget 2017 document, it announced an investment of $180 billion in Infrastructure over the next 12 years. This will nearly triple the federal investment over the next decade, the minister said.
The Investing in Canada Infrastructure plan will focus on five main Infrastructure areas: Public Transit; Green Infrastructure (including water and sewer systems, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions); Social Infrastructure (including affordable housing, cultural and recreational facilities); Trade and Transport; and Rural and Northern Communities. Details of Investing in Canada will be worked out by the first quarter of next year and will “give the provinces and territories the certainty and resources they need to plan their long-term investments,” said Sohi.
Included in the Investing in Canada plan is the proposed Canada Infrastructure Bank, which was announced in April and will, if it is eventually approved by Parliament, invest $35 billion into “transformative Infrastructure projects” through public-private partnerships. Fifteen billion dollars would come from Investing in Canada, to be divided equally between public transit systems, trade and transportation corridors, and green Infrastructure projects.
The Bank’s stated objectives are to invest in Infrastructure projects that have revenue-generating potential and are in the public interest; to attract private-sector and institutional investors to projects so that more Infrastructure can be built in Canada; to serve as a centre of expertise on Infrastructure projects in which private-sector or institutional investors are making a significant investment; to foster evidence-based decision-making and advise all orders of government on the design of revenue-generating projects; and to collect and share data to help governments make better decisions about Infrastructure investments.
The term “bank” may be a bit of a misnomer, suggests Timothy Murphy, whose practice with McMillan LLP in Toronto focuses on transactions with a public component. “Really what this is, is … an enabler of large [government-funded] Infrastructure projects to proceed in partnership with large pension funds,” and to encourage them to invest in Canada, Murphy says.
Some critics see the proposed Infrastructure Bank as redundant, given the existence of the Crown corporation PPP Canada and its P3 Canada Fund — a merit-based program that encourages P3 innovation and “inexperienced governments” to consider P3s in public Infrastructure procurements.
To date, the government hasn’t shared with the Infrastructure community how the proposed Canada Infrastructure Bank will work, says Douglas Younger, chair of Aird & Berlis LLP’s national Infrastructure team in Toronto: “I think the government so far has been pretty sketchy in how the Infrastructure Bank will be structured, and how it will provide financing. … There’s lots of speculation in the market, and amongst people in the industry, and quite a bit of skepticism. The mantra you’ll hear is that there is more than enough funding, but not enough opportunities. It’s a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.”
Will the new Canada Infrastructure Bank replace PPP Canada? What will its mandate be? “It’s been speculated in the press that it will focus on revenue-generating projects,” Younger says. “It’s also been speculated that this may be a way of inducing the major funds to invest in green projects.”
Younger questions whether there are enough profitable Infrastructure projects out there to invest in, noting that public transit systems are very expensive to build and dependent on government funding; as an example, he points to Toronto’s Eglinton Crosstown light rail transit (LRT) system, now in development, which carries a price tag in excess of $6 billion.
But Murphy believes that the Bank may play a useful role in public transit projects, citing the “classic example” of Toronto’s Union Pearson Express airport rail link, completed in time for the Pan American and Parapan American Games held in the city in 2015.
The project was intended to have been a public-private partnership between the province of Ontario and the Union Pearson Airlink Group, which is a subsidiary of SNC-Lavalin.
“It was meant to be a revenue-risk project,” he says. SNC-Lavalin was to build and operate the rail link as a commercial operation, paying the capital costs and recouping them from the fare box. But after two years of failed negotiations — including, says Murphy, the Ontario government’s refusal to cover the risk of the project — SNC-Lavalin’s Union Pearson AirLink Group walked away, and Crown agency Metrolinx took over the ownership and operation of UP Express.
“If the Bank had been around it could have provided support to the project, and even if the project was not economically successful, the province would have been better off in two ways,” says Murphy. “First, it would have had the expertise of a private-sector entity looking to operate it efficiently and well so as to encourage riders, and second, even in the circumstance where the project did not succeed, the project would still have benefited from the contribution of the SNC equity.”
The Bank will not take over the business of granting Infrastructure money, says Jane Bird, who works in complex public and private construction and Infrastructure initiatives with Bennett Jones LLP in Vancouver.
“The vast majority of [granting] will come through the traditional source: Infrastructure Canada.” A small portion of that funding will be available through the bank, which can play a significant role, she says, through direct investment of money allocated and facilitating private-sector investment, and by acting as a source of expertise on structuring larger, more complicated commercial structures.
The case for the Infrastructure Bank goes beyond a simple cost-of-borrowing analysis, says Catherine Doyle of Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP in Toronto, whose practice focuses largely on Infrastructure and public-private partnerships. Governments can borrow at a lower rate, but they can also operate at a loss “forever,” unlike the private sector. So, the case for the Bank is “based on how to use federal capital appropriately,” and how to use the private sector effectively “for the long-term benefit of the country.”
The five focus areas of Investing in Canada support that the majority of Infrastructure in Canada is not federally owned or controlled, Doyle says. “The vast majority is either provincially or municipally controlled or owned.” So, focusing on public transit, green space, social Infrastructure and other municipal/provincial projects makes sense. Doyle “would have preferred to see First Nations explicitly called out” in the list of five priorities; “they are the communities that least have the tools to build that Infrastructure,” she says, while noting that they may be included under the rubric of rural and northern communities.
The Bank will concentrate in areas where projects are not as financeable, she says. “There’s lots of money now for LRT, roads, those types of things,” and yet water treatment systems are in dire need of financing, and impose a significant cost on municipalities. “There the Bank can play a role.”
[...]
http://www.railjournal.com/index.php/light-rail/work-starts-on-maryland-purple-line-ppp-project.html
