VIA Rail

[lenaitch]

I could see a need still to have the current UPX extended to Pickering airport, with the same service levels from downtown. Call it the PUPX (Pearson-Union-Pickering Express)

Doesnt mean a VIA stop cant still exist at Pickering, but it would probably be more like a stop that you'd have to transfer to a People Mover or something, I cant see it going right into the station on that "Y" track like mentioned above. That would shave too much time.

The only issue with the airport train along this corridor of course is service levels, working around VIA. But if there is a track into the airport like in the graphic above, it would be used as a passing track of sorts.

It think the word "extended" oversimplifies the concept. If a 'large 'U' (Pearson-Union-Pickering) is envisioned it would still require a similar corresponding publicly-funded infrastructure; perhaps even more costly because of the nature of the ROW.

 

[nfitz]

... perhaps even more costly because of the nature of the ROW.

Much more costly, given that Pickering airport is about twice as far from Union than Pearson. I doubt it would ever have a regular express service to downtown, as it's not in that type of market, even if it does open this century.

Airports seldom have anything significant until they are already open and had millions of passengers per year. Most airports are very well established before getting dedicated express rail type services. JFK and LaGuardia still don't have such services - and even the convenient train to Newark airport is just an in-between stop on a frequent commuter line.

 

[crs1026]

That would be a lot of high-speed turnouts! It might almost suggest that, in areas where the ROW and terrain reasonably permit, to simply construct fewer but longer passing tracks. I believe that's what CP did with their double tracked Kam and Ignace subs; they downgraded the two-track mainline to single with some very, very long sidings. I imagine they did that because the maintenance standards are different.

Yes, my earlier comment about high speed turnouts pertained to ends of double track segments, where you are trying to keep things moving without stopping. For a regular siding, you only need enough turnout speed to match the stopping distance of the siding. VIA’s sidings on its current line are only about 2500 feet long, which means a train routed into a siding has done a good bit of deceleration before it reaches the switch. No need for 80mph turnouts there!

My speculative 7-mile spec would still be expensive in terms of the number of CTC installations required (typically one at each siding end). If that spec were downgraded to sidings every 10.5 miles, then the legacy roadbed at every third legacy siding could be reused. One new siding requiring new roadbed but only 2 CTC plants might be cheaper than two reused sidings with a total of four CTC plants. However, waiting times would increase. Whether one uses single track with sidings or judicious amounts of double track, the goal should be fastest possible trip times.

- Paul

 

[crs1026]

Much more costly, given that Pickering airport is about twice as far from Union than Pearson. I doubt it would ever have a regular express service to downtown, as it's not in that type of market, even if it does open this century.

Airports seldom have anything significant until they are already open and had millions of passengers per year. Most airports are very well established before getting dedicated express rail type services. JFK and LaGuardia still don't have such services - and even the convenient train to Newark airport is just an in-between stop on a frequent commuter line.

We need not be bound by the past. Any new airport should have a spec that emphasizes access by public transit ahead of automobile. And probably active transport too, although distances may discourage that.

Pickering Airport would make a great anchor point for an LRT line through Durham Region. If it happened to connect the airport with a VIA stop, so much the better. I can’t imagine that HFR will ignore the Durham market, even if their initial artwork places its east end station way over by the Don River.

- Paul

- Paul

 

[hw621]

It think the word "extended" oversimplifies the concept. If a 'large 'U' (Pearson-Union-Pickering) is envisioned it would still require a similar corresponding publicly-funded infrastructure; perhaps even more costly because of the nature of the ROW.

SmartTrack 2.0, although 1.0 will never exist...

 

[nfitz]

We need not be bound by the past. Any new airport should have a spec that emphasizes access by public transit ahead of automobile.

If they were to build Pickering as a 20 million passenger per year facility from day one, sure.

There's no plans for that though. Day one operation would be general aviation. Even initial passenger operations would be smaller than Hamilton which has about 0.7 million passengers per year.

If GO has service running on the Peterborough line by then, then adding a station, and a shuttle bus, would be more than enough. Though if the City of Pickering wants to blow money on a people mover, that would work - though probably overkill!

 

[Allandale25]

Citizen Rally in Gaspé - August 18, 2019 - Coalition des Gaspésiens pour le retour du train passager de VIA Rail

Français (French)

www.gaspetrain.org

 

[crs1026]

If they were to build Pickering as a 20 million passenger per year facility from day one, sure.

There's no plans for that though. Day one operation would be general aviation. Even initial passenger operations would be smaller than Hamilton which has about 0.7 million passengers per year.

If GO has service running on the Peterborough line by then, then adding a station, and a shuttle bus, would be more than enough. Though if the City of Pickering wants to blow money on a people mover, that would work - though probably overkill!

Quite agree - no need for overkill. Bus would work just fine at first. But the facility would be built with the right rough-ins so that higher order transit could be cheaply addes. Land should be banked, etc

I won’t digress into what the initial outlay for phase I of the airport will cost, but presumably it won’t be funded in a manner more generous, or less bound in bureaucratese, than HFR. Although if anything has been studied for longer than HSR, it’s the Pickering Airport. I remember working at a summer camp on the airport lands as a student in 1972, and some government types turning up to valuate the property for the government. Now I’m retired, and they still haven’t broken ground.

- Paul

 

[MarkBrooks]

A firm nod towards my signature (as in: please note that I'm expressing nothing but my own interpretation of what synergies there might be lying between HFR and the Pickering Airport):

First off, I'm no fan at all of the aviation industry, as they are responsible for some of the most obscene destruction of our species' own livelihood (heavily taxed by the taxpayer to the point where people don't only choose the plane because it's the fastest mode, but also because its ticket prices make it often the cheaper than other, much more appropriate chances) and building additional infrastructure (just as with roads and cars) just encourages further, highly unsustainable growth. That said, I have to fly myself regularly to see my family and friends which live in my native Germany, even though I'm planning to limit myself to one return-flight per year in the future, following the call of clima activist Greta Thunberg to boycott aviation.

That said, in order to reduce road traffic to and from the airports and the demand or the need for short-haul flights, there needs to be a strong integration of the airports within the transit and rail networks. Also, rail advocates are painfully aware of the highly detrimental effect of not anticipating future expansion needs when planning transportation (or other) infrastructure which often violates former ROWs. As you write yourself in the article you've linked, you don't anticipate that Pickering Airport would be built before HFR (and god forbid that you will be proven wrong!), so this is more a question of making provisions for a future stop at the airport.

With this preamble, I would like to share the following brainstorming activity:

Source: DurhamRegion.com

• Assuming that above map is still representative of your plans, I would believe that you can forget about the Y-shaped tracks into a rail station next to your planned airport terminal, at least where it concerns HFR trains, as this would add at least 10 minutes to their runtime, while a platform built and served along the Havelock Subdivision should at least halve that travel time penalty. You also seem to be unaware of how long your train station would have to be, especially if it was to host GO trains. Thankfully, all what a future station along the Havelock Subdivision would require at this point is to simply plan the HFR infrastructure with such a future station in mind, which only means placing signals or switches in a way so that they won't need to be moved later and should cause no non-negligible additional costs.
• For understandable reasons, you seem to believe that passengers will rather connect from downtown Toronto (i.e. GTHA-based passengers substituting the car to access Pickering Airport) than from Ottawa or Montreal (i.e. passengers substituting a connection flight), but the problem is that Transport Canada classifies VIA Rail as "intercity" rail, which prevents VIA from selling more tickets than there are seats on that particular departure. This means that whereas there will presumably be an abundance of seats available for downtown-to-airport travellers in the early morning or in the evenings, there might be a shortage at a time which might be the most critical for Pickering Airport: the afternoon peak around 5 pm, as any intercity rail operator who can sell every seat only once will rather sell it to someone paying $100* for Toronto-Ottawa than $10* for Toronto-Pickering. (*all these ticket prices are completely arbitrary and only provided for illustrative purposes)
• In order to solve the previous point, you would need to attract much more riders which are willing to travel between a Pickering Airport rail station and HFR destinations east of it, which will require an abundance of affordable parking spaces and a convenient integration into the regional road (and especially transit networks, with the first (affordable parking) being in short supply at almost every airport, while the third (transit integration) is a common weakness of the kind of secondary metropolitan airports like the one you are hoping to build. This would allow to sell the same seat for $10* to a Toronto-Pickering passenger and for $100* for a Pickering-Ottawa passenger. Otherwise, the afternoon peak downtown-to-airport connection could be offered by a future GO service (potentially extended to Peterborough), which would anyways be most likely to offer service during that time of the day.
• Unless you are on a Shinkansen line in Japan, any intercity service will offer frequencies which are inferior to that what downtown-to-airport rail links commonly offer (for which UPX with its 15 minute headways is a very typical example). The same frequency which your future passengers might consider as "frequent" for connecting towards Ottawa or Montreal, would be considered as "painfully infrequent" to connect towards downtown Toronto.

With all of that said (and despite my at-best luke-warm enthusiasm for Pickering Airport), I deeply appreciate your support for HFR and your determination to see HFR as an opportunity rather than threat for your vision!



You sounded so certain that I didn't even doubt your claim. It was only when I checked the report for explanations as to why the costs had been so sky-high that I re-checked the table...


Indeed, but your over-inflated cost figure made the whole HFR costing (wrongly) appear implausible...



You won't be surprised then that it was of course said deer friend @steveintoronto, who provided two professional/academic articles about maintaining high frequencies on (partly) single-tracked infrastructure:

Given that the second paper is older than myself (and arguably the most relevant when discussing single-track meets), I've uploaded the Petersen et Taylor (1987) article here.

In addition, @steveintoronto also identified the following two impressive examples of high-frequency single-track operations (both of which I have witnessed myself):


It is posts like the above which make me highly regret his forced absence from this forum...

Thankyou for your in-depth reply, Your observations are interesting. The rail station shown in the diagram you posted is from a GTAA 2004 report. Although now widely used as a base line, it is not a final design. That will be undertaken by an RFP process, expected as a follow on to the soon to be released KPMG report . In 2004 it was strictly envisioned as a local commuter rail service. This should no longer be the case in an updated design.

We agree that HFR needs a different design, your idea of no diversions/get people off-on quickly and get on its way is interesting. The ticketing issue has never been raised by anyone before to the best of my knowledge, including Transport.

The problem is that not a lot of forward thinking has been applied to the rail side of the Pickering airport design. Up to now the energy has been focused on the airside with rail tacked on as a nice to have. That said, It can easily be envision as a Via-Metrolinx arrangement with Via HFR and GO short-turn service at Pickering. Via could then be setup for a share of that Metrolinx revenue. Via HFR could connect Ottawa / Montreal to Pickering area including Stouffville. In coordination with airside flights it could in theory greatly improve the efficiency ( and carbon footprint) of our transportation network.

Here is a newer private design, an update from the 2004 layout. Note the rail line is expected to be used to supplement the fuel farm. The main fuel delivery is expected to utilize a pipeline to the south of the airport, the same one that currently serves as the main way to delivery JetA to Pearson. Is supplemental fuel delivery by rail to a fuel farm even feasible if the line is heavily used for HFR service ? An open question.

A lot to think about here, but one of the most important points is these questions need to be asked. rail needs to be included as one of the Pickering airport RFP requirements.

 

[nfitz]

But the facility would be built with the right rough-ins so that higher order transit could be cheaply addes. Land should be banked, etc

The now demolished terminal at Mirabel had a train station roughed in, in the basement! That was a waste of money!

The Crossways apartment building on top of the Dundas West subway station was built with a roughed connection to GO Bloor - which didn't do much good, as it doesn't meet current accessibility standards (i.e. no elevator!).

A lot to think about here, but one of the most important points is these questions need to be asked. rail needs to be included as one of the Pickering airport RFP requirements.

What RFP?

 

[kEiThZ]

If they were to build Pickering as a 20 million passenger per year facility from day one, sure.

There's no plans for that though.

Like the MOOSE Rail clown, Mark Brooks keeps telling us that this is now well beyond GA and that there's investors lined up to throw down billions on a Pickering airport if only the government would let them.

They could launch as a massive facility in Pickering if they had a major anchor and major investors. But there's no business case for any airline to move there. And there's no investors close to the league required to build that large facility.

Consider this: The proposed Pearson transit hub has a supposed price tag of $11 billion. That's just the transit hub. That's not the terminals, airside facilities, etc. Each runway will end up costing a billion dollars alone. And their little graphic shows three major runways. What they are proposing is easily $5 billion. And that's just the terminal and airfield. Does not include all the civil works to facilitate the airport or transit connections. As a point of reference, the redevelopment of LaGuardia (which handles 30 million mostly domestic pax per year) is running at US$8 billion. In reality, when you add it all up, it's a CA$7-10 billion plan for what Mark envisions at Pickering.

With those price tags in mind, now ask yourself which airline will want to be the anchor at that airport, and can generate enough traffic to pay off that kind of debt. Can't be Westjet or Air Canada. Business traffic is a big deal and all those head offices are in the western GTA or in the downtown core. Not to mention that neither carrier would want to split up traffic from a hub. Air Transat would have been a candidate. But AC owns them now. Sunwing is too small and seasonally dependent to be the prime anchor. Who else is left?

One could argue that they could scale back plans and go with smaller runways, smaller terminal, etc. But all of it leads to the same problem. Who will provide the traffic that will pay for this? They could build a $1 billion airport that's the size of Waterloo tomorrow and they'd face the same problem. Who will operate from there and provide the traffic that let's them pay off the debt?

The "If you build it, they will come" approach doesn't work for multi-billion dollar facilities. And that brings me to the next point: investors. I don't doubt that Mark has some conditional investors line up who might have tens or even hundreds of millions. But I seriously question if there's enough investor support to plop down billions on this idea. Which inevitably means they will need taxpayer support. Hence why Mark is here to socialize the idea with the public....

As far as a rail connection goes. If there was going to be an airport there, co-locating the GTA East station at the airport makes a lot of sense. Shared parking, feed from air to rail and vice versa. But if the airport is a rather sketchy idea, why the heck would you build your station out there? Would make much more sense to locate near where there's residents and industry...ie Markham. Not to mention, Mark and his fantasy crew have completely ignored the rail line and not even planned to run it through their terminal. It was seen entirely as a fuel conveying operation until Mark and co. realized that a government entity wants to run a $4 billion rail service right through their fantasy map, making their plans as realistic as the MOOSE Rail crew. Having tried to trash rail and HFR and failed, he's realizing he needs to work it in to his sales pitch. Maybe he should start with something basic like actually co-locating the rail line and the terminal and considering how many hundreds of millions will have to be spent on triple tracking the corridor till Pickering to provide VIA HFR, GO RER and fuel delivery service.

 

[kEiThZ]

I hope people don't let him hijack and spew propaganda on this thread too.....

 

[Urban Sky]

Thankyou for your in-depth reply, Your observations are interesting. The rail station shown in the diagram you posted is from a GTAA 2004 report. Although now widely used as a base line, it is not a final design. That will be undertaken by an RFP process, expected as a follow on to the soon to be released KPMG report . In 2004 it was strictly envisioned as a local commuter rail service. This should no longer be the case in an updated design.

We agree that HFR needs a different design, your idea of no diversions/get people off-on quickly and get on its way is interesting.

Thank you for providing the updated map, it at least seems that a rail station would be possible within walking distance from the terminal.

The ticketing issue has never been raised by anyone before to the best of my knowledge, including Transport.

It’s not that obvious as an issue, but if you tried to book a 5pm weekday VIA train out of Toronto to Oshawa, you might notice that it’s quite challenging to find anything cheaper than “Economy Plus” tickets...

The problem is that not a lot of forward thinking has been applied to the rail side of the Pickering airport design. Up to now the energy has been focused on the airside with rail tacked on as a nice to have. That said, It can easily be envision as a Via-Metrolinx arrangement with Via HFR and GO short-turn service at Pickering. Via could then be setup for a share of that Metrolinx revenue. Via HFR could connect Ottawa / Montreal to Pickering area including Stouffville. In coordination with airside flights it could in theory greatly improve the efficiency ( and carbon footprint) of our transportation network.

I’m not entirely sure what would be the kind of cooperation with Metrolink you just described for VIA, but it would be subject to the same ticketing constraints...

Here is a newer private design, an update from the 2004 layout. Note the rail line is expected to be used to supplement the fuel farm. The main fuel delivery is expected to utilize a pipeline to the south of the airport, the same one that currently serves as the main way to delivery JetA to Pearson. Is supplemental fuel delivery by rail to a fuel farm even feasible if the line is heavily used for HFR service ? An open question.
View attachment 197888

As far as I’m aware, CN and CP are “common carriers”, which means they have to transport goods even if they consider them as “unsafe” (which was one of the contributing factors in the Lac-Mégantic disaster) and it would be unreasonable to believe that a public railroad could be more selective with the kinds of traffic it hosts. There might be no possibility of shared operation, but I don’t see a problem to do the deliveries outside of HFR operating hours (i.e. during the night)...

A lot to think about here, but one of the most important points is these questions need to be asked. rail needs to be included as one of the Pickering airport RFP requirements.

It’s always best to think things from the end and that starts with the question: “If this thing becomes a big success one day, what kinds of facilities would we require and where would it be most convenient to place them?”

 

[crs1026]

Consider this: The proposed Pearson transit hub has a supposed price tag of $11 billion. That's just the transit hub. That's not the terminals, airside facilities, etc. Each runway will end up costing a billion dollars alone. And their little graphic shows three major runways. What they are proposing is easily $5 billion. And that's just the terminal and airfield. Does not include all the civil works to facilitate the airport or transit connections. In reality, when you add it all up, it's a $7-10 billion plan.

I can’t imagine the business case for Pickering surviving on top of HFR, especially if the two are held to the same financing model and thresholds and the same cost recovery expectations.
Even $1B of that airport investment added to upgrade HFR would give a service that is fast and frequent enough that east enders would find preferable to a Pickering-Ottawa or Pickering-Montreal flight. That’s the gap in economics that would bring a 125 mph+, grade separated, almost HSRish quality to HFR instead of it being a slightly better than LRCish thing.
A further $2-3B with the right push to CN and CP, would fund enough RER capacity across the top or middle of the City so that access to Pearson from Markham and Durham would be very convenient, as well as meeting other needs.
Pearson will remain the hub for international and transocean flights, I can’t see much incentive for any airline (except maybe Air Canada, and only to a couple of destinations) to split this traffic across two airports. Getting people to Pearson for that traffic, and using VIA to reduce short haul flights, sure seems like a better strategy.
Having said that, it’s great that the Pickering data is brought up to date, if only so that we can try to level the playing field with HFR.

- Paul

 

[kEiThZ]

I can’t imagine the business case for Pickering surviving on top of HFR, especially if the two are held to the same financing model and thresholds and the same cost recovery expectations.

What will kill their business plan isn't HFR. It's the fact that the ROI for whatever has to be spent on a commercial airport in Pickering, is so much better at the existing airports.

Even $1B of that airport investment added to upgrade HFR would give a service that is fast and frequent enough that east enders would find preferable to a Pickering-Ottawa or Pickering-Montreal flight.

Exactly. There's infinitely better ways to spend a few billion dollars than a Pickering airport. Even private investors will see better ROI for HFR than this airport proposal.

Having said that, it’s great that the Pickering data is brought up to date, if only so that we can try to level the playing field with HFR.

Agreed. The updated cost info, financial and passenger projections will only make the HFR case stronger, when that comes out in 2 years.