nfitz
Superstar
HFR doesn't have to be electrified either - and is surely unlikely to, given the huge cost that would involve - even if it is single track.
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VIA Rail
- Thread starter ehlow
- Start date
Urban Sky
Senior Member
Jesus, I get it that some people in Toronto hate Ottawa, but get real: it’s the third-largest CMA in this half of the country and almost twice as large as the fourth (Quebec City). Oh yes, it’s sometimes easy to forget, but it is also the god damn capital of this country and located almost exactly on the way between the two dominating metropolitan areas in this country!
Regardless of whatever travel time you envision between Montreal and Toronto, the HFR route (assuming the existing ROWs along the Montreal, Winchester, Alexandria, Beachburg, Smiths Falls, Belleville, Havelock and again: Belleville Subdivisions) would be 580 km and thus only 41 km (or 7.6 %) longer than CN’s Kingston Subdivision, which I believe to be the shortest rail alignment which ever existed between Montreal Gare Central and Toronto Union. Since people here seem to love Western end of the Winchester Sub (i.e. west of De Beaujeu) so much: Montreal-Toronto via Winchester and Havelock was 545 km (via Winchester and Belleville: 548 km). Which suggests the following:
Estimate for travel time HFR route with Ottawa Bypass via Winchester (Bedell)
4:45 h / 580 km * 545 km = 4:28 h (i.e. 17 minutes less)
Estimate for VIA Fast, but on HFR route
3:30h / 539 km * 580 km = 3:46 h (i.e. 16 minutes more)
France built a 90 km long High Speed Rail bypass around Paris to save passengers not wanting to travel through Paris 90 minutes and two transfers (while conveniently linking Europe’s by-far busiest theme park and its second-busiest airport on the way). Are we seriously talking about Canada building a 146 km long bypass (i.e. Winchester Sub from De Beaujeu to Smiths Falls) around Ottawa with virtually zero ridership potential along its route - just to save, what, less than 20 minutes and zero transfers...???
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kEiThZ
Superstar
Oh I don't expect HFR to be electrified. My point here is that it's far easier to electrify, twin track, straighten and grade separate a corridor that VIA owns than one on which VIA leases space from a freight operator.
Also, there's physics. Fuel consumption at 249 kph is a lot higher than at 177 kph. So now when the government decides that VIA will go over 200 kph, the upgradability of HFR guarantees that the upgrade will be electric.
I'm going to bet that I will be riding electrified HSR between Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal in the 2050s, if HFR is finished this decade.
crs1026
Superstar
Is the VIAFast study on line anywhere? I can only find a 2009 press report that put the cost at $2.5B. Costs will have risen since then, but I'm having trouble with $15B as a projection. Freight traffic has grown but that's not the story so much as it has transformed into a less compatible format, ie longer trains, that would add a whole new complexity to changing the plant. So certainly double the cost at least. Note that the scope seemed to imply Quebec-Windsor so a direct comparison to HFR needs to consider that.
HFR will certainly provide an attractive initial route, but the more I play with route data the idea of shaving time by easing curves seems less and less likely in the worst stretches. The Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec and Havelock-Toronto stretches may be amenable to that, but the Havelock-Perth stretch will remain high cost to change. If one assumes that the initial speeds may be moderately high, through banking, then the added cost to rework the alignment won't actually reduce times very much, so I would expect the ROI to not be all that compelling.
- Paul
kEiThZ
Superstar
The Ecotrain study had $11B for electric 300 kph HSR in 2009 dollars. And it incorporated a lot of the ViaFast routing. Given the development, appreciation of land along the lakeshore, etc. I absolutely do not see how ViaFast would be less than double digit billions today.
Urban Sky
Senior Member
Study #17 (my favourite “STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL” document)
Ontario - Quebec
25 Ontario, Quebec high-speed rail, TGV studies. Windsor, Toronto, Ottawa Montreal, Quebec City. Certaines études à grande vitesse sont en français
Which is why I keep arguing to build that segment as cheap as possible and bypass it (via Kingston!) as soon as we grow the stomach to pay for greenfield HSR infrastructure...!
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kEiThZ
Superstar
I will never understand how people get all skeptical over the estimates from $70M worth of survey, analysis and engineering by the VIA-CIB JPO and yet will take that ViaFast $2.5B estimate from two decades ago as gospel, a reliable number that just needs to be escalated for inflation. Their study and modeling was hardly all that detailed. Even for the era.
EnviroTO
Senior Member
You couldn't do incremental upgrades to get you to 350km/h service that is expected on the new HSR systems in Europe and Asia without it being a complete fortune because the line isn't near straight enough and the terrain would be expensive to work with, but you should be able to make incremental upgrades to have the Peterborough - Perth corridor run 200km/h. Toronto to Peterborough in 45min, Peterborough to Ottawa in 90 min, Total time 2h 15min as compared to 4h 45min today. 4h 45min is longer than it takes to drive the Havelock route and that road has lots of slow sections. Add about 1h 15min to Montreal, that is 3h 30min as compared to 5h 10min today.
nfitz
Superstar
Wait, previously you said I hated Montreal ...
I suggested using the line though the Shield to Ottawa, and the alignment through Kingston to Montreal.
Quebec City might be fourth, but the Toronto-Kingston demand exceeds the Ottawa-Quebec City demand.
And at the rate Hamilton is growing, it will overtake Quebec City before the decade is out. And yet is almost completely left out of this plan!
I don't understand this concept of hating cities. Transportation planning should be numbers-driven.
crs1026
Superstar
The VIaFAST number was imprecise and, (like most first proposal numbers), likely lowballed, absolutely. The best one can do is guesstimate the multiple to apply to bulk out that original estimate.
Development has driven land prices upwards, but for the amount of land needed, that won’t drive the cost of the entire project up by a factor of six, especially since every HxR proposal assumes shared or enlarged use of an existing rail corridors through the urbanised areas where land prices are highest. We aren’t expropriating a 400-series highway corridor here
I would think that the alignment chosen in open country would have a bigger impact. For instance, a single bridge at a river crossing would add $50M. Some of the larger valleys (Don, Ganaraska, Trent, Moira, Napanee, Ottawa) would be considerably more, which is why studies seem to presume sharing with CP/CN or avoid them altogether. HFR does particularly well in that regard (except maybe over the Don, or at Peterboro).
Count the number of rivers and creeks between the end points, and costs add up. This is as true to double track a presently single track line as it is to propose a brand new alignment. Blasting through solid rock isn’t cheap, either. Wetland routings will be especially constraining, not so much because fill is expensive as the route may have to be constrained or bells and whistles added to mitigate environmental concerns.
My own SWAG for escalating VIAFast would be a factor of 3, and I have absolutely nothing behind that statement to support it. I’m not arguing towards VIAFast, I’m just challenging the rhetoric. HFR may be the lower priced option, but we don’t have to rewrite the data to make the comparisons more dramatic than they might be.
- Paul
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Allandale25
Senior Member
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Cynthia Garneau has had a bumpy ride since taking over VIA Rail, but she is still chugging toward her ultimate goal – growth
Chief executive has the difficult task of transforming a money-losing passenger rail company in the midst of a pandemic that has crushed ridership. But the only thing more improbable might be her failure to succeed
www.theglobeandmail.com
Xav
Active Member
That's it! The Corridor doesn't need 350km/h service. All it needs is enough speed to compete with planes and cars, a reliable schedule and proper connections with transit, YUL and YYZ. Just with that VIA would be in a strong position to win corporate contracts, which is truly where the money is.
Allandale25
Senior Member
Cynthia Garneau has had a bumpy ride since taking over VIA Rail, but she is still chugging toward her ultimate goal – growth
Chief executive has the difficult task of transforming a money-losing passenger rail company in the midst of a pandemic that has crushed ridership. But the only thing more improbable might be her failure to succeed
kEiThZ
Superstar
Railfans are weird folks who gatekeep on HSR definitions.
The better way to look at it is target travel time. Toronto-Montreal in 3.5 hrs and Toronto-Ottawa in 2.5 hrs would basically end Porter and reduce AC/WS service to almost exclusively feeder service. As it stands, 3:15 Toronto-Ottawa and 2:20 Montreal-Quebec are big hits for the airlines that should eliminate a lot of point to point customers.
Urban Sky
Senior Member
Just to avoid disappointment: the “HFR Business Case” can’t be downloaded anywhere on the Globe and Mail’s website, not even as a paying subscriber...