VIA Rail

[MisterF]

Exactly! If the trip between Toronto to Montreal takes too long because it goes via Ottawa most travelers will take alternatives. One can argue what 'too long' is but some of us remember the (supposed) 4 hour Montreal-Toronto schedules and I for one would expect a "new train' to be faster than that!

The problem with this way of thinking is that while Toronto-Montreal passengers would have a slight benefit to bypassing Ottawa (in theory but probably not in practice, but I'll get to that), that comes at the expense of Ottawa-Toronto and Ottawa-Montreal passengers. So two of the three city pairs end up with worse service to make make one of the three slightly better. It hurts the majority to benefit the minority. Not to mention they'd still have exactly the same issues with CP that they currently have with CN, so we'd end up with the same scheduling and reliability problems we have now, and probably worse travel times to Montreal because of that. So in reality this Winchester sub idea would get worse rail service for every route, cost more money to build, and cost more money to operate.

According to Wikipedia, Ottawa station gets more ridership than Montreal Central. 800,000 per year for Ottawa vs 593,000 for Central (those are 2012-2016 numbers). And it's not just train traffic, it's car traffic too. Highway 401 traffic literally drops in half at the 416. Ottawa is critical to the Corridor.

Besides, the proposed HFR will still make Toronto-Montreal trains faster than even the fastest trips today. Every route benefits.

 

[robmausser]

The problem with this way of thinking is that while Toronto-Montreal passengers would have a slight benefit to bypassing Ottawa (in theory but probably not in practice, but I'll get to that), that comes at the expense of Ottawa-Toronto and Ottawa-Montreal passengers. So two of the three city pairs end up with worse service to make make one of the three slightly better. It hurts the majority to benefit the minority. Not to mention they'd still have exactly the same issues with CP that they currently have with CN, so we'd end up with the same scheduling and reliability problems we have now, and probably worse travel times to Montreal because of that. So in reality this Winchester sub idea would get worse rail service for every route, cost more money to build, and cost more money to operate.

According to Wikipedia, Ottawa station gets more ridership than Montreal Central. 800,000 per year for Ottawa vs 593,000 for Central (those are 2012-2016 numbers). And it's not just train traffic, it's car traffic too. Highway 401 traffic literally drops in half at the 416. Ottawa is critical to the Corridor.

Besides, the proposed HFR will still make Toronto-Montreal trains faster than even the fastest trips today. Every route benefits.

Yes and shaving 30-40km really is not going to benefit much compared to the ridership that will happen from stopping at Ottawa.

 

[lenaitch]

One problem with major funding announcements, particularly when it involves procurement and other large capital expenditures, is that Treasury Board tends to include lifetime costs over sometimes decades, such as operating costs, maintenance and inflation, without adequately explaining it, so the media, opponents, the Opposition, etc. see this massive number and it scares the pants off everybody. This is a particular problem with large military acquisitions. It is largely poor communications and marketing. If you and I did that type of accounting, we'd never buy anything.

Get the thing going and fund steady, incremental improvements. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

 

[nfitz]

Besides, the proposed HFR will still make Toronto-Montreal trains faster than even the fastest trips today. Every route benefits.

That's rather an unfair comparison. With only 2 trains a day during the pandemic, the fastest train makes 7 stops in between Montreal and Toronto, taking 5:10 hours. What's the HFR time ... almost 5 hours according to Global. Ominously, VIA seems to have removed that information from their website.

Just before the pandemic VIA was doing Toronto to Montreal in 4:49, and for most of the last 40 years has been hitting 4:30 - and even as fast as 3:59.

I just don't see them achieving 4:30 on the HFR line through Ottawa - let alone beating it, with only $4 billion available - which barely seems enough to put in the single track, some sidings, rebuild the viaduct down the Don, and do the required grade separations.

 

[Allandale25]

^ Just a quick note on the rebuilding of the viaduct/Don piece. There's speculation that HFR may actually use the LSE-Stouffville line to get to the CP Belleville and then Havelock Sub.

 

[kEiThZ]

That's rather an unfair comparison. With only 2 trains a day during the pandemic, the fastest train makes 7 stops in between Montreal and Toronto, taking 5:10 hours. What's the HFR time ... almost 5 hours according to Global. Ominously, VIA seems to have removed that information from their website.

Just before the pandemic VIA was doing Toronto to Montreal in 4:49, and for most of the last 40 years has been hitting 4:30 - and even as fast as 3:59.

I just don't see them achieving 4:30 on the HFR line through Ottawa - let alone beating it, with only $4 billion available - which barely seems enough to put in the single track, some sidings, rebuild the viaduct down the Don, and do the required grade separations.

You seem to have missed the gap between timetable schedule and reality. You also seem to be ignoring how many trains were scheduled in less than 5 hrs or less. And while talking about what has been happening over the last four decades, you also missed the trend here. Slower and slower service.

HFR's actual performance should beat out actual performance pre-Covid. Sure, it may only be by a few minutes. But HFR should basically turn every train into a pre-Covid sub 5 hr express with >90% on-time performance. That is better than anything pre-Covid.

And hopefully after it's built, we can start discussing upgrades that we cut travel times further.

 

[Urban Sky]

I honestly don’t know what the business case for having any Montreal-Toronto Express trains bypass Ottawa via the Winchester Sub is supposed to be, as it would significantly increase capital (25% more route-km to upgrade) and operating costs (94% more train-miles) for an insignificant increase of ridership (3.3%, according to my GJT model)...

Besides, you are totally missing my point. I was trying to say that having completely separate and isolated ROWs for Montreal-Toronto and Ottawa-Toronto (like some people seem to be promoting), is not only expensive, but unnecessary since the shortest possible route for Montreal-Toronto could have branches to Ottawa and Kingston with the bulk of the ROW being shared.

If you go back to my original post, you will see that I said,:

No, you are "totally missing" my point: I'm not saying that there is no economic case to build the Ottawa bypass from the outset, I'm saying that it's not worth building at all.

To explain this, let's look at an actual real-world example of the Bremen Freight Bypass:

Bremen Freight Bypass [...]

When the Hamburg-Venlo railway was built, the Hanseatic city of Bremen (like Hamburg) was still not a member of the German Customs Union (Zollverein); in fact this did not happen until 1888.

In order to be able to transport goods from the Rhenish-Westphalian industrial region to Harburg [Note: Harburg is a suburb of Hamburg] without incurring taxes in the German customs area a treaty-approved goods line was built due east past Bremen which also reduced the journey time considerably because it was almost 13 km [Note: more like 34 km, the bypass itself is just short of 13 km] shorter than the main route which ran in a loop through Bremen state territory.

[...] The shortcut was worked for several years by the Hamburg–Cologne Metropolitan line. Currently an ICE Sprinter pair of trains uses the line to circumvent Bremen Hbf. Tracks pass over the Friedenstunnel in Bremen.

Basically, an 11.7 km long bypass (from Sagehorn to Bremen-Gabelung) avoids a 45.6 km long trip through Bremen (Germany's 11th-largest city and smallest city-State with just over 500k people), thus shaving 33.9 km off the route or 2.9 km for every km bypass built:

Adapted from: DB Netz Register of Inftastructure

Note that out of 21 intercity (IC/EC/ICE) trains running daily between Cologne and Hamburg, only 6 make use of this bypass, whereas 15 trains (i.e. one per hour) use the regular (longer) line to serve Bremen Central Station:

Source: Fernbahn.de

Consequently, the Bypass line is unlikely to be upgraded beyond its current speed limit of 100 km/h (even though the regular line is capable of 120-200 km/h), as even at an assumed average speed of 160 km/h on the regular line (a unrealistically high estimate!), an average speed of 100 km/h on the bypass route would save exactly 10 minutes, whereas even an upgrade to 300 km/h (the fastest speed of any train reached in Germany while in revenue service) would fail to save another 5 minutes):

Note: speed figures highlighted in red means that the average speed required to achieve the desired travel time saving exceeds the average speed assumed for the regular route.

Now, let's look at the Ottawa bypass and assume an average speed of 120 km/h (i.e. roughly the average speed implied by the latest travel times we've seen for HFR) for the segment you want to bypass (i.e. De Beaujeu to Smiths Falls): This time, the regular route is 214 km and the bypass route is 146 km, meaning that the bypass would save 68 km or about 450 meter for every kilometer of Bypass built. Note that the bypass is 12 times longer than the Bremen Freight Bypass, but shaves only twice as much of distance off the route. Note also that upgrading the Winchester subdivision to HFR standards means building new tracks and passing loops, whereas the existing route via Ottawa is already mostly straight and requires very minor upgrades for HFR. Anyways, let's still assume we would build that bypass and chose an average speed so that it saved 30 minutes of travel time (i.e. at 113.8 km/h, see table below), every subsequent upgrade on the Ottawa route would reduce that travel time advantage and would eventually make the whole bypass redundant once the average speed on the "regular route" exceeds 160 km/h (i.e. an increase of only one-third compared to HFR speeds).

Note: as in the last table, the speed figures highlighted in red means that the average speed required to achieve the desired travel time saving exceeds the average speed assumed for the regular route.


In the end, the fact that the incremental costs to upgrade an alignment raise exponentially with the design speed, it is clear that the bypass would never be upgraded to HSR standards and that's the point where even you should realize that it would be a costly mistake to ever build it...

In other words, this would only happen once when demand has increased to a point where HFR is exceeding its capacity and upgrades are needed anyway. The thing about intercity rail is once you have hourly service, increasing frequency beyond that doesn't provide significant benefit, so rather than having 30 minute service through Ottawa, it would make more sense to keep it at the (post HFR) hourly frequency and add hourly express trains from Montreal to Toronto.

This is complete nonsense: the GJT model shows that a decrease in headway from 60 to 30 is equivalent to a reduction of travel time by 13 minutes (i.e. the perceived penalty decreases from 39 to 26 minutes). Therefore, having that second hourly train stop in Ottawa has the same effect to demand for Ottawa-Montreal and Ottawa-Toronto than upgrading the lines to shave off 13 minutes on both sides of Ottawa. This extra demand might not matter for stations like Kingston or Peterborough, but in the case of Ottawa, it would be huge...



I'm always happy to lay down why bypassing Ottawa would be extremely wasteful in terms of capital and operating costs, but I do start to wonder what still remains to be explained...

 

[nfitz]

^ Just a quick note on the rebuilding of the viaduct/Don piece. There's speculation that HFR may actually use the LSE-Stouffville line to get to the CP Belleville and then Havelock Sub.

There was talk of that 2-3 years ago, but with the Ontario Line plans, it reduces the ultimate capacity on the Kingston Sub to only 4 tracks - which GO needs just with the current VIA operations - let alone increased operations.

You seem to have missed the gap between timetable schedule and reality. You also seem to be ignoring how many trains were scheduled in less than 5 hrs or less. And while talking about what has been happening over the last four decades, you also missed the trend here. Slower and slower service.

HFR's actual performance should beat out actual performance pre-Covid. Sure, it may only be by a few minutes. But HFR should basically turn every train into a pre-Covid sub 5 hr express with >90% on-time performance. That is better than anything pre-Covid.

I've certainly taken Montreal to Toronto trains that achieved the 4:30 during that era. And even were close to 3:59 in that era. The theoretical minimum is about 3:45 (though rarely achieved).

If you are going to drop $4 billion you can readily achieve 4.5 ... or better on some runs.

 

[crs1026]

I'm always happy to lay down why bypassing Ottawa would be extremely wasteful in terms of capital and operating costs, but I do start to wonder what still remains to be explained...

Your explanation is quite compelling.

I would come at it from another angle: Suppose we can find whatever amount of capital the incremental Ottawa bypass would rquire, using the CP line as the straw man. Now remember that VIA is planning to also retain the Lakeshore service, with reportedly 12 trains per day west of Brockville and 6 east of there. Now remember that the whole issue with the Lakeshore line is the conflict with CN freight. 12 trains is still a lot of conflict.
I would expect that the business case for spending that available capital on the CN line to assure the performance of that Lakeshore service would exceed the business case for spending the same amount to extract a small gain in travel time on through Montreal-Toronto business.

Relaying the Winchester, at minimum, would be roughly 60 miles of new rail and ties. If the vision is to lay a new line end to end, not encroaching on CP's freight infrastructure, that's an even bigger bit of capital....25 miles of new grading plus the track itself to sidestep the remaining double track sections. All, with a huge presumption that CP will be amenable.

Spend that money on the Kingston line, and, even with a "hub" at Kingston, the performance and marketability of that service would likely deliver equal or better return. Who knows - one might even find that a couple of those 6 local trains would run right through, on a total Montreal-Toronto time as good or better than through Ottawa.

I'm not saying that will ever happen, just making the point about the return on the simplest bypass versus other uses of the money. And there are other things I can think of that would also be better uses.

- Paul

 

[Allandale25]

There was talk of that 2-3 years ago, but with the Ontario Line plans, it reduces the ultimate capacity on the Kingston Sub to only 4 tracks - which GO needs just with the current VIA operations - let alone increased operations.

I've certainly taken Montreal to Toronto trains that achieved the 4:30 during that era. And even were close to 3:59 in that era. The theoretical minimum is about 3:45 (though rarely achieved).

If you are going to drop $4 billion you can readily achieve 4.5 ... or better on some runs.

There's been talk/speculation of it more recently than that, partly because of GO's plan for the Richmond Hill layover on the Don Spur.

 

[ManyQuestions]

I hope that this talk about using CP Winchester tracks was not inspired by my questions about such a routing over the summer. They were purely speculation based on the assumptions that VIA could use the then intact double track to run trains at 160km/h without major upgrades given that the line is straight. Given that such a intact alternative does not already exist, such a bloating of the HFR project clearly does not make sense. It has already been shown on these boards that the main priority of the HFR route design should be minimizing trip times. However, at this point, I am just waiting to see the findings of the engineering report. I hope that it includes provisions for future speed and capacity improvements as demand permits and am very curious about how it plans to address the challenges of connecting the north shore route to Quebec into the Montreal central station.

 

[nfitz]

There's been talk/speculation of it more recently than that, partly because of GO's plan for the Richmond Hill layover on the Don Spur.

Perhaps ... during the consultation for that storage space, Metrolinx was clear that nothing about their plan stops VIAs use of that corridor.

I think what it indicates is that HFR (or HST) is years or decades away, with no serious plans to implement anytime soon. All the other signs point a similar direction, between the years of lack of approval in the budget, the lack of a single word of comment by the current minister, the lack of any recent comments from VIA. She's dead Jim ...

 

[kEiThZ]

I've certainly taken Montreal to Toronto trains that achieved the 4:30 during that era. And even were close to 3:59 in that era. The theoretical minimum is about 3:45 (though rarely achieved).

If you are going to drop $4 billion you can readily achieve 4.5 ... or better on some runs.

Past performance is not indicative of future results. The reality is that freight traffic has increased and the freight trains themselves have gotten longer. If you looked at a Pre-Covid schedule, the average would have been over 5 hrs. I think it was 5:15 hrs or thereabouts. And that was before adding delays.

Also, I don't see why spending more money necessarily must result in a speed increase. The primary goal of HFR is higher frequency and reliability. Speed is a secondary benefit and not applicable to every city pair.

Also this whole thing is supposed to be cost neutral, which makes investing for speed all the more difficult because despite all the talk from rail fans, the return for investment on speed is very poor. Billions required for a pool of passengers restricted to a fraction of current airline passengers.

 

[Allandale25]

Perhaps ... during the consultation for that storage space, Metrolinx was clear that nothing about their plan stops VIAs use of that corridor.

I think what it indicates is that HFR (or HST) is years or decades away, with no serious plans to implement anytime soon. All the other signs point a similar direction, between the years of lack of approval in the budget, the lack of a single word of comment by the current minister, the lack of any recent comments from VIA. She's dead Jim ...

It will be interesting to see what's released given $71 million was spent by the JPO. As discussed here before, a couple of scenarios:

1) The budget funds HFR. To back it up, more documentation on the HFR route is released and public community consultations start. It's my understanding there have already been stakeholder conversations along the corridor. If we use the Ontario Line as an example, Metrolinx hasn't released detailed civil engineering track plans yet but they have released content like this (I picked the most contentious portion but by coincidence the potential OL-GO-HFR via LSE/ST corridor) so it would be nice to see something similar to address some questions/speculation/debates here on alignment choices. Especially because all other HSR proposals generally used the same corridor getting into/out of the City of Toronto but HFR proposes something different - correct me if I'm wrong (cc @crs1026 @smallspy)

2) The budget does not fund HFR and the Minister says while it's a good idea, they won't proceed in the short term. Given we the public provided $71 million, it would be nice for some of the documentation to still be released on the alignment. Maybe to the level of the GO Bolton line report in 2010? PDF here. I get that there could be risks to protecting the corridor/land values/NIMBYism to releasing the corridor material but not proceeding, but I still think it would be worth it and I don't see a major political risk. Even if there is a strong backlash in certain communities or ridings, it's a big corridor.

As fun as it is to see some of the maps posted here by various users (including @reaperexpress), it would be great to see what the JPO decided (or options) or something more specific than the HFR maps available. It would just be helpful to see as much public information posted as possible. AECOM and Aurp are the consultants as noted in January 2020.

 

[kEiThZ]

Your explanation is quite compelling.

I would come at it from another angle: Suppose we can find whatever amount of capital the incremental Ottawa bypass would rquire, using the CP line as the straw man. Now remember that VIA is planning to also retain the Lakeshore service, with reportedly 12 trains per day west of Brockville and 6 east of there. Now remember that the whole issue with the Lakeshore line is the conflict with CN freight. 12 trains is still a lot of conflict.
I would expect that the business case for spending that available capital on the CN line to assure the performance of that Lakeshore service would exceed the business case for spending the same amount to extract a small gain in travel time on through Montreal-Toronto business.

Relaying the Winchester, at minimum, would be roughly 60 miles of new rail and ties. If the vision is to lay a new line end to end, not encroaching on CP's freight infrastructure, that's an even bigger bit of capital....25 miles of new grading plus the track itself to sidestep the remaining double track sections. All, with a huge presumption that CP will be amenable.

Spend that money on the Kingston line, and, even with a "hub" at Kingston, the performance and marketability of that service would likely deliver equal or better return. Who knows - one might even find that a couple of those 6 local trains would run right through, on a total Montreal-Toronto time as good or better than through Ottawa.

I'm not saying that will ever happen, just making the point about the return on the simplest bypass versus other uses of the money. And there are other things I can think of that would also be better uses.

- Paul

So we're back to basically a variant of ViaFast.

I really don't get the obsession people have with trying to brainstorm every single idea to avoid HFR on the proposed routing. Do all railfans think that VIA is so incompetent that none of these ideas have been gamed out internally at all?

We need to recognize that successful passenger rail in the Corridor requires us to build dedicated passenger rail corridors. There is no way around this. Everything else is half measures. It worked for GO. It will work for VIA. Let's get on with building this.