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VIA Rail

Urban Sky said:
Canada will regret if it continues trying to achieve HSR while skipping the creation of a frequent and semi-fast intercity rail network, which was the very foundation on which HSR was built on in every single HSR nation, save Saudi-Arabia and Uzbekistan...
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Sure. But even the HFR proposal, as per the rumours we've had, doesn't seem robust. It seems to literally be the most barebones possible. Which, if we're not getting HSR for several decades seems sad. I get the fear of scope creep. But surely there is some middle ground where they can do CAIV Analysis to invest towards a more optimal system.
 
jelbana said:
You do realize Marc Garneau has been the minister of transport for nearly 5 years in a government with majority power?
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This is what really pisses me off. They found billions for social spending but couldn't fit in the $70M for the JPO before 2019?

Times like these I can understand why people vote conservative......
 
Urban Sky said:
MPs are not transport infrastructure planners and they can only fund projects which are presented to them. You can fault them for many things, but not for the self-defeating delusion behind every single passenger rail investment project in this country (except, of course, VIAFast, which was surely an inspiration for HFR), which in their hubris treated conventional (i.e. non-HSR) intercity rail service as obsolete rather than the pre-requisite for HSR. It is those people who decry the lack of HSR the loudest (honorary mention goes to Paul Langan), who are the most guilty that four decades of talking about HSR have not resulted in any tangible progress towards that vision...

PS: now that I think of it, the emergence of HSR proposals in the mid 1980s and their promise to replace rather than augment the conventional passenger rail network (the same narrative used by those people who promote Gadgetbahnen like Maglevs, Monorails or Hyperloops) certainly contributed to the momentum which Mulroney exploited for the January 1990 cuts, meaning that, if anything, the pro-HSR groups have had a negative effect on the quantity and quality of passenger rail service in this country...
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Well said. Nearly every country that has an operational HSR network today also had/still has an operational, frequent higher-speed intercity rail system before they introduced true HSR. Even China, where people tend to think that HSR lines were simply built out of thin air, started by significantly investing in and improving their conventional intercity passenger rail network from the early-90s to 2008 - decades before building its first HSR line using imported rolling stock (a ~117 km test line between Beijing and Tianjin which was completed for the 2008 Olympics). I remember traveling within China in the mid to late 1990s and then early 2000s, when the Chinese state railway operator gradually phased in electrification (which took well over a decade), and along with that gradual increases in frequency and speed of its intercity trains (officially there were 6 "speed upgrades" over a duration of 12+ years in the late 90s to mid 2000s throughout the conventional intercity network which incrementally cut travel time).

VIA's HFR project is absolutely the right and necessary prerequisite for the future of passenger rail in Canada.
 
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nfitz said:
What am I missing?
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Since 2016, South Korea’s KTX high speed trains have been dealing with a zombie outbreak.

Very bad for business.
 
jelbana said:
No one is against incremental upgrades, but rather the pace and goals. Are we actually going to end up with HFR within 5-10 years? Where does that put us for HSR, 20-30 years? Both need to be addressed jointly and it needs to be absolutely clear that this will set us up for upgrading to HSR the second HFR is completed. I'm not left with much confidence given the pace and objectives we've seen/heard so far. Only in Canada is it politically acceptable to allow the most obviously needed projects to be delayed and re-studied by each and every election cycle.
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No it doesn't, and that's not how it works in public sector / federal procurement process. At the moment, the focus should be getting HFR EA and technical planning completed by the JPO, and have it ready to be approved and fully funded by the Spring 2021 budget, along with a confirmation of the detailed technical scope, implementation phases/timeline, and detailed project costing. As someone who has worked on past public sector projects, I believe the JPO is already working as best as they can within the constraints of the system, funding, and current level of political commitment. You want to talk about HSR - by all means feel free to shout about it on social media. But that is absolutely outside the scope of the current HFR project.
 
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jelbana said:
Right, thanks for clearing up what a public procurement process is. I had no idea that all that mattered was preparing the EA and that no input whatsoever comes from politicians in defining project goals or the willingness to actually commit funding. If this current project's objective is to deliver HFR while keeping travel times between Montreal-Toronto almost the same for a cost of $5B without clearly specifying how this line can eventually be upgraded to HSR, than we are just wasting our time. Spending $5B now only to learn at a future date that the cost for HSR is absurdly high and could have been avoided if we had thought about how to build a line that can be upgraded to HSR from the get-go is incredibly short-sighted.
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Why are so many people obsessed with the Montreal-Toronto travel times? I don't know about the actual number of passengers but before COVID VIA was only running 6 trains a day between Montreal and Toronto but 10 trains a day between Ottawa and Toronto, so assuming the trains are the same size and equally full, that means Ottawa-Toronto had close to double the passenger volume (1⅔ times to be exact). The travel time on that route will drop from approximately 4 hours and 30 minutes to as low as 3 hours and 15 minutes. Montreal-Ottawa also had 6 trains a day (though I believe the trains were shorter), so that route also had significant traffic and its travel time will drop from 1:58 to 1:33.

There is also something to be said about the frequency of the service. Going from 6 to 15 trains a day means you will have to wait significantly less time for a train.
 
roger1818 said:
Why are so many people obsessed with the Montreal-Toronto travel times? I don't know about the actual number of passengers but before COVID VIA was only running 6 trains a day between Montreal and Toronto but 10 trains a day between Ottawa and Toronto, so assuming the trains are the same size and equally full, that means Ottawa-Toronto had close to double the passenger volume (1⅔ times to be exact). The travel time on that route will drop from approximately 4 hours and 30 minutes to as low as 3 hours and 15 minutes. Montreal-Ottawa also had 6 trains a day (though I believe the trains were shorter), so that route also had significant traffic and its travel time will drop from 1:58 to 1:33.
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It's natural to wonder about a connection between the first and second largest cities in Canada. Also, the rail demand is low because the service sucks (relatively). It's not all that competitive with a car and costs a ton. Compare air and bus travel between Toronto-Ottawa and Toronto-Montreal and you'll get a very different picture of demand. VIA does well on Toronto-Ottawa because a fifth of the trip is on track that VIA owns.

Will be interesting to see how much a higher frequency and marginally shorter travel time (4:45 vs 5:04 average today) will improve demand on the Toronto-Montreal segment.

roger1818 said:
There is also something to be said about the frequency of the service. Going from 6 to 15 trains a day means you will have to wait significantly less time for a train.
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Yes. That is what the "F" in HFR stands for.
 
roger1818 said:
Why are so many people obsessed with the Montreal-Toronto travel times?
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Population of Ottawa : 812,000
Population of Montreal : 1,600,000

It may not be an apples to apples comparison, but which end point would seem to have more market potential for a train service from Toronto?

What’s wrong with wanting the trip to Montreal to be as marketable as the Ottawa service?

- Paul
 
Do you know how much of the planning/design discussion that is being talked about here is being done by VIA vs by their contractors? I suppose it's pretty much all handled by Arup/AECOM and therefore has only been ongoing for about a year, right? Would their deliverables be an entire set of plans from which the line could be built if funded in the next budget?
 
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