Canada is great at high-speed rail studies — but not at actually building high-speed rail. So why is it the only country in the developed world considering a new conventional-speed passenger network?
Created by Paige Saunders with special guest Reece Martin
Conventional speed it still 200 kph (177 on the last gen locomotives), if you don’t have to wait for freight.
While I’d prefer HSR, I’ll take HFR over fighting between the two and building nothing.
I assume HFR can convert to HSR later?nopeI agree with you but I don’t think you can simply convert. HSR take a lot more engineering and careful planning.
I’m not a rail engineer, but I assume if grades and curves are done for higher speeds off the hop, then the non-earthworks conversion later should be relatively easy?
There can be no crossings. If someone looks both ways and crosses the tracks they can be hit by a train they didn’t see or hear. This means a lot more work than just curves.
Exactly. The line connecting London to Kitchener-Waterloo, two cities of a half-million people, spends most of its length doing 50-60km/h because of the lousy rail lines that have been largely un maintained for forty years. What should be a 45 minute ride ends up being over two hours. We can get so much improvement to our system by just fixing the shit we already have, or had fifty years ago.
It’s more complicated, and the Kitchener to London route is a good example with which I’m familiar.
I used to take this route a lot in the mid-Aughts and I think it was roughly 45-60 minutes. I moved back to the area ~5 years ago and was flabbergasted when I found out how long it takes now. I thought, “the government should fix this!” However, when you dig into it more, you find out CN owns that route and they’ve made the calculation that upkeep is more expensive to them than slow trains. Sure, “the government” could pay CN to fix the rails, but I don’t think we want CN getting tax dollars, and even then, back when it was reasonably fast, you’d often experience huge delays because of freight.
Rumours are, GO has been eyeing that section of track and if they buy, they’ll obviously fix it up. However, this whole thing demonstrates how important it is to have designated passenger train tracks. And if you’re building dedicated tracks between two of the biggest cities in North America, it’s probably worth investing the extra money in HSR.
I don’t see why we should go for HSR when we haven’t even gotten close to the top speeds of our existing rolling stock, let alone the cutoff for “low speed” rail at around 200 km/h.
If VIA trains actually maintained that across the whole Windsor-Quebec City corridor I think you could satisfy the majority of people without needing the huge investment that true HSR requires.
For ViaRail to maintain max speed across The Corridor, they would have to rebuild most of it, which outside of those 2 Class 5 sections, they don’t own. If you’re building new tracks anyways, it might be worth building HSR.
That assumption is not a good one. The video highlights that both competing proposals, which include Siemen’s conventional “high frequency” option and Alstrom’s high speed rail option, are set to build new track through the Canadian shield in the area around Peterborough which would slow down speeds significantly. There’s too much geography navigate around on this proposed route for HSR. Instead the video hosts suggest using the existing freight lines beside Lake Ontario and extending GO service to Peterborough which has much more potential for HSR.
We don’t even have classifications for 200kmh rail yet and only 2 small sections in Canada are Class 5 (160km/h). The rest is lower class.
Paige points out in the video that you can’t just trivially convert curvy conventional rail to high speed. He also points towards, without explicitly saying, that with the projected winding route, trains will spend a lot of time at slower than max conventional speeds.