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The internet???
High Speed Train Coming?-split from boosting Canada’s military spending"
- Thread starter Czech_pivo
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At the rate this thread is going, should be up to about 600 pages by the time Phase 1 is scheduled to open . Lol
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600 pages of appeals to emotion.
Yay.
I'll leave @ytz to it, this thread stopped being interesting a long time ago.
Halifax Tar
Army.ca Legend
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Now that looks closer to a Nation project.
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Was that VIA or was the CP/CN passenger trains?
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It is, apparently , a VIA Rail map from 1979.
What Canadian passenger rail looked like in 1955
What Canadian passenger rail looked like in 1955
An interactive map depicting intercity rail services in Ontario and Quebec in 1955
seanmarshall.ca
and now even the buses are gone for the most part so the only option is PMV. Some of that network could and should be re-built. I remember the Turbo. When it worked speeds of 100mph were easily attainable but there were too many unguarded crossings on the CN mainline. 3&1/2 hours if I remember correctly which is still better than air travel from downtown to downtown. It was the freight trains that caused most of the delays as they got priority as they were far more profitable. A dedicated line and proper crossing gates would have provided a reliable service. They were extremely comfortable too: best ride in NA. I even remember catching the sleeper from Toronto to Montreal. Leave late at night and arrive downtown in time for start of business. It was designed to be slow.It is, apparently , a VIA Rail map from 1979.
What Canadian passenger rail looked like in 1955
What Canadian passenger rail looked like in 1955
An interactive map depicting intercity rail services in Ontario and Quebec in 1955
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A grandfather worked for CP and I remember being a young kid riding on some cp passenger train from Windsor up to London in the late 70’s or 1980.It is, apparently , a VIA Rail map from 1979.
What Canadian passenger rail looked like in 1955
What Canadian passenger rail looked like in 1955
An interactive map depicting intercity rail services in Ontario and Quebec in 1955
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My father was a CNR / VIA Rail locomotive engineer. He took me on the Turbo, and everything else they operated.
Even made sure I got to ride in a steam locomotive just before they retired the last one. That was my most terrifying childhood memory. < smile emoji
Glad he he saw it at it's best when got out of the navy in 1946. His father got him on.
But, by the time he retired in 1991, Canada's greatest passenger rail years were long gone.
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Mine was the Yardmaster down in Windsor. My younger brother and I would walk over to visit him at work when we were like 11 and 9, we lived about 4-5 blocks from the yard. He would take us into the engines used to ‘shunt’ the freight cars back and forth in the yard to build up the trains going to Detroit or leaving from Windsor to the rest of Canada. My brother and I used to also walk up and down the tracks with buckets picking up the coal that would sometimes fall from the coal cars and sell it to neighbours for a 1$ a bucket to use in their fireplaces in the winter.
honeymoon trip to Vancouver via CP, bedroom and all. Food was excellent, service superb and the scenery both north of Superior and through the Rockies. You wouldn't want HS on either route; too much to see. But both routes are gone I think. Didn't the viaducts past Banff burn a couple of years back.
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VIA was established in 1977 so that network was pretty much 'as received' from CN and CP. A number of those routes don't have rail anymore. They couldn't make money carrying freight. I doubt the taxpayers would be happy subsidizing trains will little to no passengers. A poster on another forum rode the Sudbury -White River VIA and the crew told him the winter passenger load is typically between 0 and 10.It is, apparently , a VIA Rail map from 1979.
What Canadian passenger rail looked like in 1955
What Canadian passenger rail looked like in 1955
An interactive map depicting intercity rail services in Ontario and Quebec in 1955
VIA moved Canadian from CP to CN track in 1990 for a number of reasons. The CP mainline still exists to Vancouver but no passenger service outside of the Rocky Mountaineer. The only bridge I recall burning were on the Kettle Valley tourist train/train in southern BC.
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I book a sleeper to Edmonton to visit my mother, and fly back. She still mentions her honeymoon train trip to New Orleans.
I'm in no hurry to get anywhere.
Readers of Humoresque may remember this line,
Cool. Where were you guys when Mulroney gutted VIA in the 80s and when Chretien did the same in the 90s?
There's no going back now.
Especially as people have become more habituated to flying for anything more than 500 km. Which is exactly why HSR is being pushed. Competitive with air travel door to door under 500 km which is incidentally where Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal are. Ditto Montreal, Ottawa and Quebec City.
There's no going back now.
Especially as people have become more habituated to flying for anything more than 500 km. Which is exactly why HSR is being pushed. Competitive with air travel door to door under 500 km which is incidentally where Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal are. Ditto Montreal, Ottawa and Quebec City.
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Can't you tell from our posts: we were on the trains.
It was the lack of priority that did them in, not the speed and many of the routes were cancelled because CN and CP were closing down the lines for freight as well, cutting back on all the low profit routes and divesting property to eliminate tons of municipal taxes. Places like Orangeville thought that the railways were cash cows and charged for every foot of right of way going through the municipalities. And there is lots of room to go back if they set the priority on building a proper rail centred network for short haul. Look at the work that has been done around Kitchener with more planned. They ripped up the rails decades ago but they are going back in.Take every city and draw a 60 mile circle. Most of those folks employment or entertainment is focused on the centre of that circle and many of them spend an hour or more travelling each way 5 days a week. Many, like me, have given up on the city entirely because it isn't worth the hassle any more. There is your market and there is where you need the 90 billion dollars spent. Look at Paris, Brussels, Rome, Frankfurt and count the number of short line runs feeding into the city centre. Definitely we need to re-build the longer routes but HSR is simply wasting money for an elite few. There are what, 10 million people in the Golden Horseshoe. Ottawa airport had 3 million domestic passengers to all destinations in 2024. Assuming that even a third of them were in or out of Toronto that is maybe 500,000 total passengers each way, assuming again that they are both coming and going. So we are going to spend all that money to accommodate 5% of the population who may or may not decide on the train whilst 95% queue up on the 401 and other roads. It isn't logical especially since the people that you are saying will flock to the HSR have to get into downtown Toronto or out to the station in Ottawa to catch the train in the first place. You need to build the slower less flashy infrastructure first.
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