Agreed, in my Alberta example, perhaps the terminus of HSR should be each international airport, with light rail getting you to city centre (Edmonton is now only a few kms short of their airport with light rail).
reason.com
why Quebec city at all, other than politics? Toronto- London makes more sense and is more heavily travelled, also easier to build, and yes fishbone, no Windsor for the same reason that Quebec shouldn't be included. Take a good look at the capacity of the planes that the airlines have on the route. Air Canada runs A321 so approximately 200 per flight and 3 direct flights a day. That is only 600 people so not much of a client base.
Sure, for someone wanting to go from Toronto to Montreal. A better comparison for what we need would be Namur to Ostend in Belgium or maybe London to Southampton. Not enough distance for a true high speed but lots of people who want to travel within that corridor and not from end to end. According to legend, The automobile got rid of interurban train travel in NA. Now, in order to supplant the car, we need to provide alternatives that duplicate an average person's travels. As mentioned above, I do Oakville to Trenton. A secondary trip is Oakville Fergus which has no connections. I get to Ottawa once every couple of years and I have been to Quebec perhaps 6 times in a 50 year span: I suspect I am an average driver. I actually like VIA to Quebec: I have used it 3 of those times. VIA one service is superb. I tried to book Concord to England once just to say I had before it faded into history but it was fully booked when I was able to go. I suspect that I would book the HSR once for the same reason. On the other hand, I would be on VIA to Trenton every couple of months if it was available.
That's the beauty of rail, walk on, walk off right downtown. Flying is a major pain in the dick.
Unless you have a CATSA kink. Which, statistically, a few people out there do.
I'd rather snort a line of razor blades than fly through Pearson lol.
I find Halifax somehow manages to be worse...
You don’t do 300kph on those tracks, even in Europe.
They pull into town like any other train. Once they leave the controlled zone, they open the throttle and fly.
Through the downtown core? Obviously not. But that’s also not what they do elsewhere. That’s why I contextualized it as ducking off the dedicated high speed route onto the main passenger lines to access the city core, which would obviously be at a much lesser speed. True high speed would be for the intercity stretches which make up most of the route. Sorta like how a 777 doesn’t land at cruising speed.
The gauge is the exact same but the track design is completely different.
That was my point. It's not safe. I was just using trudeau's numbers.
Yes, understood. Again I'm not talking about high speed within the cities. You being the SME on the board for this, would it be at all viable to build dedicated high speed intercity trackage for everything outside of the cities' cores, but for the trains to merge onto existing main line (maybe with some refurbishment), obvious at lower speeds, for the purpose of accessing existing stations, or something built in close proximity to them? Could existing trackage, or at least the rights of way, be leveraged to any degree to facilitate this, understanding that that won't be high speed for those parts?
That's how it works in Italy. Freight, commuter and HSR share urban trackage.
The subject of my post was the condition of the existing tracks.
