All VIA Rail trains currently using Central Station have to back in or back out using the wye that takes them over the Victoria Bridge to the South Shore, or else they have to be turned somehow, as I think the Ocean to Halifax does (as if that train actually matters anymore.) Central Station was designed as a stub terminal and it worked because all trains started and ended in Montreal, the centre of the universe. Going from Toronto or Ottawa to Quebec City, Halifax, or the U.S. you changed trains in Montreal, sometimes just across the platform. Same was true when CN and CP ran their passenger trains. Part of this is constrained by Montreal being an island. A stub meant building only one rail bridge and yard throat, not two. So imagining through service from Ottawa to Quebec City means redesigning Montreal as a waypoint, not as a terminus. Someday it will be a bettrave, but that's for another day. Toronto is a through station with two long throats. Most GO Trains on the two Lakeshore Lines don't reverse in Union but run straight through from Hamilton to Oshawa and back. Rush hour trains often do reverse and of course they reverse on the other lines to places like Kitchener and Unionville and Barrie because of the way the tracks were laid nearly 200 years ago.
Ottawa's downtown Union Station used to be a through station, because the Montreal sections of both CPR and CNR's transcontinental trains after splitting in Sudbury/Capreol ran through Ottawa on the way to their termination in Montreal. But the tracks running east from the old Ottawa station crossing the Rideau River along the Ottawa River out through Vanier are long gone.
Shoehorning HSR into built environments where tracks have been converted to bike paths is going to be wildly expensive.
Worth remembering that most Chinese HSR stations are not in the urban core, but over time have developed entirely new urban cores of their own. One might argue the best locations for Alto would actually be somewhere like YZD in Toronto. Connected to metropolitan transport, cheaper to build and part of North America's largest brownfield urban development.
It's quite possible that having a central station can be ideal, but given the cost and engineering challenges, the opposite of a good idea can be an equally good or perhaps even better idea.
I deliberately let the Chinese experience out because the conditions are so unlike. Yes, Chinese HSR stations become new cities; but then the Chinese are *building new cities*, an ambition utterly beyond Canadians today
Are they unlike though? I'd argue Toronto in many ways can take more of the form of a rapidly growing Asian city, than a culturally conservative European one. But then even Amsterdam does stuff like the regeneration of Amsterdam Zuid into something more like a net new hub.
Toronto is nothing like an Asian city. Asian cities are, for the most part, full of Asians. Toronto is a globalists wet dream of competing cultures and races - there is no defining culture and therefore no real coherent vision and therefore easily ruled over. Even the architecture is boring with the exception of Casa Loma which has unfortunately been turned into a yearly cheesy theme park during the holidays.
This is a very lame take. And Toronto’s diversity actually makes it possible to look at what works elsewhere and then work out how to apply it to the context.
I agree the architecture could be more interesting, but there are still modern gems like the ROM extension and OCAD. Toronto also has clever things like the Bentway that deserve more recognition.
And I say this as someone who thinks Toronto plays to less than the sum of its parts.
Also worth remembering that China has WAY more aerable land than we do. Try growing anything north of Ottawa that is NOT in a greenhouse and let me know how that goes. We can't all just eat corn and short season wheat. The number of frost free days and solar days is important. 90% of people in Canada live in the southern, most valuable part because that is the part where we grow our food and happens to be the most comfortable to live. Everywhere else is akin to living in the arctic circle. We shouldn't be building a fenced rail line that will effectively destroy wildlife corridors, wetlands, watersheds and habitat just so some well to do business people can type on their laptops and make calls with their $1700 iPhone's and say they were able to have a Starbucks coffee in both Toronto and Montreal that same morning. The rest of us 90% poor schmucks take vacation once a year and trust me, we ain't going to visit Quebec - it's going to be the Gulf of Mexico. I think people forget that you still have to rent a car and rent a hotel when you get there, despite getting there 50% faster. I used to ride the subway and transit every day. Most people I know sure's hell ain't going to be riding public transit when they visit Quebec, that's for sure, no matter how good it is. This entire project is stupid to begin with, highly favoring tourists, weekend warriors, and business people that decide they want to have a meeting in another province when a zoom call can suffice.
You realize how comparatively little land a railway requires yeah? And you know how China is exceptionally mountainous too right? Building a railway is not going to destroy Canada’s food security.
Nor is this thing being built for tourism. The reasons people use transport infrastructure when it is built are significant. And in a world where people are craving inperson connection, we’ve learned doing all meetings by video call doesn’t cut it.
As per the completely full and delayed VIA service I took from Toronto to Montreal last night. You will struggle to find a much more diverse crowd of people travelling between the two cities for a whole host of different reasons, business or lifestyle related.
I don't see YZD figuring. The Ottawa-Toronto segment will never be built. This project is all about providing a cozy convenient connection between Ottawa and Québec City as I snarkily proposed the other day. The segment between Havelock and Smith's Falls is on the granite of the Frontenac Axis. Many curves on the old abandoned CPR route -- they used to operate night passenger trains between Toronto and Ottawa on that route in steam days because there were no stops to wake passengers up -- will have to be straightened and leveled for HSR and that means cutting through the rock. (The existing CN and CP main lines along Lake Ontario/St. Lawrence River encounter granite only at Gananoque, and they have curves which are OK for slow freights.)
The political purposes of the project will be served by ignoring Toronto altogether and providing an unnecessary (because poorly patronized) link to Québec. The pure-laine francophones don't wan no steenkin' Asian city sitting at the end of their private Toonerville Trolley like a carbuncle, making it so costly to build that fares on their French section will have to be more expensive.
Well if they build the rail on concrete pillars that would solve many problems like keeping the wildlife corridor open and allowing free flow of water to prevent flooding. Failing that, the FENCED rail on the ground is going to divide Eastern Ontario into a northern and southern part, which is catastrophic both socially and environmentally. The entire area is one giant water filter that cleans the water before entering the Great Lakes. Nobody higher up seems to care both about the environmental impact and the impact this will have on 100's of families having to relocate.
Great analysis, but only adds to my concerns that this will be one of the most financially costly mistakes in Canadian history.
On Ottawa: LRT is a disaster, so no one's getting on that to take HSR to Toronto. It's a huge time suck (think 1.5 hours from the southern suburbs) and if you take LRT from the suburbs of Ottawa to Union or Tremblay for Montreal HSR, you could drive most of the way to Montreal by the time you set foot on HSR.
Union is out as an HSR station given the time and expense of tunnelling on top of the reversing issue but Tremblay has almost no parking. Fallowfield Station is a possibility, and skipping Tremblay and any tunnelling by going east on the surface through the greenbelt. But I'll say that Via from Fallowfield to Montreal is very easy, with parking and a short trip with no delays compared to going to Toronto - HSR really doesn't offer any advantage and will ge hugely expensive (Via's not quite cheap though).
On a sidenote, your imaginary picture of a train station with nothing but fields around it, not even a barn, is a reality in Ottawa called LRT Bowesville Station. It's like Field of Dreams for corrupt city planners and developers. Lots of parking though.
Last I checked California HSR was at C$200B for similar length. They need to stop low-balling this at $60-$90B and explain how the capital costs will affect ticket prices and subsidies to compete with private airlines.
Well, since the economic benefit is likely to be negative,....
Here is the likely non-economic benefit:
Separatist politicians from Quebec City can take the train to visit their confederates in Ottawa, spend the day hob-nobbing and conspiring against the Canadian taxpayers who built this thing, knock off at 5, stop off in Montreal for steaks and strippers and still be home to their own old ladies in Quebec, hug 'em up and kiss their babies, crawl in bed to tell 'em it's so good to be back home again.......to quote an old Shel Silverstein song, "Mendocino Desperados".
They are already talking about cost cutting which translates to, "to hell with the wetlands, watersheds, wildlife corridors and the farmers, we gotta build this cheap".
Meanwhile in Japan, they build much of the rail on CONCRETE PILLARS to minimize land acquisition and wildlife disturbance. Canada is an ass backward country and you can't fix stupid. Read:
Safety and Grade Separation: The Shinkansen is completely separated from roads and conventional rail, with massive sections elevated on concrete bridges, especially in dense urban areas, reducing noise, traffic disruption, and land acquisition.
The next one they are building in Japan will be mostly UNDERGROUND. I rest my case. Meanwhile in Canada, "let's just plow through a bunch of fields and tell the people and the environment to f-off with bill C-15"
We’ve learned from the UK that burying a high speed train under the countryside is mindbogglingly expensive. And it’s likely much of the Canadian one will be built elevated. I was having this conversation with people responsible for the Rouge yesterday.
Reminder that most rail projects that actually get built blow their cost benefit analyses out of the water because we are so bad at quantifying what we cannot imagine.
Now imagine if the people doing cost benefit analyses had to do cost benefit analyses on their own work.
All VIA Rail trains currently using Central Station have to back in or back out using the wye that takes them over the Victoria Bridge to the South Shore, or else they have to be turned somehow, as I think the Ocean to Halifax does (as if that train actually matters anymore.) Central Station was designed as a stub terminal and it worked because all trains started and ended in Montreal, the centre of the universe. Going from Toronto or Ottawa to Quebec City, Halifax, or the U.S. you changed trains in Montreal, sometimes just across the platform. Same was true when CN and CP ran their passenger trains. Part of this is constrained by Montreal being an island. A stub meant building only one rail bridge and yard throat, not two. So imagining through service from Ottawa to Quebec City means redesigning Montreal as a waypoint, not as a terminus. Someday it will be a bettrave, but that's for another day. Toronto is a through station with two long throats. Most GO Trains on the two Lakeshore Lines don't reverse in Union but run straight through from Hamilton to Oshawa and back. Rush hour trains often do reverse and of course they reverse on the other lines to places like Kitchener and Unionville and Barrie because of the way the tracks were laid nearly 200 years ago.
Ottawa's downtown Union Station used to be a through station, because the Montreal sections of both CPR and CNR's transcontinental trains after splitting in Sudbury/Capreol ran through Ottawa on the way to their termination in Montreal. But the tracks running east from the old Ottawa station crossing the Rideau River along the Ottawa River out through Vanier are long gone.
Shoehorning HSR into built environments where tracks have been converted to bike paths is going to be wildly expensive.
Worth remembering that most Chinese HSR stations are not in the urban core, but over time have developed entirely new urban cores of their own. One might argue the best locations for Alto would actually be somewhere like YZD in Toronto. Connected to metropolitan transport, cheaper to build and part of North America's largest brownfield urban development.
It's quite possible that having a central station can be ideal, but given the cost and engineering challenges, the opposite of a good idea can be an equally good or perhaps even better idea.
I deliberately let the Chinese experience out because the conditions are so unlike. Yes, Chinese HSR stations become new cities; but then the Chinese are *building new cities*, an ambition utterly beyond Canadians today
Are they unlike though? I'd argue Toronto in many ways can take more of the form of a rapidly growing Asian city, than a culturally conservative European one. But then even Amsterdam does stuff like the regeneration of Amsterdam Zuid into something more like a net new hub.
Toronto is nothing like an Asian city. Asian cities are, for the most part, full of Asians. Toronto is a globalists wet dream of competing cultures and races - there is no defining culture and therefore no real coherent vision and therefore easily ruled over. Even the architecture is boring with the exception of Casa Loma which has unfortunately been turned into a yearly cheesy theme park during the holidays.
This is a very lame take. And Toronto’s diversity actually makes it possible to look at what works elsewhere and then work out how to apply it to the context.
I agree the architecture could be more interesting, but there are still modern gems like the ROM extension and OCAD. Toronto also has clever things like the Bentway that deserve more recognition.
And I say this as someone who thinks Toronto plays to less than the sum of its parts.
Also worth remembering that China has WAY more aerable land than we do. Try growing anything north of Ottawa that is NOT in a greenhouse and let me know how that goes. We can't all just eat corn and short season wheat. The number of frost free days and solar days is important. 90% of people in Canada live in the southern, most valuable part because that is the part where we grow our food and happens to be the most comfortable to live. Everywhere else is akin to living in the arctic circle. We shouldn't be building a fenced rail line that will effectively destroy wildlife corridors, wetlands, watersheds and habitat just so some well to do business people can type on their laptops and make calls with their $1700 iPhone's and say they were able to have a Starbucks coffee in both Toronto and Montreal that same morning. The rest of us 90% poor schmucks take vacation once a year and trust me, we ain't going to visit Quebec - it's going to be the Gulf of Mexico. I think people forget that you still have to rent a car and rent a hotel when you get there, despite getting there 50% faster. I used to ride the subway and transit every day. Most people I know sure's hell ain't going to be riding public transit when they visit Quebec, that's for sure, no matter how good it is. This entire project is stupid to begin with, highly favoring tourists, weekend warriors, and business people that decide they want to have a meeting in another province when a zoom call can suffice.
You realize how comparatively little land a railway requires yeah? And you know how China is exceptionally mountainous too right? Building a railway is not going to destroy Canada’s food security.
Nor is this thing being built for tourism. The reasons people use transport infrastructure when it is built are significant. And in a world where people are craving inperson connection, we’ve learned doing all meetings by video call doesn’t cut it.
As per the completely full and delayed VIA service I took from Toronto to Montreal last night. You will struggle to find a much more diverse crowd of people travelling between the two cities for a whole host of different reasons, business or lifestyle related.
I don't see YZD figuring. The Ottawa-Toronto segment will never be built. This project is all about providing a cozy convenient connection between Ottawa and Québec City as I snarkily proposed the other day. The segment between Havelock and Smith's Falls is on the granite of the Frontenac Axis. Many curves on the old abandoned CPR route -- they used to operate night passenger trains between Toronto and Ottawa on that route in steam days because there were no stops to wake passengers up -- will have to be straightened and leveled for HSR and that means cutting through the rock. (The existing CN and CP main lines along Lake Ontario/St. Lawrence River encounter granite only at Gananoque, and they have curves which are OK for slow freights.)
The political purposes of the project will be served by ignoring Toronto altogether and providing an unnecessary (because poorly patronized) link to Québec. The pure-laine francophones don't wan no steenkin' Asian city sitting at the end of their private Toonerville Trolley like a carbuncle, making it so costly to build that fares on their French section will have to be more expensive.
Well if they build the rail on concrete pillars that would solve many problems like keeping the wildlife corridor open and allowing free flow of water to prevent flooding. Failing that, the FENCED rail on the ground is going to divide Eastern Ontario into a northern and southern part, which is catastrophic both socially and environmentally. The entire area is one giant water filter that cleans the water before entering the Great Lakes. Nobody higher up seems to care both about the environmental impact and the impact this will have on 100's of families having to relocate.
Great analysis, but only adds to my concerns that this will be one of the most financially costly mistakes in Canadian history.
On Ottawa: LRT is a disaster, so no one's getting on that to take HSR to Toronto. It's a huge time suck (think 1.5 hours from the southern suburbs) and if you take LRT from the suburbs of Ottawa to Union or Tremblay for Montreal HSR, you could drive most of the way to Montreal by the time you set foot on HSR.
Union is out as an HSR station given the time and expense of tunnelling on top of the reversing issue but Tremblay has almost no parking. Fallowfield Station is a possibility, and skipping Tremblay and any tunnelling by going east on the surface through the greenbelt. But I'll say that Via from Fallowfield to Montreal is very easy, with parking and a short trip with no delays compared to going to Toronto - HSR really doesn't offer any advantage and will ge hugely expensive (Via's not quite cheap though).
On a sidenote, your imaginary picture of a train station with nothing but fields around it, not even a barn, is a reality in Ottawa called LRT Bowesville Station. It's like Field of Dreams for corrupt city planners and developers. Lots of parking though.
Last I checked California HSR was at C$200B for similar length. They need to stop low-balling this at $60-$90B and explain how the capital costs will affect ticket prices and subsidies to compete with private airlines.
Has anyone produced a cost/benefit analysis of this?
Well, since the economic benefit is likely to be negative,....
Here is the likely non-economic benefit:
Separatist politicians from Quebec City can take the train to visit their confederates in Ottawa, spend the day hob-nobbing and conspiring against the Canadian taxpayers who built this thing, knock off at 5, stop off in Montreal for steaks and strippers and still be home to their own old ladies in Quebec, hug 'em up and kiss their babies, crawl in bed to tell 'em it's so good to be back home again.......to quote an old Shel Silverstein song, "Mendocino Desperados".
Is that how every other high speed railway in the world works?
They are already talking about cost cutting which translates to, "to hell with the wetlands, watersheds, wildlife corridors and the farmers, we gotta build this cheap".
Meanwhile in Japan, they build much of the rail on CONCRETE PILLARS to minimize land acquisition and wildlife disturbance. Canada is an ass backward country and you can't fix stupid. Read:
Safety and Grade Separation: The Shinkansen is completely separated from roads and conventional rail, with massive sections elevated on concrete bridges, especially in dense urban areas, reducing noise, traffic disruption, and land acquisition.
The next one they are building in Japan will be mostly UNDERGROUND. I rest my case. Meanwhile in Canada, "let's just plow through a bunch of fields and tell the people and the environment to f-off with bill C-15"
We’ve learned from the UK that burying a high speed train under the countryside is mindbogglingly expensive. And it’s likely much of the Canadian one will be built elevated. I was having this conversation with people responsible for the Rouge yesterday.
Reminder that most rail projects that actually get built blow their cost benefit analyses out of the water because we are so bad at quantifying what we cannot imagine.
Now imagine if the people doing cost benefit analyses had to do cost benefit analyses on their own work.