If you're going to be a credible alternative to driving, you need to have enough trains that someone can just decide to take one without planning their whole day around it. So this sounds like really encouraging news to me.
Exactly. What makes the Shinkansen so successful actually isn’t the speed (or at least not the speed alone), it’s the frequency. One daily HSR departure may as well not exist because it wouldn’t be convenient.
The Tokyo to Osaka line would be the same idea as this line and one of the huge advantages that it is has is all the scheduled trips. They as well have a normal that stops at every station, express that is less stops and the super express that is only a couple of stops. For this line we need to make sure that it is designed that the trains could bypass stations for a type of express service. Could be something like Toronto to Montreal with no stops as a super express. You get on and no worries on when to get off.
The next huge thing will be to keep the price low, you want to to be cheaper then flights.
It could even be roughly the same price as a flight; there's an inherent advantage in having no real luggage limitations and being able to transit from downtown core to downtown core without even needing to think about a taxi or additional public transit connections. Personally, I'd be very excited to be able to decide "the day of" that I'm going to Toronto to catch a Jays game or something of the like.
Your typical flight from Ottawa to Toronto is still like $350 dollars. Conversely I can hop on a train from Florence to Rome for like $15 bucks. I’d hope there’s a happy medium somewhere between those price points.
Yeah. When I was in the Netherlands back in September, I didn't look at train schedules. I just showed up and was able to get on one pretty quickly. Usually within 10 minutes. I just hope this train doesn't adopt the stupid boarding practices that Via does.
Yeah, VIA is ridiculous. I've been fortunate enough to travel by rail on three different continents on a lot of occasions over the years, and VIA is a massively annoying outlier. It's like they're desperate to make people hate rail as an alternative.
Whichever executives supported that policy should be run out of the transportation industry permanently.
That said, many HSRs have a mix of express and semi-express service; I'd bet a large chunk of those trains will also stop at Markham, Oshawa, Richmond, Barrhaven and a bunch of other towns along the way while others go TOR-OTT-MON-QC direct.
There’s something like 12 nearly sold out flights between just Toronto and Ottawa every day.
That’s why the “HFR” plan was a completely useless half-measure and I’m so glad the Government smartened up and decided to fully invest in real HSR. You need to actually be a viable alternative.
Probably less on the weekend. If they follow through this should mean it's priced for commuters which is really the bread and butter of a line like this. They need to fix the baggage problem though in operations to make that happen.
Or the much shorter commutes between Peterborough and Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, or Trois-Rivieres and Quebec City. Those would be between an hour to an hour and a half at most.
This is almost double the number of trains that VIA currently runs along the corridor, and still more than the HFR proposal that came before the pivot to high-speed. We're going all in.
You need HSR to have HFR. Slow trains won't clear tracks quickly enough and it's suboptimal use of the rolling stock. Which was a major criticism of the HFR proposal.
Sure you can, but it won't be economical. More speed equals less trains needed to maintain headway. Each train is worth about $100m so it's pretty expensive to buy lots of them because your network is slow.
You don't need to have HSR to have HFR. You need track capacity to have HFR, and VIA doesn't have that right now. Adding their own track, even a single track, to an existing CN/CP corridor will enable VIA to have HFR on that track.
High speeds actually reduce capacity because of the increase in the safe stopping distances. That's why your speed on the highway drops as traffic increases. You can fit more trains on a line if they're going 160km/h than if they're going 350km/h
The election this past April was very likely the last point of no return. I don’t believe the contract with Cadence is public but generally governments write penalty clauses in these contracts so egregious it’s untenable for a future government to break them.
And the project is still popular enough amongst Conservatives (especially in the East) they wouldn’t expend the political capital to kill a project their own people quietly like too.
Hell it was the Conservative Members on the Transport committee that basically said no half measures: make this project true HSR or don’t build it at all. So we might have them to thank for avoiding HFR (that in my opinion was going to fail spectacularly).
They also champion building one from Calgary to Edmonton too which they could really use one too.
The Acela is a nice train but the network and operation matters too. Not much point if you can't travel effortlessly fast or the operation is labourious and time consuming (awful boarding, poor ticket options, poor ride quality due to bad track, etc).
They plan to break ground by 2029 on the Ottawa-Montreal section. I imagine, based on how this is currently proceeding, that timeline could move up a bit.
In 2010, transit was a big focus of the election in Ottawa. The LRT isn't perfect, but it got built in a decade. You can relax, this is actually happening and it would be very challenging for a future government to shut down or mothball Alto
Its taken close to 15 years to build a LRT in Toronto and it’s still not open. Let’s see how long it takes to get the first section open. I’d think 2040 would be best case.
The companies who built the LRT in Toronto aren't the same as the ones building this. Look up how quickly the CDPQ got the REM up and running in Montreal. They're also involved in a lot of projects in Europe, which adds to their expertise.
I grew up in Spain. 72 trains per day is I believe considerably more than the daily HSR traffic between Madrid and Barcelona, which you can compare (very) roughly to Toronto and Montreal in terms of population and distance. I guess if you add on some Quebec City-Montreal trips and factor Ottawa in, you might get to 72, but it seems like a lot to me.
There's also a bit of an economies of scale problem here: getting to Madrid or Barcelona by HSR opens up going, still by train, somewhere else, e.g. France, Southern Spain, Portugal. Once you get to Toronto or Quebec City that's literally the end of the line, and even travelling to Quebec City is going to be subsidized by the tickets sold for travel between Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal.
Don't get me wrong, I desperately want them to build it, but this usage seems optimistic.
Living in Waterloo Region this just feels like deja vu. They’ll build the first 2 phases and us and London will be left twisting in the wind for 20 years.
You have access to the GO Train...Ottawa does not. So yeah, I'd say K-W just isn't a national priority. Spain built its first track from Seville to Madrid and continues to add track year over year.
Yes, though it’s relatively slow and only last month got weekend service. And I don’t live in Kitchener, so it’s a half hour plus drive in the wrong direction to then take almost 2 hours to get into Union. It’s sub optimal, but better than nothing. We have an LRT, that Cambridge has footed the bill for, while also still being probably 10 years out from actually having it built to service my community.
For the high speed rail I felt Toronto to Ottawa made the most sense, because you could then build the project both east and west for phase 2. Instead we see how we’re actively low priority and really only have promises of improved service for GO at this point.
The Ottawa-Montreal line makes more geographical sense. It's entirely flat and there are fewer communities/regulatory hurdles. Once one section is up and going, public demand will skyrocket for completion of the rest. It also crosses the provincial boundary, so from there Alto only has to work with one province for each stretch.
This is a fairly well-done, insightful video on what Alto should do, and what they've got right so far.
I’m not aggrieved with the plan, I’m happy it seems forward progress is occurring. It’s that I’ve seen this movie before being a latter phase afterthought. We had to fight to get phase 1 of our LRT built, then had to go through the whole dog and pony show again this year to justify to get regional council to give us what we agreed and have been paying for already for a decade. As mentioned, Waterloo Region isn’t a priority and we don’t have the pull of Montreal, Ottawa or Toronto, so we’ll have to justify the expense of the latter, costly phases the exact same way.
When was the last time a crown corporation was made in Canada for a national project? I know this feels like a lot of transit promises we've heard at various levels of government. But it's not.
This is a nation building project on a scale we haven't seen since the 1950s, and its underway, with heavy private sector involvement. I don't love the P3 set up, but if it gets the lines built, I can live with it.
Yup. I find the big difference between WR and Ottawa is that there ain’t anybody commuting to Toronto from Ottawa daily. Having easier access between the cities is great, but in some ways less pressing than servicing WR, Guelph where people often have little choice than to drive the 401 into the GTA.
You might think that’s a lot of trains, but do we really have that many travelers? I’m from China, and before the high-speed railway system was built in 2008, we didn’t think high-speed trains were a big deal. We might not have needed them that much, and we thought they would be expensive. But fast forward to 2025 (I visited China this year), and high-speed trains have changed the way we think. For example, the journey between Beijing and Shanghai, the two largest cities, used to take about 17 hours. Now, it only takes 4.5 hours, so you can go to Shanghai and come back to Beijing in the same day. Imagine if this took 17 hours—you probably wouldn’t want to travel.
correct, we don't have that many travellers, even it the wettest century initiative dreams we are not going to have 30 millions living in Montreal, so whatever works for Shanghai makes not sense for Canada
Cost and convenience will dictate if Alto will be successful IMO.
Trains running hourly and every 30 minutes during peak would be convenient. However, where to get access to the train? If they use existing stations like Union then it has limited value for travelers outside of the city to get to the airport than downtown Toronto unless you live on a GO line and then it will add time to your trip.
Three hours from Toronto to Montreal? (I assume that is express only and you'll need say 1hr on each end to get to station and your final destination = 5 hrs). You can drive it in 6. You can fly in <1.5 hours (again with 1 hr on each end = 3.5hrs.
Then there will be the cost. Will Via be able to pay for the service and capital costs and keep fairs competitive with at least flying?
In the long run what needs to happen is to do what Spain has done. For years there was just Renfe, the state owned high speed operator. Now, there’s Renfe, Avlo (owned by Renfe), OUIGO and Iryo competing on all the major lines. ADIF owns the tracks but “anyone” is free to offer their own service. Prices have drastically reduced and service has gone way up.
We need to get rid of the idea that it needs to make money. The tracks are public infrastructure like a road is. A road doesn’t need to make money. Sure charge access fees and etc but decouple the tracks from the operators (even with a government operator too)!
It’s honestly been incredible how much the prices have dropped. I used to pay generally about 60 euros each way to go from Valencia to Madrid (2 hours). Now it’s as low a 7 and probably average of 20. Absolute peak times are like 35 now max.
Will there be sufficient travellers to fill 72 trips at decided fare throughout the year? I will personally visit Quebec City more if it starts in my lifetime.
I know it's far off. But I dream of the day trips to Montreal from Toronto on a whim. If they do night service then I can imagine some wild nights out.
Here's the thing: it isn't a white elephant. Almost every developed country has high-speed rail. Except Canada. Even Morocco has high-speed rail. Morocco! With a per capita GDP one fifth of ours!!! Trains that do 300 km/h!
We need something more effective than VIA Snail Canada. It's long overdue.
We don't have the population density to make it make sense. It's going to cost a fuckton of money, and it's going to proceed to lose money hand over fist.
What they have to not do is try to make a profit. It’s a service. The profit is all the positive externalities. All the damage not done and the highways not built. Otherwise they’ll cut service and end up in a transit death spiral.
You can do Hong Kong to Beijing in 8hrs, an average speed of 325Km/h & a distance of ~2250Km over ALL KINDS of terrain. It makes about a dozen stops. That's the equivalent of a train from Halifax to Windsor stopping in Frederickton, Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and London along the way.
Japan's new 500km/h maglev train will link Osaka to Tokyo in about 1hr, a distance of about 550Km. Again - over all kinds of terrain. That's about the same as Montreal to Toronto, pretend a stop in Ottawa for good will.
These trains are comfortable, clean, rarely run late, always have 1 car dedicated to serving food. The Chinese HSR can be a little noisy - people talk loudly & often listen to their speaker instead of using headphones; that's my biggest complaint. Each car has a bathroom that's always been impeccaby clean as well as place to store luggage. You should show up 30mins before departure, but you'll be fine even if you're only 15mins. Even the cheapest seats are(much) better than economy airplane seats. Train stations are generally centrally located & always accessible via a metro station.
Could you imagine how either of these lines would ABSOLUTELY TRANSFORM Canada? What would happen to Quebec Sovereignty? How easy it would be for a tourist to land in one place & go to the other? The number of American tourists coming up? How people wouldn't need their cars anymore & tax money saved on the roads?
These trains are comfortable, clean, rarely run late, always have 1 car dedicated to serving food.
Correct. But in Canada no one will want to operate and maintain trains at that level, because it's not how the culture here works. That is the true advantage the east Asian rail experience has.
Go and look at the much lauded REM. The actual rolling stock is a cheaply made horror show designed to be cheap to build and insanely low cost to clean over all other priorities.
Conversely Japan is full of retro trains with comfortable seating operated incredibly well.
go to Europe and check out their experience The high speed tickets cost more, so business travel times are fully booked. The rest of the day, the trains sit mostly idle.
This is going to get a lot of hate but I think this will be a failure.
The population density, the distance , the network connections, the destinations near the stations, the industrial expertise, all are missing for this to be a success.
The tagline for this project "Canada is the only G7 country without high speed rail" is just such a dumb premise to build this. The actual comparable countries to us are the US and Australia, not Europe or Japan. There's a reason passenger rail, especially high speed rail, doesn't work in the US Australia and Canada. Distances are longer, population is lower, the lack of an existing popular passenger rail network to connect to and to build upon, cities are more spread out, flights are more frequent, freight rail jams existing rail mainlines, there is no domestic high speed rail industry or expertise, etc, etc, etc.
The only "comparable network" that we can aspire to seems to be the Acela express in the US East Coast and even that isn't exactly a success despite a much higher population basin. I would love to be proven wrong but it seems like we are inevitably going down the California high speed rail route. Hundred billion + price tag for trips that won't be fast or frequented enough to justify the investment.
This particular corridor is quite dense! Half of Canada lives in the Windsor to Quebec City corridor. Maybe you’re right on other concerns but 20 million people in a straight flat line is a pretty good starting point for high speed rail.
My worry is that in Europe you have so many mid-tier destinations in between or connected to the stations being serviced by high speed rail. Those mid tier destinations may not be connected by HSR themselves but they create a network and bring connection traffic through regular passenger rail.
Also the station theselves in Europe tend to be more of a destination with density around them. That will only be the case for Toronto Union Station and Montreal Central Station. Even then most people will have to drive to and from their HSR station in Canada (which lack parking) whereas in Europe there is just better public transit and accessibility to/from the stations.
What I want is KPI's and ROI! Sorry but unless some serious REALISTIC studies clearly indicating that MEANINGFUL and PROFITABLE market acceptance will be a reality then this project, like many before it, will just become a multi-billion dollar boondoggle at a time when this capital could be utilized in other more practical ways. Empty trains is what I expect as an outcome. Wonder what the COST to the tax payer per trip will be? Just like all those phantom jobs the liberals and ontario conservatives wasted wasted 100's of MILLIONS on if not BILLIONS!
The tax payer is not a bottomless well of cash contrary to ford, the carney and the trudeau before him.
Tens of thousands of people already fly that trip every day. HSR is superior in terms of cost and time accounting for the time wasted in airports. Pretty sure the market is proven.
How many people are going to choose the train over the plane? I'm one of the few who would always pick the train because I hate flying, but for the vast majority of people the plane will be quicker and if not cheaper, competitively priced.
People broadly have already voted with their wallets. Trains are largely subsidized because people don't really want to deal with them when they could otherwise fly.
All this to say I don't think the flying market is in anyway indicative of a future train market, unless you ban short range flights or make the costs prohibitively expensive through extra taxation.
Why would the plane be quicker than HSR? Alto already stated a 3 hours travel time between Toronto and Montreal. A plane may be faster, but not if you include arriving early and the travel to/from the airport, whereas HSR you can show up 15 minutes before.
I would also say that people tend to fly over the current trains because the current trains take almost six hours for that trip. HSR is significantly better than what VIA currently offers.
It's faster to fly from Tokyo to Fukuoka despite the Shinkansen (pretty much the closest direct match I can give for Toronto to Quebec City). I don't think we're ever matching Shinkansen speeds in Canada.
Tokyo-Kyoto/Osaka is basically the only case where the Shinkansen wins out on total travel time. Still Tokyo-Kyoto/Osaka has many flights daily.
The question you have to ask is "is this train going to be as fast, efficient, and attractive as an option as the Shinkansen?" Because if no, Japan already proves that people will fly otherwise. I don't see any reason that Canada's HSR is going to match the Shinkansen in any of these factors, so it will most likely be a money pit.
My real world experience is that dedicated rights of way for rail generally result in consistent and fast travel. There are places where HSR solutions are not solid, and most of those are due to having to share track or rights of way with other kinds of rail traffic.
Alto will be built on a dedicated ROW under its entire control and as such I'm not worried about their quality of service, assuming it's built as described.
If I have concerns it's whether Alto actually gets built on time and even within the neighbourhood of the budget in the first place... and that it actually has a dedicated ROW, and that the station locations are well thought out, convenient and integrated into local transit and transportation networks.
My real world experience is that dedicated rights of way for rail generally result in consistent and fast travel. There are places where HSR solutions are not solid, and most of those are due to having to share track or rights of way with other kinds of rail traffic.
Again, yes but no. You keep dodging the fact that Tokyo-Osaka is a flight path that is still maintained despite the Shinkansen being faster and generally more comfortable. Why is that? Why do you think this wouldn't be the case in Canada?
If I have concerns it's whether Alto actually gets built on time and even within the neighbourhood of the budget in the first place... and that it actually has a dedicated ROW, and that the station locations are well thought out, convenient and integrated into local transit and transportation networks.
That's a concern as well. I'd be shocked if they get their 300km/h peak for any serious amount of time during movement. I'm much more of the camp that real peak will be 200km/h maybe averaging 150-170km/h which makes the whole train/plane calculation even more of a toss up for consumers.
Setting aside that a large number of those flights are connecting flights from International destinations that only fly into one of the two cities...
There are airlines like Skymark that will fly from Tokyo-Osaka for 6000¥ which is way cheaper than the Shinkansen, and if you live near Haneda or Narita then flying is probably more convenient too.
I'm not saying that there isn't a use case for flying that will still exist here in Canada as well, I'm sure that there will still be flights after Alto is built, but I think the actual door-to-door timing and customer experience will be superior to flights and that it will be successful.
I think those timings and speeds have already been accounted for in the timings provided by Alto, so when they say it'll be a 3h 5m trip it's not like an unreasonable thing. HSR is a solved problem particularly when you control your entire ROW.
In pretty well every historic case, increased movement between cities has stimulated economies. When it's easier to commute, or a move feels "two hours away" instead of "4-6 hours away", population mobility leads to increased opportunities.
In what world is a high-speed train from Toronto to Montreal not profitable? This is the most viable place to put a new line, out of any place in the world without one.
There are around 30 flights between Toronto and Montreal each day, and Air Canada is part of this project to move that traffic to the train. People taking the VIA Rail between major cities rather than smaller communities would also take this option instead. This train existing at all is only going to boost the number of people making the trip as well.
Edit: Around 30 flights when just counting Air Canada.
I don't think that'll be too productive, you seem dead set on the idea that we'll only see a worst-case scenario. If routing the Air Canada and VIA Rail traffic to a new high-speed line across a corridor with half the population of the country is somehow a recipe for failure, I don't know what could ever be considered a winning solution.
Like you say, it's an obsolete factor that took the TurboTrain under. It had other issues, such as the tracks limiting speed. Alto is building an entirely new electrified line.
That's not even mentioning that Air Canada joined the project with the goal of getting all the people on flights from Toronto to Montreal onto trains instead. Or that our population is now nearly doubled compared to when the TurboTrain operated. I don't think we have much to be worried about.
I know it's fun to be cynical about the "Liberals" and the "taxpayer burden", but let's be realistic.
This isn't a vague idea anymore. Alto is in the active planning phase.
You can, using google, look this stuff up. Alto is forecasting millions of annual trips by 2059. Think tanks, like CD Howe, estimate it'll add billions to the economy.
Big projects come with risk, and yes cost discipline will be essential, but you can't just dismiss the peoject before those studies are available. This isn't a Liberal thing, this isn't a Conservative thing. It's a Canadian thing.
So, really, it doesn't matter what you want. This is happening, and if any future government wants to cut this project it'll cost them billions of dollars to Cadence. The private sector has skin in this game.
EDIT - I also want to add, in response to "capital can be better spent elsewhere", do you think the BILLIONS Canadian taxpayers spend on roads at the provincial and municipal level is "money well spent"? Do you realize that taking cars off the road with HSR means we'll spend less on road maintenance?
If you're going to be a credible alternative to driving, you need to have enough trains that someone can just decide to take one without planning their whole day around it. So this sounds like really encouraging news to me.
Exactly. What makes the Shinkansen so successful actually isn’t the speed (or at least not the speed alone), it’s the frequency. One daily HSR departure may as well not exist because it wouldn’t be convenient.
That is very true.
The Tokyo to Osaka line would be the same idea as this line and one of the huge advantages that it is has is all the scheduled trips. They as well have a normal that stops at every station, express that is less stops and the super express that is only a couple of stops. For this line we need to make sure that it is designed that the trains could bypass stations for a type of express service. Could be something like Toronto to Montreal with no stops as a super express. You get on and no worries on when to get off.
The next huge thing will be to keep the price low, you want to to be cheaper then flights.
It could even be roughly the same price as a flight; there's an inherent advantage in having no real luggage limitations and being able to transit from downtown core to downtown core without even needing to think about a taxi or additional public transit connections. Personally, I'd be very excited to be able to decide "the day of" that I'm going to Toronto to catch a Jays game or something of the like.
Your typical flight from Ottawa to Toronto is still like $350 dollars. Conversely I can hop on a train from Florence to Rome for like $15 bucks. I’d hope there’s a happy medium somewhere between those price points.
I hope the planners are reading this. Based on what we see in Canadian trains, they might not have this in the plan. I hope I am wrong.
Also you need to schedule the timing so it's not dependent on the train constantly running at maximum speed, otherwise you have a "house of card" situation like the HSR in Czech Republic the moment things don't go perfect.
Yeah. When I was in the Netherlands back in September, I didn't look at train schedules. I just showed up and was able to get on one pretty quickly. Usually within 10 minutes. I just hope this train doesn't adopt the stupid boarding practices that Via does.
Yeah, VIA is ridiculous. I've been fortunate enough to travel by rail on three different continents on a lot of occasions over the years, and VIA is a massively annoying outlier. It's like they're desperate to make people hate rail as an alternative.
Whichever executives supported that policy should be run out of the transportation industry permanently.
For really long trips, I think once every 90 minutes can be reasonable. Treat it as more like a flight than a subway.
Either way, once it becomes available I think i will at least be interested in taking it at least once.
That said, many HSRs have a mix of express and semi-express service; I'd bet a large chunk of those trains will also stop at Markham, Oshawa, Richmond, Barrhaven and a bunch of other towns along the way while others go TOR-OTT-MON-QC direct.
Not just driving but flying too.
There’s something like 12 nearly sold out flights between just Toronto and Ottawa every day.
That’s why the “HFR” plan was a completely useless half-measure and I’m so glad the Government smartened up and decided to fully invest in real HSR. You need to actually be a viable alternative.
For 600$
Oh they released the price already? Please share the source! It would be very interesting to read.
I’m just a cynical asshole but hey! I’d like to be surprised
Shameful display.
Pound sand, unicorn humper
Wow, truly shameful to make a personal attack and one that is homophobic. Please, get help, you seem full of hate.
That would be crazy. That's one every 20 minutes, 24 hours per day.
This counts both directions. So 40 minutes on average.
More in peak times, less off peak. It will probably be every 15 min peak, 30 min off peak.
Edited for times, I think this is more like it for the frequency.
Probably not every hour in the middle of the night.
So maybe every 15-20 minutes during the peak.
I agree upon reflection.
Keyword is “up to”
Probably less on the weekend. If they follow through this should mean it's priced for commuters which is really the bread and butter of a line like this. They need to fix the baggage problem though in operations to make that happen.
commuters? Like 3 hour commute from Montreal to Toronto?
Or the much shorter commutes between Peterborough and Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, or Trois-Rivieres and Quebec City. Those would be between an hour to an hour and a half at most.
Montreal <> Ottawa, but other places too. This alignment isn't just planned to serve Toronto <> Montreal.
Also assumes no breakdowns/delays/troublemakers/etc
Sure. I would expect to see a train every 5 to 10 minutes during peak travel periods.
When I lived in Japan the Shinkansen didn't even have this.
Are you confused with a metro system?
It isnt a metro system
Prices will have to be reduced compared to Via’s current numbers to fill all those seats….maybe a sign?
This is almost double the number of trains that VIA currently runs along the corridor, and still more than the HFR proposal that came before the pivot to high-speed. We're going all in.
You need HSR to have HFR. Slow trains won't clear tracks quickly enough and it's suboptimal use of the rolling stock. Which was a major criticism of the HFR proposal.
Sure you can, but it won't be economical. More speed equals less trains needed to maintain headway. Each train is worth about $100m so it's pretty expensive to buy lots of them because your network is slow.
Via HFR was still going 180-200km/h since it would have had dedicated track.
His "Slow trains won't clear tracks quickly enough" statement doesn't make sense since all slower speed means is that you need more trains.
There are extended sections where there is only 1 track, with sidings where trains have to wait for oncoming traffic to pass.
If there were 2 tracks we could have as many slow trains as we want, but with 1 track you need speed and precise scheduling.
Double track also allows higher speeds. There's some speed limitations at all the merges.
You don't need to have HSR to have HFR. You need track capacity to have HFR, and VIA doesn't have that right now. Adding their own track, even a single track, to an existing CN/CP corridor will enable VIA to have HFR on that track.
High speeds actually reduce capacity because of the increase in the safe stopping distances. That's why your speed on the highway drops as traffic increases. You can fit more trains on a line if they're going 160km/h than if they're going 350km/h
Liberals have my vote again till at least phase 1 is completed.
The election this past April was very likely the last point of no return. I don’t believe the contract with Cadence is public but generally governments write penalty clauses in these contracts so egregious it’s untenable for a future government to break them.
And the project is still popular enough amongst Conservatives (especially in the East) they wouldn’t expend the political capital to kill a project their own people quietly like too.
Hell it was the Conservative Members on the Transport committee that basically said no half measures: make this project true HSR or don’t build it at all. So we might have them to thank for avoiding HFR (that in my opinion was going to fail spectacularly).
They also champion building one from Calgary to Edmonton too which they could really use one too.
Just came back from France. If we had anything resembling the TGV here I would use it often.
It'll resemble France's TGV because the companies that built it are part of the consortium that Alto contracted.
The Acela is a nice train but the network and operation matters too. Not much point if you can't travel effortlessly fast or the operation is labourious and time consuming (awful boarding, poor ticket options, poor ride quality due to bad track, etc).
In Switzerland, even millionaires take trains to commute because it is so consistent. You don't even have to check the schedules
“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.”
― Gustavo Petro
Awesome, too bad I’ll be near death when this is finished.
Well our predecessors never managed to get this done, so I guess it’s our responsibility to build the infrastructure for our grandchildren.
"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit"
This is a fantastic saying.
I've never heard that phrase before, but DAMN is it accurate. That should be printed on our money.
People are having kids?
They plan to break ground by 2029 on the Ottawa-Montreal section. I imagine, based on how this is currently proceeding, that timeline could move up a bit.
In 2010, transit was a big focus of the election in Ottawa. The LRT isn't perfect, but it got built in a decade. You can relax, this is actually happening and it would be very challenging for a future government to shut down or mothball Alto
Its taken close to 15 years to build a LRT in Toronto and it’s still not open. Let’s see how long it takes to get the first section open. I’d think 2040 would be best case.
The companies who built the LRT in Toronto aren't the same as the ones building this. Look up how quickly the CDPQ got the REM up and running in Montreal. They're also involved in a lot of projects in Europe, which adds to their expertise.
The reason for that is that it was fucked with repeatedly and cancelled then uncancelled.
Ford owns the entire fuck up
Have anything to back that claim up? The Eglinton Cross town started before he took office.
I’d kill to have something like this on the island if you don’t own a car/don’t drive it’s such a pain in the ass to travel
I grew up in Spain. 72 trains per day is I believe considerably more than the daily HSR traffic between Madrid and Barcelona, which you can compare (very) roughly to Toronto and Montreal in terms of population and distance. I guess if you add on some Quebec City-Montreal trips and factor Ottawa in, you might get to 72, but it seems like a lot to me.
There's also a bit of an economies of scale problem here: getting to Madrid or Barcelona by HSR opens up going, still by train, somewhere else, e.g. France, Southern Spain, Portugal. Once you get to Toronto or Quebec City that's literally the end of the line, and even travelling to Quebec City is going to be subsidized by the tickets sold for travel between Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal.
Don't get me wrong, I desperately want them to build it, but this usage seems optimistic.
Living in Waterloo Region this just feels like deja vu. They’ll build the first 2 phases and us and London will be left twisting in the wind for 20 years.
You have access to the GO Train...Ottawa does not. So yeah, I'd say K-W just isn't a national priority. Spain built its first track from Seville to Madrid and continues to add track year over year.
Yes, though it’s relatively slow and only last month got weekend service. And I don’t live in Kitchener, so it’s a half hour plus drive in the wrong direction to then take almost 2 hours to get into Union. It’s sub optimal, but better than nothing. We have an LRT, that Cambridge has footed the bill for, while also still being probably 10 years out from actually having it built to service my community.
For the high speed rail I felt Toronto to Ottawa made the most sense, because you could then build the project both east and west for phase 2. Instead we see how we’re actively low priority and really only have promises of improved service for GO at this point.
The Ottawa-Montreal line makes more geographical sense. It's entirely flat and there are fewer communities/regulatory hurdles. Once one section is up and going, public demand will skyrocket for completion of the rest. It also crosses the provincial boundary, so from there Alto only has to work with one province for each stretch.
This is a fairly well-done, insightful video on what Alto should do, and what they've got right so far.
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.7013719
I’m not aggrieved with the plan, I’m happy it seems forward progress is occurring. It’s that I’ve seen this movie before being a latter phase afterthought. We had to fight to get phase 1 of our LRT built, then had to go through the whole dog and pony show again this year to justify to get regional council to give us what we agreed and have been paying for already for a decade. As mentioned, Waterloo Region isn’t a priority and we don’t have the pull of Montreal, Ottawa or Toronto, so we’ll have to justify the expense of the latter, costly phases the exact same way.
When was the last time a crown corporation was made in Canada for a national project? I know this feels like a lot of transit promises we've heard at various levels of government. But it's not.
This is a nation building project on a scale we haven't seen since the 1950s, and its underway, with heavy private sector involvement. I don't love the P3 set up, but if it gets the lines built, I can live with it.
Weekend service lol, it’s 3-4 trains all day and last one from union back is at 10:30pm. Rest of the time it’s bus transfers in Brampton.
Yup. I find the big difference between WR and Ottawa is that there ain’t anybody commuting to Toronto from Ottawa daily. Having easier access between the cities is great, but in some ways less pressing than servicing WR, Guelph where people often have little choice than to drive the 401 into the GTA.
We will now join the elite ranks of every Western European country and parts of East Asia.
Elite ranks of all major countries except US & UK
Won't believe it until its up and running. Pro tip, dont let Metrolinx near this (Torontonians will know what i mean).
You read my mind about Metrolinx
You might think that’s a lot of trains, but do we really have that many travelers? I’m from China, and before the high-speed railway system was built in 2008, we didn’t think high-speed trains were a big deal. We might not have needed them that much, and we thought they would be expensive. But fast forward to 2025 (I visited China this year), and high-speed trains have changed the way we think. For example, the journey between Beijing and Shanghai, the two largest cities, used to take about 17 hours. Now, it only takes 4.5 hours, so you can go to Shanghai and come back to Beijing in the same day. Imagine if this took 17 hours—you probably wouldn’t want to travel.
correct, we don't have that many travellers, even it the wettest century initiative dreams we are not going to have 30 millions living in Montreal, so whatever works for Shanghai makes not sense for Canada
I fully support this. I'll be long since retired and maybe even a nursing home before it's done.
Same here. They have been talking abkut this for decades.
As long as it stays in planning stage everything is possible
Cost and convenience will dictate if Alto will be successful IMO.
Trains running hourly and every 30 minutes during peak would be convenient. However, where to get access to the train? If they use existing stations like Union then it has limited value for travelers outside of the city to get to the airport than downtown Toronto unless you live on a GO line and then it will add time to your trip.
Three hours from Toronto to Montreal? (I assume that is express only and you'll need say 1hr on each end to get to station and your final destination = 5 hrs). You can drive it in 6. You can fly in <1.5 hours (again with 1 hr on each end = 3.5hrs.
Then there will be the cost. Will Via be able to pay for the service and capital costs and keep fairs competitive with at least flying?
In the long run what needs to happen is to do what Spain has done. For years there was just Renfe, the state owned high speed operator. Now, there’s Renfe, Avlo (owned by Renfe), OUIGO and Iryo competing on all the major lines. ADIF owns the tracks but “anyone” is free to offer their own service. Prices have drastically reduced and service has gone way up.
We need to get rid of the idea that it needs to make money. The tracks are public infrastructure like a road is. A road doesn’t need to make money. Sure charge access fees and etc but decouple the tracks from the operators (even with a government operator too)!
It’s honestly been incredible how much the prices have dropped. I used to pay generally about 60 euros each way to go from Valencia to Madrid (2 hours). Now it’s as low a 7 and probably average of 20. Absolute peak times are like 35 now max.
This makes too much sense. Therefore it will never happen
Will there be sufficient travellers to fill 72 trips at decided fare throughout the year? I will personally visit Quebec City more if it starts in my lifetime.
I know it's far off. But I dream of the day trips to Montreal from Toronto on a whim. If they do night service then I can imagine some wild nights out.
Hell ya brother
I, for one, am setting my expectations very high.
Come ride the wave with me.
I'm glad our kids kids woll use this
Better hope the Liberals stay in power until it’s built. Dollars to donuts if the Conservatives get in, it will be the first thing they cancel.
It’s better to subsidize the brodozer pickup crowd with cheap gas than those effete tree-hugging libtards that want to play with their train set… /s
Doesn't matter which party is in power, there is no way this white elephant actually gets built.
Here's the thing: it isn't a white elephant. Almost every developed country has high-speed rail. Except Canada. Even Morocco has high-speed rail. Morocco! With a per capita GDP one fifth of ours!!! Trains that do 300 km/h!
We need something more effective than VIA Snail Canada. It's long overdue.
We don't have the population density to make it make sense. It's going to cost a fuckton of money, and it's going to proceed to lose money hand over fist.
We do in the Corridor. It's roughly the population of the Netherlands and greater than the population of Belgium over a somewhat greater distance.
About time
Gosh, the stuff of dreams.
What they have to not do is try to make a profit. It’s a service. The profit is all the positive externalities. All the damage not done and the highways not built. Otherwise they’ll cut service and end up in a transit death spiral.
“Up to” is doing some heavy lifting here
Up to 72.
Given the performance of both local and regional commuter service in Toronto, Ottawa, and in between points I'd say this is pure fantasy.
I'm just ruminating here;
I've traveled extensively in Asia.
You can do Hong Kong to Beijing in 8hrs, an average speed of 325Km/h & a distance of ~2250Km over ALL KINDS of terrain. It makes about a dozen stops. That's the equivalent of a train from Halifax to Windsor stopping in Frederickton, Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and London along the way.
Japan's new 500km/h maglev train will link Osaka to Tokyo in about 1hr, a distance of about 550Km. Again - over all kinds of terrain. That's about the same as Montreal to Toronto, pretend a stop in Ottawa for good will.
These trains are comfortable, clean, rarely run late, always have 1 car dedicated to serving food. The Chinese HSR can be a little noisy - people talk loudly & often listen to their speaker instead of using headphones; that's my biggest complaint. Each car has a bathroom that's always been impeccaby clean as well as place to store luggage. You should show up 30mins before departure, but you'll be fine even if you're only 15mins. Even the cheapest seats are(much) better than economy airplane seats. Train stations are generally centrally located & always accessible via a metro station.
Could you imagine how either of these lines would ABSOLUTELY TRANSFORM Canada? What would happen to Quebec Sovereignty? How easy it would be for a tourist to land in one place & go to the other? The number of American tourists coming up? How people wouldn't need their cars anymore & tax money saved on the roads?
I'll be shocked if the high speed trains in Canada go faster than 150km/h.
Correct. But in Canada no one will want to operate and maintain trains at that level, because it's not how the culture here works. That is the true advantage the east Asian rail experience has.
Go and look at the much lauded REM. The actual rolling stock is a cheaply made horror show designed to be cheap to build and insanely low cost to clean over all other priorities.
Conversely Japan is full of retro trains with comfortable seating operated incredibly well.
Wow, impressive! Maybe we can make this commuter friendly after all!
go to Europe and check out their experience The high speed tickets cost more, so business travel times are fully booked. The rest of the day, the trains sit mostly idle.
This is going to get a lot of hate but I think this will be a failure.
The population density, the distance , the network connections, the destinations near the stations, the industrial expertise, all are missing for this to be a success.
The tagline for this project "Canada is the only G7 country without high speed rail" is just such a dumb premise to build this. The actual comparable countries to us are the US and Australia, not Europe or Japan. There's a reason passenger rail, especially high speed rail, doesn't work in the US Australia and Canada. Distances are longer, population is lower, the lack of an existing popular passenger rail network to connect to and to build upon, cities are more spread out, flights are more frequent, freight rail jams existing rail mainlines, there is no domestic high speed rail industry or expertise, etc, etc, etc.
The only "comparable network" that we can aspire to seems to be the Acela express in the US East Coast and even that isn't exactly a success despite a much higher population basin. I would love to be proven wrong but it seems like we are inevitably going down the California high speed rail route. Hundred billion + price tag for trips that won't be fast or frequented enough to justify the investment.
I would love to be proven wrong
This particular corridor is quite dense! Half of Canada lives in the Windsor to Quebec City corridor. Maybe you’re right on other concerns but 20 million people in a straight flat line is a pretty good starting point for high speed rail.
My worry is that in Europe you have so many mid-tier destinations in between or connected to the stations being serviced by high speed rail. Those mid tier destinations may not be connected by HSR themselves but they create a network and bring connection traffic through regular passenger rail.
Also the station theselves in Europe tend to be more of a destination with density around them. That will only be the case for Toronto Union Station and Montreal Central Station. Even then most people will have to drive to and from their HSR station in Canada (which lack parking) whereas in Europe there is just better public transit and accessibility to/from the stations.
Australia is also building high-speed rail now. Can't say why the US is such a boondoggle, though.
https://www.hsra.gov.au/high-speed-rail
Yawn. Learn how to make streetcars run faster than me first
It's the CDPQ building this, the guys that are building the REM in Montreal. Your expectations might shoot up if you ever get a chance to ride it.
What I want is KPI's and ROI! Sorry but unless some serious REALISTIC studies clearly indicating that MEANINGFUL and PROFITABLE market acceptance will be a reality then this project, like many before it, will just become a multi-billion dollar boondoggle at a time when this capital could be utilized in other more practical ways. Empty trains is what I expect as an outcome. Wonder what the COST to the tax payer per trip will be? Just like all those phantom jobs the liberals and ontario conservatives wasted wasted 100's of MILLIONS on if not BILLIONS!
The tax payer is not a bottomless well of cash contrary to ford, the carney and the trudeau before him.
Tens of thousands of people already fly that trip every day. HSR is superior in terms of cost and time accounting for the time wasted in airports. Pretty sure the market is proven.
How many people are going to choose the train over the plane? I'm one of the few who would always pick the train because I hate flying, but for the vast majority of people the plane will be quicker and if not cheaper, competitively priced.
People broadly have already voted with their wallets. Trains are largely subsidized because people don't really want to deal with them when they could otherwise fly.
All this to say I don't think the flying market is in anyway indicative of a future train market, unless you ban short range flights or make the costs prohibitively expensive through extra taxation.
Why would the plane be quicker than HSR? Alto already stated a 3 hours travel time between Toronto and Montreal. A plane may be faster, but not if you include arriving early and the travel to/from the airport, whereas HSR you can show up 15 minutes before.
I would also say that people tend to fly over the current trains because the current trains take almost six hours for that trip. HSR is significantly better than what VIA currently offers.
It's faster to fly from Tokyo to Fukuoka despite the Shinkansen (pretty much the closest direct match I can give for Toronto to Quebec City). I don't think we're ever matching Shinkansen speeds in Canada.
Tokyo-Kyoto/Osaka is basically the only case where the Shinkansen wins out on total travel time. Still Tokyo-Kyoto/Osaka has many flights daily.
The question you have to ask is "is this train going to be as fast, efficient, and attractive as an option as the Shinkansen?" Because if no, Japan already proves that people will fly otherwise. I don't see any reason that Canada's HSR is going to match the Shinkansen in any of these factors, so it will most likely be a money pit.
So your argument is that Alto is lying about their planned travel time, and that Alto will just suck so therefore not worth it. Cool.
Not lying, just overhyping what they can deliver like most companies do.
But I'm using real world already existing examples to parse out what will likely happen. Your analysis is just to buy the hype?
My real world experience is that dedicated rights of way for rail generally result in consistent and fast travel. There are places where HSR solutions are not solid, and most of those are due to having to share track or rights of way with other kinds of rail traffic.
Alto will be built on a dedicated ROW under its entire control and as such I'm not worried about their quality of service, assuming it's built as described.
If I have concerns it's whether Alto actually gets built on time and even within the neighbourhood of the budget in the first place... and that it actually has a dedicated ROW, and that the station locations are well thought out, convenient and integrated into local transit and transportation networks.
Again, yes but no. You keep dodging the fact that Tokyo-Osaka is a flight path that is still maintained despite the Shinkansen being faster and generally more comfortable. Why is that? Why do you think this wouldn't be the case in Canada?
That's a concern as well. I'd be shocked if they get their 300km/h peak for any serious amount of time during movement. I'm much more of the camp that real peak will be 200km/h maybe averaging 150-170km/h which makes the whole train/plane calculation even more of a toss up for consumers.
Setting aside that a large number of those flights are connecting flights from International destinations that only fly into one of the two cities...
There are airlines like Skymark that will fly from Tokyo-Osaka for 6000¥ which is way cheaper than the Shinkansen, and if you live near Haneda or Narita then flying is probably more convenient too.
I'm not saying that there isn't a use case for flying that will still exist here in Canada as well, I'm sure that there will still be flights after Alto is built, but I think the actual door-to-door timing and customer experience will be superior to flights and that it will be successful.
I think those timings and speeds have already been accounted for in the timings provided by Alto, so when they say it'll be a 3h 5m trip it's not like an unreasonable thing. HSR is a solved problem particularly when you control your entire ROW.
In pretty well every historic case, increased movement between cities has stimulated economies. When it's easier to commute, or a move feels "two hours away" instead of "4-6 hours away", population mobility leads to increased opportunities.
There is not a single passenger train system that is both profitable and high quality. We require public investment for public good.
In what world is a high-speed train from Toronto to Montreal not profitable? This is the most viable place to put a new line, out of any place in the world without one.
It is going to be an unprofitable money pit. Too long for commuting, not enough traffic if only used for leisure on weekend.
There are around 30 flights between Toronto and Montreal each day, and Air Canada is part of this project to move that traffic to the train. People taking the VIA Rail between major cities rather than smaller communities would also take this option instead. This train existing at all is only going to boost the number of people making the trip as well.
Edit: Around 30 flights when just counting Air Canada.
30 flights carry fewer passengers than 1 train, try again
I don't think that'll be too productive, you seem dead set on the idea that we'll only see a worst-case scenario. If routing the Air Canada and VIA Rail traffic to a new high-speed line across a corridor with half the population of the country is somehow a recipe for failure, I don't know what could ever be considered a winning solution.
We had high speed rail between Toronto and Montreal before with the TurboTrain (service speed of 200 km/h, design limit 275 km/h).
It was not profitable. So after about a decade of service, they cancelled it in 1982.
To be fair it was a gas turbine locomotive - not electric - so the price of fuel caused by the oil crisis was part of why it went under. But still.
Like you say, it's an obsolete factor that took the TurboTrain under. It had other issues, such as the tracks limiting speed. Alto is building an entirely new electrified line.
That's not even mentioning that Air Canada joined the project with the goal of getting all the people on flights from Toronto to Montreal onto trains instead. Or that our population is now nearly doubled compared to when the TurboTrain operated. I don't think we have much to be worried about.
I know it's fun to be cynical about the "Liberals" and the "taxpayer burden", but let's be realistic.
This isn't a vague idea anymore. Alto is in the active planning phase.
You can, using google, look this stuff up. Alto is forecasting millions of annual trips by 2059. Think tanks, like CD Howe, estimate it'll add billions to the economy.
Big projects come with risk, and yes cost discipline will be essential, but you can't just dismiss the peoject before those studies are available. This isn't a Liberal thing, this isn't a Conservative thing. It's a Canadian thing.
So, really, it doesn't matter what you want. This is happening, and if any future government wants to cut this project it'll cost them billions of dollars to Cadence. The private sector has skin in this game.
EDIT - I also want to add, in response to "capital can be better spent elsewhere", do you think the BILLIONS Canadian taxpayers spend on roads at the provincial and municipal level is "money well spent"? Do you realize that taking cars off the road with HSR means we'll spend less on road maintenance?
I'd settle for 10 trains a day that actually worked The Way They Were intended.