A French transportation titan’s effort to win Canada over on the climate merits of “higher-speed” rail service between Toronto and Quebec City is bearing fruit, with Ottawa recently warming to the idea.
Global heating, population growth, and ever-increasing road and airport congestion all mean it’s time for a Canadian version of the French-style TGV (train à grande vitesse) rail, urges Alstom SA, the transport systems developer that bought Bombardier’s rail unit in 2021. Alstom is urging Ottawa to build such a system for Canada’s busiest transportation corridor to slash traffic and carbon emissions “rather than settling for a cheaper but slower alternative that would attract too few new passengers to make much of a difference,” reports Globe and Mail columnist Konrad Yakabuski.
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Responding to Alstom and other potential private sector partners who asked the government to “aim higher” than its present High Frequency Rail (HFR) initiative, Ottawa has expanded its parameters and is now open to proposals for a “higher-speed” rail service that could reach speeds of up to 300 kilometres per hour in parts of the Quebec City-Toronto corridor, if they are cost-effective.
The HFR project would require dedicated tracks to improve on-time performance, since Via Rail’s trains currently share tracks with the freight operations of Canadian National Railway. But HFR trains would only reach average speeds of around 200 km/h, shaving around 30 minutes off the nearly five-hour trip from Montreal to Toronto, the Globe says. A TGV could halve that trip time.
In 2021, Ottawa pegged the cost of HFR at between C$6 and $12 billion. Noting that this was “a lowball estimate even then,” the Globe says that “cost estimates for a TGV could be several times higher, though most of the funding would likely come from private partners that would own and operate the project under a long-term lease from Ottawa.”
The TGV option would not be a manufacturing job generator for Canada, Yakabuski writes, at least when it comes to the train units themselves, since the Canadian plants Alstom acquired from Bombardier are not outfitted to assemble high-speed trains. The Alstom Acela trains now in use on the Amtrak high-speed line between Boston, New York, and Washington, DC, are assembled at a plant in Hornell, New York.
There would a huge difference in construction costs for a HSR-type of modernized passenger rail (up to 300 kph) in comparison to a HrSR (Higher Speed Rail) type of HFR service (up to 200 kph) envisioned for the Toronto to Quebec City corridor.
If we look at so-called HSR service in Sweden, encompassing 200 kph top speeds, in essence a HrSR-type of passenger rail basically identical to the recently-upgraded HFR project, it has high ridership levels and, surprisingly, similar travel times to that of HSR trains operating in Germany.
Why? It’s because a considerable portion of Germany’s passenger rail system still runs at HrSR speeds of 200 kph, not at those of HSR!
As such, Germany’s HSR trains frequently make use of HrSR in addition to HSR tracks while on route to their destinations.
This can easily be verified by observing the posted speeds on the LED screens located on the ceiling of each passenger coach as my wife and I witnessed on our extensive rail tour of Germany just a few years ago.
Unbeknownst to most rail passengers, Germany’s HSR trains rarely operate exclusively at their maximum capable speeds of 300 kph, rather more like 200 to 225 kph for a significant portion of the time.
Yet, our media immediately gets exited upon hearing about 300 kph-capable projects without delving more into the actual average speeds obtained, while dismissing HrSR projects outright such as Via Rail’s HFR proposal!
Reporting about the possibility of HSR in Canada may lift eyebrows, but doesn’t reveal the sad fact that HSR was proposed time after time in this country to no avail because of exorbitantly high costs of construction!
Canadians would love to have HSR in this country but are unwilling to pay for it! It’s that simple!
Via Rail’s HFR project, however, will achieve most of the benefits of HSR, but at vastly less cost, just like the effective and successful regional trains operating at up to 200 kph in the NEC in the US.
HFR will offer a form of modernized passenger rail, never before experienced in Canada, almost equivalent to that of regular intercity and regional trains seen in Europe.
HFR will provide more affordability, all-weather capability, comfort, connectivity, convenience, economic growth, far-lower carbon emissions, faster speeds, frequencies and reliability than anything Canadians have ever experienced in passenger rail in the past.
Most importantly, HFR will shift a considerable portion of drivers from our congested roads and highways to modernized passenger rail since HFR will be both far quicker than driving and more affordable in terms of ticket prices than would be the case with HSR, in light of the high costs of construction.
Proposed HFR routes such as Toronto-Ottawa will even convince air travellers into taking the train with a travel time of 3 hours at 200 kph!
Dual-mode Siemens Charger train sets would also be capable of operating on Via Rail’s electrified, dedicated tracks and on shared, freight-owned tracks leading to centrally-located railway stations such as Montreal and Toronto.
Alstom’s HSR train sets operating exclusively in electric-mode would not have the ability to run on freight-owned trackage since both CN and CP are reluctant at this time to begin the process of making a shift from diesel to electrified rail.
In conclusion, I would like to point out that HFR should, in no way, be considered as a compromise in comparison to HSR since most European countries only migrated to HSR upon having reached full capacity of their existing railway networks.
Having modern train sets running with HFR at up to 200 kph or 125 mph would be leaps and bounds ahead of our presently antiquated, frequently-delayed, and near-irrelevant passenger rail service.
If we steadfastly continue pushing for costly HSR, we’ll just end up with nothing as evidenced in the past 6-7 years when HFR was first proposed by Via Rail’s former President Yves Desjardins-Siciliano.