I suspect he wanted to say that the average of the maximum speeds of all pieces of rolling stock VIA has in its roster is somewhere around 95 mph, which would be just as plausible as that metric is trivial…

Agreed, but any Dollar wasted on building an Ottawa Bypass would unlock so much more revenues if used to speeding up Montreal-Ottawa and Ottawa-Toronto, thus benefitting all trains and not just (at most) 3-4 express trains per day. The TGV can cover the 538 km from Paris to Bordeaux (thus one km...

But now we are really comparing apples and bananas, as we could also remove the regions without HSR in France and Spain and then the population denisty of these countries rises significantly… Adjusted for population, it would get us quite close to France, though (I really need to update this...

CN has issues detecting Venture/Charger trainsets when they approach certain level crossings due to their low axle count, light weight and different wheel-rail dynamics. The workaround imposed by CN is to reduce speeds to 45 mph until the correct operation of any automatic warning devices can be...

I believe the Liberals have already accepted their fate of inevitable defeat at the next election. This project is only about increasing the price the Conservatives have to pay should they chose to continue with it or shelve it. Which indeed is very disingenuous, but in line with everything else...

There are three ways in which the Conservatives can score points with this project: By proving their fiscal conservatism by scaling down the taxpayer exposure (“liberal excesses”) or shelving the project. By proving that they are willing to invest and keep Canada “open for business”. By proving...

I’d be shocked if that were to be the most problematic expropriation related to HFR-TGF, especially in the preferred HSR variant…

There is only one place where virtually all public transport networks converge - and that’s where the HxR service should have its station… Yes, but only by necessity, not by choice!

And $500 billion to Chicago - and $5 trillion to meet CAHSR in San Francisco. Sure, if you keep adding extensions nobody was requesting, we can arrive at any fantastical cost figure! Just to be sure, I’m not saying that there won’t be any HxR service to Windsor, but it won’t be part of this...

Nobody said that VIA needs exclusive tracks, but four tracks should be sufficient to create dedicated Express tracks, assuming that there is no need to have all GO trains stop at Scarborough, Danfourth or East Harbour…

I’m not worried about the part of the Stouffville Corridor which is South of crossing underneath the Belleville Sub, where Stoufville trains currently only stop at a single station (Kennedy), which would even be a plausible HxR stop location. However, you would need to overtake at least one...

No, the upcoming announcement will mark the end of the RFP procurement and the start of the Co-development phase, which is a major milestone!

The formal decision will be made at the end of the “Co-development” phase which will only start this year and which will last multiple years. It’s explicitly acknowledged that the final investment decision will only be made then:

History and voters will surely distinguish between the Prime Minister who delivered only insignificant media “announcements” and the one who actually gave the green light and got shovels into the ground…

I was born in 1989 and didn’t touch North American soil before 2009, so I unfortunately don’t remember that press briefing… 🤣

Of course they have, but we’ll only learn who the lucky winner is at some point in November. I just hope that the reputation of SNC-Lavalin (even after obscuring its name) is still so toxic that someone else than Cadence wins the contract…

Sure, if you are fine with being stuck behind a GO train all the way from Mount Joy to Union Station, you can do just that, but you should be aware that the current travel time of a GO train between these two stations is 55 minutes. Also, you would have to create a new ROW from Gare Centrale all...

The measure should not be how well the CDPQ is doing with the REM, but how well it fits into the overall transit development strategy and that’s where the REM’s record of cripling any prospects of frequent regional rail towards Laval and of frequent intercity rail towards Quebec City… The...

The idea of building a rail corridor from Montreal and Toronto which doesn’t share any ROWs with either CN or CPKC is rather delusional. We thankfully don’t have incompatible track gauges (like in Japan or Spain) which would force building dedicated into metropolitan centers…

I don’t see why a new tunnel to Gare Centrale would be necessary: it’s unnecessary for Montreal-Toronto and no amount of travel time savings for QBEC-MTRL will be able to even remotely justify spending something crazy like $10 billion on a new tunnel…