I suspect you're right and they made sure to secure agreements before the companies separated. It would definitely be a much bigger challenge with CN which has been separate from the government for decades already, but it does at least demonstrate that it is theoretically possible for a freight...

Okay... but what does that have to do with this discussion? Nobody here is claiming that Brightline was built without government expenditure. We are debating whether it is possible for a passenger train operating company to make an arrangement with a freight railway that enables them to...

Brightline was indeed created by Florida East Coast Industries (FECI), the parent company of the Florida East Coast Railway (FECR) but in 2017 the FECR was sold to GrupoMexico so it is no longer part of the same company as Brightline. CN also got billions of dollars in public funds to upgrade...

Like you said, it depends on how much ridership potential and dispatching flexibility the line has. If the line is fairly slow (not attracting much demand) and it's built as a single-tracked line then there won't be much possibility for competition since the schedule would be limited to a...

The Government of Canada pays CN to upgrade a lot of their lines on behalf of Via. For example, all of the triple-tracked segments on the Kingston sub were paid for in Via's name. The fact that Brightline and FEC were able to create an agreement to balance dispatch priorities on the rails owned...

Brightline

The original modern light rail systems (Calgary, Edmonton, San Diego) are based on the German model of fast high-floor tram implemented in cities like Köln, Essen, Frankfurt, etc. Those systems are known in German as Stadtbahn, which is a brand new term they invented to name those systems.

Oops. Fixed. I was thinking of Port Union.

I've been thinking along the same lines as you, though my thinking is that we can redirect parking demand by having different rates for different stations. Stations in urban growth centres like downtown Brampton or downtown Kitchener should have very expensive parking (if any at all) while...

I never said anything about reviving the service. I just shared an interesting and little-known piece of histor

Via Rail timetable, June 1982: from @Urban Sky 's Via timetable archive

This is not true. CN running does not prevent Metrolinx from implementing ETCS. Metrolinx clearly stated in the ETCS backgrounders that they will have lineside signals for use by CN trains. If you're going to make things up, please preface the statements with "my guess is that..." or something...

Potentially. Allowing the train to lay over in Niagara Falls avoids two deadhead movements across the Welland canal, which could help negotiations for more in-service crossings instead. It also increases the overnight storage capacity on the Niagara branch from 4 trains to 5, which could allow...

Yeah my primary complaint about Metrolinx is not that they took a long time to build the connection (we know that CN is also a limiting factor so some of the delay was out of Metrolinx's control). My complaint is that Metrolinx was lying about construction on the connection. They claimed in...

Finally they're doing the infrastructure work at West Harbour that Metrolinx claimed they were doing in this video I filmed on the 29th of March 2019:

Also they claim that it's part of their work to bring service "every 15 minutes or better"? Clearly the existing infrastructure on Lakeshore West can already support 15-minute or better service given that we currently have 15-minute service on weekends and in 2021 we had 15-minute or better...

As others have mentioned, I think the best candidate for tram trains in Ontario is Waterloo-Wellington:

Building only a single platform in the first phase made sense way back in the early 2010's when the station was originally designed, but now that construction has been delayed it seems that the station would open around the same time as the double track anyway. Failing to include the second...

Since when do Metrolinx promises mean anything?

But returning three tracks into service would make shifting the tracks for Ontario Line construction much harder. Having only two tracks in service in the future 6-track corridor gives them more room to have a buffer between the construction zone and the active tracks. So I would assume that...