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    Alto - High Speed Rail (Toronto-Quebec City)

    The project you linked (YNSE) has a price tag of $5.6 billion (i.e., not just the $1.4 billion quoted here for the „Advance Tunneling“) and is a walk in the park compared with the complexities of tunneling underneath dense downtown areas, this nation‘s busiest rail corridor and rail station and...
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    Alto - High Speed Rail (Toronto-Quebec City)

    I suspect it‘s rather ALTO which would be reluctant to agree on such a cohabitation. For Metrolinx, track-sharing could be a welcome vehicle to unlock federal funds for measures which have massive benefit to their own services. You are describing a stretch which would be between 5 km north and...
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    GO Transit: Construction Projects (Metrolinx, various)

    I was solely commenting on the question whether additional tracks were necessary if a hypothetical station was to be added at Lawrence East by sharing my professional suspicion that this additional station would be less disruptive if it was located at the main tracks without any passing tracks...
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    Alto - High Speed Rail (Toronto-Quebec City)

    Indeed, even the fastest scheduled downtown-to-downtown travel speed I‘m aware of in Europe (Paris to Strasbourg at an average speed of 253 km/h) starts rather slow out of Paris Gare de l‘Est:
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    GO Transit: Construction Projects (Metrolinx, various)

    I‘d like to just add the perspective of a Rail Operations Analyst to that final sentence: If the suburban train goes into a siding track, it will lose a bit of time due to speed restrictions entering/leaving that track and a lot more (maybe 2 minutes), while waiting for the intercity train to...
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    Alto - High Speed Rail (Toronto-Quebec City)

    Thank you for reminding us of what I thought (hoped?) we had already established months ago:
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    Alto - High Speed Rail (Toronto-Quebec City)

    I can’t comment on behalf of either party, but the working assumption at Metrolinx seems to be that ALTO would share their tracks and stop at Kennedy station…
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    Alto - High Speed Rail (Toronto-Quebec City)

    Well, if I compare the privately-owned-and-run rail systems of Japan with the state-monopolies of ex-Yugoslavian States (like Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia or Albania), I start to doubt that state ownership of transportation systems is the golden bullet you believe it to be…
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    Alto - High Speed Rail (Toronto-Quebec City)

    I’m a bit lost here: what exactly is the tunnel and detour we are talking about here?
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    Alto - High Speed Rail (Toronto-Quebec City)

    Just need to purchase enough shares in CN and CPKC to obtain a controlling stake and then (or probably already before that!) fantasy has no limits… 🤣
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    Alto - High Speed Rail (Toronto-Quebec City)

    From what I piece together from the grapevine (and should be consumed with a grain of salt), the progress blocker is not necessarily the shed itself, but the support structures underneath the tracks, which would need to get fixed before any major modifications or upgrades like electrification...
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    Alto - High Speed Rail (Toronto-Quebec City)

    This map provokes me to circle back to the evolution of the Fulda-Gerstungen HSR line (in a more detailed way than I just did for the Hanau-Fulda HSR line in the Quebec-Windsor Corridor thread), which shows how the routes of German (if not: European) HSR projects are continuously refined...
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    Alto - High Speed Rail (Toronto-Quebec City)

    Yes, public (!) consultations will last at least 3 years before the route can be finalized, but this is exactly the reason why they are normally done as early as possible in the planning process, so that you don't waste years in your little silo planning your route which will require substantial...
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    Alto - High Speed Rail (Toronto-Quebec City)

    Thank you! This is exactly where I start to feel very unease with the “High Speed Rail Network Act”, which is certainly amplified by ALTO’s deeply entrenched intransparence and outright secrecy about the kind of information any individual citizen would need to assess how they personally will be...
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    Metrolinx: Other Items (catch all)

    It‘s impossible to provide this depth of detail in an accessible format. There should be an „accessible“ version which is optimized for the user groups you describe…
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    Alto - High Speed Rail (Toronto-Quebec City)

    CPKC (Havelock Sub) and CFQG (Trois-Rivières Sub) would save considerable property tax payments, maintenance costs and operating costs (less labour costs resulting from drastically improved speed limits allowing much faster journey times). I don’t see them demanding hundreds of millions for...
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    Alto - High Speed Rail (Toronto-Quebec City)

    Okay, so they stress the importance of intermodal connections (specifically at airports) and to build ALTO as fast as possible. Yet, they haven’t decided yet such essential „details“ like whether the train will stop at any airport…? As Marco Chitti has pointed out in that article we just...
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    Alto - High Speed Rail (Toronto-Quebec City)

    I think it‘s highly unsusual to budget this kind of amounts before giving a formal go-ahead decision to a clearly defined project. As steep as our consultancy fees are, I don‘t see how you can possibly spend a billion Dollar in a single year without paying for actual physical assets (such as...
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    Alto - High Speed Rail (Toronto-Quebec City)

    For those people who are curious to see what level of detail is available and discussed in public engagement forums for a HSR project in Germany which is currently scheduled to start construction in 2032 and open in 2037 (So very similar to ALTO Phase 1, which is scheduled to start construction...
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    VIA Rail

    What do you think “Detroit MCR” stands for? 🙂

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