Here I go creating fantasy timings again.
I took the basic KW line, upgraded to 95 mph operation, and sacrificed the Georgetown and St Marys stops (which I would argue are generating very little business for VIA), and applied a slightly more conservative dwell factor than Urban Sky. I took some of the railway "unavoidables" into account - the approaches to both London and Union require some slow running for the first mile or two, the segment shared with RER may have some crossover activity, and Guelph may be insolvable. This gives one a baseline for a HFR operation with a very low capital investment required (well, it assumes the Bypass solves the Halton conflicts). The end-to-end running time is 112 minutes, even with stops - better than the southern route.
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Now take the same route, upgrade the easy bits to 110 mph.... the shortest segments aren't worth upgrading because the train will decelerate so soon after exceeding 95 mph, so the time savings is small. Drop Brampton as a stop to gain a few minutes at higher speed and save one station's worth of dwell time. The best performance is now 98 minutes.
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Those times are hugely competitive with driving. The Malton-London time is very appealing to air travel connections, provided a good shuttle bus is implemented.
The things I would point out are:
- this is a hugely low capital cost proposition overall. Why anyone - VIA, GO, PPP, whomever - would wait til after the Toronto-Quebec HFR is done to start work on this, I don't understand.
- if you look at how dwell time and stop spacing add minutes, you can see why this shouldn't be thought of as a GO line extension. You need limited stops to keep the end to end time attractive. The more stops you add, the less bang you get out of a higher top speed, because trains spend more of the distance at accelerating/decelerating speed. I like the ideal of GO running it at lower overhead (VIA, for instance, supports a complex reservation/ticketing system that isn't needed if you are running hourly trains with assured empty seats) but it is not a 12-car bilevel proposition.
- if you want to improve on this further, to a 120 mph or higher service, knock yourself out. You will spend a whole pile more money than this scenario. And you will have to answer to whatever additional towns you blow through without stopping.
- Paul