crs1026
Superstar
VIA can say only what the government directs them to say. I’m sure they would love to say more.
-Paul
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- Thread starter kEiThZ
- Start date
VIA can say only what the government directs them to say. I’m sure they would love to say more.
-Paul
Urban Sky
Senior Member
God help us, absolutely not!
VIA can’t build anything without funding and mandate and this hasn’t been a VIA Rail project since the federal government has founded “VIA HFR-TGF” some five years ago as (admittedly confusingly) subsidiary of VIA Rail, but which has all its masters sitting in Ottawa (TC, Treasury) and Toronto (CIB), not in Montreal.
There absolutely is no question about that the HFR downtown terminus should be at Union Station and Gare Centrale, i.e., where the respective citys’ transit systems have their biggest hubs and where the by far most significant agglomeration of office jobs can be found.
I don’t have the time to run the gravity model, but let’s recall why the Ottawa Bypass is such a bad idea: The ridership potential around Ottawa is OM>TO>TM, which means that building the Ottawa Bypass only benefits the smallest of the three markets and is too small to actually justify its own trains. Running separate TM trains weakens the TO and OM markets and leads to less frequencies for all than if operating TOM trunk trains.
Now look at Montreal, where OM>TM>MQ>OQ>TQ: For the two largest markets, nothing on the Quebec-Montreal segment matters, for the third-largest market, only the “downtown station” in Montreal matters and for the remaining “through-markets”, only the transfer point matters. At the same time, the ridership on TOM is a lot higher than on MQ, which makes running through-trains commercially unviable, especially if that implies skipping Gare Centrale.
The obvious solition for Montreal is to run full-length trains on the TOM spine and to have a MQ train connect at Dorval Airport, while MQ passengers board the MQ train at either Dorval, De la Concorde or a transfer point inbetween. There absolutely isn’t any need to contemplate forcing MT passengers out of Gare Centrale and you can bet that all three consortiums have enough commercial expertise to dismiss the Ottawa Bypass or Montreal downtown-outside-of-downtown ideas as extremely harmful and counterproductive…
nfitz
Superstar
I'm curious if any of the three consortiums proposed the VIA Fast route for either option (CN track through Kingston, and greenfield from there to Smith Falls). (I say that without reading VIA Fast, just going by what was said back then, before the Liberals killed it.
innsertnamehere
Superstar
Urban Sky
Senior Member
I don’t think it would make sense for the HFR scenario (as the detour makes reaching the aggressive travel time targets challenging), but for the HSR scenario, OTTW-SMTF-KGON-Peterborough would have been my personal preference, making Kingston with a new station north the 401 a hub station for transfers between Express and Local (Lakeshore) trains…
Mihairokov
Active Member
Definitely. I'm not taking HFR to have to transfer at Pearson or Dorval.
chrisw
Active Member
Clearly, I meant that riders could easily transfer to the UP if they wanted to go to Pearson.You could run an RDC or even a DMU from Central Station in Montreal, right into the platforms at Pearson Airport tomorrow if you wanted to.
It would cause a mess with service though ...
micheal_can
Senior Member
With the REM going to the airport in Doval, the planners could see the 2 as options to avoid going to the city centres.Are there any HSR that is successful that does not go to the downtowns of the major cities?
MisterF
Senior Member
The VIA Fast route brings us right back to the main problem that HFR was created to fix: dealing with non-cooperative freight railways that the federal government refuses to stand up to. If CN and CP aren't interested in fundamentally reshaping their core operations then Via Fast is a non starter. The whole point of HFR is acknowledging this reality and eliminating reliance on CN as much as possible.
crs1026
Superstar
As much as the plan does greatly reduce conflicts with freight trains, and use of private investor assets, any of the possible scenarios continues to depend on freight railway cooperation..... particularly in west end Montreal, and in northeast Toronto. Both zones have choke points, especially related to very large bridges that would be costly and environmentally controversial to duplicate.
I will be very interested to see whether the railways will recalibrate their opinions based on HxR leading to a reduced VIA footprint on freight lines.... if the local services are to survive, the whole question of fast passenger trains coexisting with slower freight trains will remain, and so far there has been no enthusiasm to change the balance of power. Maybe we will end up building new local/regional lines to further separate the two..... that seems to me as the most expensive way to solve the problem.
- Paul
MisterF
Senior Member
Yes that's why I said "as much as possible". While the HFR route does appear to leave some areas subject to freight sharing, those areas are vastly reduced and that should lead to a significant improvement to scheduling and reliability. But we still don't have a winning bidder or detailed plans so there's an element of speculation here.
micheal_can
Senior Member
What about buying the lines through the cities and a greenfield new alignment to connect those downtown sections?
CapitalSeven
Senior Member
I think that was the essence of one of the much earlier HSR proposals. North of the current lines, but south of the shield country which makes the Havelock route so curvaceous. The request documents specify the new route has to go through Peterborough and all of the preliminary work has focused on making that work, so I don't see any chance someone is going to propose a lakeshore buyout.
As for the "Ottawa bypass," I still don't see how anyone is going to come up with a reasonable Toronto-Montreal travel time that doesn't involve a separate service not stopping in Ottawa unless it's (nearly-)full HSR. So spend a huge chunk of money for speed, or build a track in the nearly flat, nearly straight , nearly empty corridor between Smith's Falls and the junction past the Quebec border. Since the companies are apparently submitting two proposals, one faster than the other, my guess is that some of the less-fast proposals will consider the bypass.
Urban Sky
Senior Member
Quick reminder that you can’t buy something what the current owner is unwilling to sell. CN operates trains through Point-Saint-Charles, CPKC through Agincourt and neither will be able willing to sell any ROW which serves their transcontinental operations. However, you can build grade separations to separate your trains from their trains, but even that requires cooperation from the infrastructure owner (google “Dorval bridge to nowhere” if you don’t know what I mean)…
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Urban Sky
Senior Member
CPKC’s Winchester Subdivision measures 90 miles from De Beaujeu (MP 35) to Smiths Falls (MP 125). This means that such an Ottawa Bypass would add 145 km (or 25%) to the 580 km of rail infrastructure which needs to be built or upgraded between Toronto and Montreal. This is a considerable cost escalation.
At the same time every Toronto-Montreal train which bypasses Ottawa loses more TO and OM passengers than it gains TM passengers from cutting travel times by maybe 15 minutes, as I’ve shown here:
VIA Rail
Conversely, bypassing Ottawa with Montreal-Toronto express trains undermines the key trick to minimize operating costs and fleet size: by merging the Montreal-Ottawa, Montreal-Toronto and Ottawa-Toronto trains into one one single corridor, while outsourcing the intermediary markets onto...
The Ottawa Bypass thus entails high incremental capital costs (when building it) and negative incremental revenues (when using it). It’s an absolute no-brainer to discard this idea as unviable.
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