My apologies for the lack of responsiveness lately, but I'm on paternity leave currenty and therefore have slightly different priorities at the moment...
Perhaps we should move the fantasy HFR discussions to another thread!
Any project can fold anytime before it's funded (and even after that), but if a project which has received auxiliary funding in several consecutive federal budgets and received a recommendation for final approval by the federal parliament's transport committee is a "fantasy", then arguably every single streetcar, light rail or subway you ever rode in this country was a fantasy - until the project was funded and under construction...
Seriously though ... this is a Toronto forum, not a rail forum. One thread for inter-city national rail service is more than enough.
I also wonder what business discussions about restoring daily train service to Sudbury, Western Canada or Vancouver Island have on Urban Toronto (and this thread in particular), but that's where certain commenters in this thread insist to have them...^^
Once you reflect on the geographic scope of what might be called "Urban Toronto" (presumably the GTHA?), there is hardly any VIA service which would fit the description - maybe the Maple Leaf to Niagara Falls (though that continues as an Amtrak-train to NYC), but already the Toronto-London trains 80/81/82/83/85/88 would be kind of a stretch, which makes you wonder what "VIA Rail" discussions actually
do fit into this thread on Urban Toronto. As it happens, SkyriseCities (i.e. the parent forum of Urban Toronto) has a
"Transportation and Infrastructure" section for its Canada page, but it has yet to see a single thread:
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Respectfully, my impression of your agenda in trying to separate the VIA discussion is to have one thread that speaks to “All the great things ViA is doing and has in the works and has gotten right” and a different thread for “what are the risks and deficiencies and things in passenger rail that ought to change”. Apparently voicing the latter is somehow inappropriate or of lesser concern?
I don’t consider the question of “How should VIA structure its Lakeshore service post-HfR” to be a fantasy discussion. Nor is “What ought to happen next after HFR launches”. Those questions have no mandated answer yet, but they are meaningful to get our heads around. We may be spectators and not professionals or decisionmakers, but isn’t that what public forums are for?
In my experience strategy generally involves exploration of strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities. Personally, I’m a lot more interested in discussing the strategy and execution of strategy around rail passenger especially in Ontario, than just observing on models of trains etc. As to execution, that discussion always starts with identifying risks. It’s not a constructive discussion if we are obliged to assume that VIA and Ottawa have figured everything out and nothing might be done differently and nothing will go wrong.
Admittedly, some of the discussions get loopy, and because nothing changes quickly in this space, we often circle back into topics that have been beaten to death before. I do try to stay focused. But if challenging anything status quo means jumping to another thread....
- Paul
I was only sharing into
@robmausser's sentiment that discussing things which are happening or will happen along side with things which are (currently, and for the foreseeable future) impossible to happen is exhausting and fruitless. This doesn't necessarily mean that we shouldn't have both types of discussions, but I believe that if we discuss in a thread dedicated to a particular railroad (be it VIA, Metrolinx or ONR), we need to be clear whether what we would like it to do is actually within its managerial discretion or not. And that's why having certain discussions resurfacing here every single month and needing to re-establish again and again (with a commenter who has blocked me!) that expanding and investing into its Corridor services over its non-Corridor networks is not a testament of indifference or even deliberate neglect of the proportion of Canadians which live outside the Corridor, but simply a consequence of VIA having a very narrow mandate within which it has to allocate its efforts and funding.
Don't get me wrong: I would love to analyze the service concept
@micheal_can has presented here a few dozen pages ago
[edit: he actually shared it on Skyscraper Page, not here] and to demonstrate to him that his fleet requirements would easily exceed those of the current Corridor fleet renewal, before working out with him how we can scale down the ambition while identifying a few incremental steps of what could actually happen anytime soon (I could see ONR operating a daily Toronto-North Bay-Sudbury service, with full integration into ONR's bus network). However, as someone who has first-hand knowledge of what limits the actions VIA might pursue, I will not actively encourage any discussions in
this thread which ignore or deny these limitations, because certain commenters here have demonstrated again and again their unwillingness or inability to distinguish between the things which we might be able to see VIA doing and those which are simply impossible for VIA to do (regardless of how much they might want to do them)...
That said, there can’t be any doubt that this thread is of course the most appropriate place for any discussion about the future of VIA's Lakeshore (or any other existing) services post-HFR! I'm just increasingly annoyed that you seem to be only willing to discuss VIA's ability to maintain meaningful service on the Kingston Sub against CN's own priorities as a hidden cost of HFR, when the need for additional infrastructure upgrades in the Kingston subdivision should be mitigated and not exacerbated by post-HFR Lakeshore service. Maybe you've softened your stance in the meanwhile, but that was my impression...
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Interesting analysis, even if it is a strawman argument. You said, "for the segment you want to bypass (i.e. De Beaujeu to Smiths Falls)" yet I never said anything about De Beaujeu. In fact, I said:
[quote truncated due to character limitations]
Since strawman arguments seem so popular on this forum, I will say this again, none of this is feasible until there is demand for at least 15 trains a day on each of the Toronto-Montreal, Toronto-Ottawa and Ottawa-Montreal routes and VIA has the money to upgrade HFR to HSR.
Rather than shouting "Strawman argument! Strawman argument!", you might want to ask yourself how someone could have possibly gotten the (apparently wrong) impression that you were talking about Montreal-Ottawa trains taking the Alexandria Subdivision all the way west of
De Beaujeu: If I may direct your attention at the map you've posted just
above your initial mention of a bypass around Ottawa:
Just to be sure: I'm well aware of the potential for a connection between the Alexandria and Winchester Subdivisions at Moose Creek and Monkland, as it was a prominent feature in the maps about the VIA Fast and Ecotrain E-300 alignments I’ve shared here multiple times and which were the inspiration for a "Montreal-Ottawa Higher Speed Rail proposal"
I outlined in my Bachelor Thesis:
Other than that, you seem to ignore that the higher your average speed, the higher the per-km construction costs of rail infrastructure and the less time you save with every km you shorten a train's route, which makes it increasingly difficult to justify that expense to only benefit a minority of trains serving this particular HSR corridor (i.e. only those trains which run around the bypassed city).
In any case, I challenge you to find any example of a city of a comparable size and importance as Ottawa being bypassed by a HSR line which is almost 100 km long and runs 40+ km away from the bypassed city and doesn't serve anything on its route. Have a look at Lyon (less than half the size of Ottawa and negligible political importance) and you might see that building a bypass around that city (while serving its airport on the way!) was much more compelling than bypassing Ottawa along the Winchester Subdivision will ever be:
That's it from me probably for another week, but I hope that I succeeded this time in not offending anyone...
