Quote:
Originally Posted by roger1818
Being born and raised in Abbotsford, I am quite familiar with this region. The problem is finding a good route.
The route of the old interurban line (now the Southern Railway of British Columbia) is usually proposed, but it is quite meandering and would be very slow. On top of that, the stretch around Langley is heavily used by coal trains going to Robert's Bank, so trains could easily get stuck waiting for a long, slow, freight train to pass.
CN's ROW is more direct, but it follows the river and is quite a distance from where most people live (it is mostly ALR land). Also, east of the Mission bridge, it is part of part of CN and CP's track sharing agreement which has all eastbound traffic north of the river (on CP's track) and all westbound traffic is south of the river (on CN's track), which wouldn't be conducive for commuter rail. It is also heavily used by freight trains.
Probably the direct and central route would be to follow the freeway, but it would be expensive as it would require new track. I am also not sure how best to route the train into Vancouver from the freeway. Having stations near a freeway isn't optimal either.
While I agree that demand is there, finding a viable solution won't be easy. |
Wouldn't it be possible to mix these routes? The interurban route to Langley is pretty good (passes through areas where people live), and it looks like it crosses highway 1. Wouldn't a Langley train be useful right now?
I guess the service needs to hit some baseline speed in order to be viable (not very fast in the Lower Mainland!). The overall theme of my posts is that it seems like there are a lot of rail routes in Canada that could be improved incrementally. Yet the discussion on SSP is often a binary one about whether or not to build expensive "high-speed rail". Question why routes of a few hundred km with 1 million+ people don't have any passenger rail service at all and people start talking about why you're a fool for demanding a Shinkansen for Regina.
I think another factor in Canada is that we underspend on infrastructure and consider modest projects very expensive. The Lower Mainland's GDP is around $150B or so. Projects like the $3B Broadway train are not actually that expensive when placed into a historical context or a future context of decades of use and economic growth. And BC is one of the better provinces for transit development.
Around metro Vancouver and the Lower Mainland there are many at-grade rail crossings. It would be good to get rid of them even aside from passenger rail service.