VIA Rail

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by acottawa

To get the kind of average speeds they are promising there is going to have to be a fair bit of overlap into HSR territory.

I don't see how you get that. They just need long stretches where they operate at closer to max speed. An average speed of 78 mph, does not mean in anyway they need to operate above 125 mph (very lowest end of HSR) to achieve that average. Remember that the goal here is to stay below requirements for expensive grade separation. If they can cobble together enough stretches at 110 mph and keep suburban running at a decent speed (> 50 mph), they should be able to pull this off. And if they achieve 3.5 hrs instead of 3.25 hrs as rumoured in the Globe article, I don't think too many people are going to be crying over it. Still much faster than driving.

Originally Posted by acottawa

They are promising a 25% reduction in Ottawa-Montreal, so I am not sure how they would get those sorts of improvements without significant investment. They also need to get through Montreal to the start of the Q-G, where there is no obvious route and as far as I know have not published a plan for doing that.

Urban Sky has already covered this in previous posts. They've come close to the proposed HFR trip times in existing services. All they need are a few improvements to ensure that can be done consistently in both directions.

Originally Posted by acottawa

The VIA owned track between Smith Falls and Coteau is not particularly fast, despite not having the freight conflicts that everyone keeps complaining about. They have not released any plans, but if they are cheap I don’t understand why they wouldn’t have implemented them already.

It's been my criticism that they should have spent the $90-100 million to do this already. Best that I can understand is that they don't want to build that infrastructure if the rest of the project isn't going to happen. A large chunk of the requirement is based on through service at Ottawa, creating specific meeting times that would drive requirements for passing tracks.

Originally Posted by acottawa

We don’t really know how much of the Agincourt-Glen Tay infrastructure is actually useable for the speeds Via needs. Agincourt to Havelock is class 1 track with a 10 mph speed limit. The last time via used the line it took hours. Is it just replacing the rails (or installing rails on the snowmobile track) or does all the ballast have to be replaced? Do the bridges have to be replaced? How are they getting across Peterborough? How are they crossing the Trent? (using the existing swing bridge?). If you have to grade separated he line through Peterborough and build a new bridge then the cost is not much different than HSR.

And then there are the curves. Much of the route looks like a sine wave because Victorian engineers avoided geographic features. Since they have non-tilting rolling stock many curves will probably have to go.

Yes, there's lots of details. And most of that is beyond the scope of random bulletin board discussions. That's for the owner's engineers VIA hired to sort out when they contract.

Originally Posted by acottawa

The cost of going through or over geographic obstacles is not much different if you’re building to HSR or HFR specs.

Disagree. HFR isn't a specific speed commitment. It's primary goal is frequency. Capacity and speed are corollary benefits achieved simply by building a dedicated corridor for high frequency. This is very different from HSR where speed is the goal and the entire corridor, track and rolling stock are designed to that goal.

Originally Posted by acottawa

As I have said before, this proposal is costed (about 5 million per km) as if relatively straightforward upgrade to an existing line. Yet the average speeds are estimated as if it were a greenfield project, engineered from the ground up to meet very ambitious targets.

Again, keep in mind their primary goal is frequency. With reliability a close second. Most of the speed gains they get are ancillary, coming from a dedicated corridor. So I really doubt there's an "ambitious target" for speed.

And the per km cost of the whole project is a bit deceiving. There's very little required to be spent on Ottawa-Montreal. And there's existing corridors for both Toronto-Ottawa and Montreal-Quebec City, which at least removes a lot of the costs associated with assembling a corridor and expropriating land. Most of the money will actually be going to improve track itself. This is very different from a real greenfield project where you'd be spending millions per km buying up land.

In any event, until the JPO actually puts out all their work next year, all we have to go on is what the media got through FOIA. I think it's a reach to start slamming it as completely infeasible based on that info.