High Speed Rail in Canada

[YOWetal]

Originally Posted by acottawa

Where is Europe building this kind of rail? (i.e. a new or significantly renovated rail line to connect sub one million cities or new or substantially renovated rail lines to connect cities thousands of km apart with no intermediate population centres of any significance). You would struggle to even find any regularly scheduled train service at these distances even using existing rails (I think there is one, from Poland to Frankfurt that just launched last year).

North America is much larger than Europe and the Western European trains that most Canadians are familiar cover a relatively compact (and high density) area by North American standards.

RailBaltic is the former but I'm nitpicking and distracting your main point which is how delusional the idea of St. John to Halifax or Calgary to Winnipeg passenger service is which I completely agree with. But sure if we destroy the financial ability to drive a car then we can end up with Russian like rail service.

Originally Posted by Taeolas

That's also why proponents for Maritime rail are saying we need track improvements so that the train can get ballpark similar numbers as car travel.

As a country we've been decreasing our investment in PAX rail for decades, and doing other bone headed decisions (like letting CP/CN degrade rail lines in general), so of course we have a lot of infrastructure debt.

Setting up an SJ - HFX route is possible, and probably a lot easier than most other areas. The track is there; it just needs twinning and/or upgrading so it can handle PAX speeds, as well as the rolling stock to actually run the service. Which means we need a government willing to step up to the freight companies and force them to finally maintain and upgrade the rail equivalent of dirt roads they've been running for decades and forcing VIA to share. Considering how port traffic at SJ and Halifax is growing (or potentially growing if chokepoints could be resolved), sorting out the rail seems a no brainer from many angles.