High-speed rail over hockey
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - 16 Comments
Is this the birth of a brave new Michael Ignatieff?
Leader Michael Ignatieff says he hopes for the return of the Quebec Nordiques, but his funding priority would be the often-discussed and never-built high speed rail link from Quebec City to Windsor.
The popular idea of bringing the Nords back to the provincial capital arose when the city’s incumbent mayor began campaigning on a promise to build a modern arena that could attract an NHL team.
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Idea alert
By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 28, 2009 at 12:27 PM - 52 Comments
La Presse confirms Michael Ignatieff’s intention to pursue high-speed rail.
Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff will reportedly promise the building of a high-speed train as part of the Liberal Party’s election platform.
The train would be built along the Quebec City-Windsor corridor, and would have many economic spin-offs for Quebec and Ontario, according to a report in Monday’s La Presse. A high-speed train for the corridor has been studied several times and estimated to cost $20 billion, so the timing of the project would have to depend on government finances at both the federal and provincial levels, the report adds.
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High-speed railroading
By Paul Wells - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 2:27 PM - 114 Comments
From the print edition, Andrew Coyne says a lot of really mean things about my high-speed rail dream. And yet I rather like where his argument ends up.
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It’s a fast train
By Chris Selley - Monday, September 22, 2008 at 6:32 PM - 7 Comments
Elizabeth May on our Green, glorious, incredibly fast future:
“When we really make history is when we get to Parliament, and we are able to change transportation policy in this country to ensure we have access to modern, high-speed trains,” she said in Kamloops.
“If we had access to Canadian-made Bombardier trains that people do in China and Spain and other advanced countries … the trip from coast to coast would be 18 hours instead of five days.”
You won’t find a bigger fan of high-speed rail than me. It’s the tops—the bees’ knees. A true high-speed line between Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal would put the airlines out of business in two weeks, and we’d all wonder why the hell we hadn’t done it years earlier. And the Greens, to their great credit, are avid proponents such ideas.
But an 18-hour trip from Vancouver to Halifax? Well, It’s ambitious, I’ll give them that. May’s vision, assuming it followed the same route she’s taking on her whistlestop tour, would necessitate a coast-to-coast average speed of 353 km/h—a world record, and not just by a little. The current A-to-B speed record for conventional high-speed rail, according to the Railway Gazette’s 2007 survey, is 279.3 km/h over a distance of 167.6 km. Vancouver to Halifax, on VIA Rail’s current route, is 6,531 km. I’m all for thinking big, but maybe we should start out in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal and see how it goes.
