I’d go even further and take back the right-of-way to west of Casselman, another important curve. The current ROW would then be traded to CP, with a freight connection from Moose Creek to around Avonmore.
This still involves quite a bit of new trackbed and many grade separations. I’m rather more fond of the idea of reactivating the line through Rigaud. This keeps you out of the hair of the freight lines, significantly reduces the number of grade separations, but means a new tunnel under Hudson and either a significant speed restriction or an expensive and high-impact viaduct/Ile-aux-Tortes crossing through Vaudreuil.
Victoriaville and Plessisville are non starters unfortunately. The original rail ROW has been entirely reclaimed by bike paths and parks, two things that will be basically impossible to interrupt. Even if we say the railway will integrate a bike path, the opposition would be legendary. Same for Granby: bikepaths, parks, riverfront.
Any new lines to these cities would not be able to reach the center, so we shouldn’t even bother.
As for south shore/north shore, the north shore does have trois rivières (~150k) where spur lines could go north to Shawinigan etc. , as well some small cities between. Double tracking should be considered by default because it could allow us to run local service to the smaller cities too. It’s more flexible.
I don’t think this is something that should be cheaped out on tbh. 1 billion is nothing in the long term. Literally pocket change in terms of infrastructure.
We also have to be really careful when calculating travel times… Remember that Montréal-Ottawa contains the Dorion-Centrale portion which is 40km long and where speed is not very high. Any discussion of high speed infrastructure without solving this problem first makes it irrelevant…
There isn’t the travel demand for more than a train per hour. Take the number of cars on A20 east of Drummondville, 23000 per day per direction times 69.5% (removing trucks). Split that across 18 trains a day, and you get the equivalent of 888 cars per train, at best, travelling on that shore from anywhere west of Drummondville to Quebec. Having an intercity transit frequency that is one half of the travel time just about optimizes operating cost vs usage, and at one train per hour per direction, single track works.
Rigaud wasn’t what I had in mind, but the track is rather straight with a few wide curves and goes straight into the Ottawa station. The main problem that I can see with that idea is that it has been converted into a bike route. There likely would be a lot of opposition to reactivating it. Why was that route abandoned in the first place?
Because, as I pointed out, there’s an easier option. Just build a spur between Moose Creek and the CP alignment. In one of your earlier posts, you said that the land was rather flat. There aren’t any big hill, but it definitely isn’t flat. If you pan the map on Google earth, you’ll find out that this segment of track has a series of low rolling hills. There’s also a number of rather large swamps in the woods surrounding the track. That’s quite characteristic of that area. Environmentalists would throw a fit if the government decided that some of those areas were needed to widen curves and straighten the track. It would also take the route away from a number of smaller municipalities which could buy some good will thoward the project.
It was abandonned because CP owned it and CP abandonned all its routes into Ottawa. CN had the better passenger route along the lake, so they maintained their passenger operations and used their line (Alexandria branch) for it. CN then also took care of any industry that happened to be left over.
The Rigaud line is reasonably straight, with the largest bypass needed around Plantagenet station (in addition to Hudson as mentionned earlier). It goes through far fewer backyards and has fewer road and farm crossings.
I was using the A20 as a bit of a ridiculous upper limit comparison. If all the traffic on that highway can fit into a train per hour, the demand between Montréal and Québec is safely less than that.
The better way of estimating the travel demand is by taking a ridership model like Alon Levy’s gravity model. That estimate gives a ridership level of 2,14 million passengers per year per direction to Québec from everywhere to the west. Japan runs about one 400m long train per hour per 5.8 million pax p.a.
A diesel train between Montreal and Quebec City for the next 50 years is a complete non-starter. With no time gain and GHG emissions to boot, Quebecers will keep driving electric cars between the two cities.
It’s not for the next 50 years, but for the next 20. The Siemens chargers that VIA is currently purchasing would be appropriate for the service, so best not to waste rolling stock we will already have. Once they reach end of life, go for electrification.
Most trains run for about 20 years before they either need a major refurbishment or reach the end of their life. Given the timeline that VIA has given us, the Siemens Chargers will already be at their expected end of life by the time the HFR / HSR line is operational, so that’s a moot point unless we assume a faster schedule.
il ne faut pas non plus oublier que le corridor existant sera toujours là pour desservir les villes situées le long du lac Ontario ainsi que la rive sud au Québec. tout nouveau service doit être complémentaire.
While I agree that a HSR line between Toronto and Montreal is the priority and that the current proposed project is compromising that primary purpose in order to check too many secondary (or tertiary) boxes, I don’t think I would go as far as saying that a hybrid solution (“chimerical line”) has no added value. If a significant portion of the line allows high-speed, the total travel time could be fairly interesting.
It ultimately depends on the price tag, but if a hybrid with a majority (eg: 60-70%) of HSR costs lets say half the price of a complete HSR system, I think it could be an interesting compromise (and more likely to get built!). The urban segments would be very costly to upgrade to HSR, and maybe their financial weight exceeds their benefits. It reminds me of the 80:20 rule (Pareto principle), where 20% of the work lends 80% of the results, with the remaining 80% of the work lending 20% of the results.
That being said, I still think the detour by Ottawa is a mistake, not only because it leads to a longer route, but mostly because I fear the topography will limit the possibility of HSR on a good portion of the line. I am somewhat reassured by the Alstom proposal which seems to suggest >200km/h would be realistic up to Peterborough, but I wonder if with the same money a line along the river and the lake could achieve a better transit time. An antenna toward Ottawa would be sufficient, or maybe an HFR hybrid route that could “double” the HSR route to allow service to Ottawa (eg: Montreal-Ottawa-Kingston HFR hybrid running alongside Montreal-Kingston HSR).
By trying to improve too much the regional service, the proposed project jeopardizes the main objective of efficiently linking Toronto to Montreal and compete with the plane.
The Ottawa detour with a bypass of the slow sections of the Alexandria subdivision adds about 20 minutes in end-to-end travel time vs going straight from Smith Falls to Montreal. Having an Ottawa spur would mean that trains would have to branch, reducing frequency between any given city pair, which would likely mean a train every 30 minutes per branch.
To me, it makes sense to build out HSR through Ottawa as that provides the shortest total amount of track to build while keeping train frequency high between all three destinations.
Japan runs the Shinkansen with a 3 minute headway. I really don’t see any reason why we could not have one out of every 2 trains go straight to Toronto while the other one makes a stop in Ottawa. We aren’t going to be running 3 minute headways, so the amount of headway isn’t an issue.
J’ai manqué pas mal toute la convo, donc excusez-moi si je répète quelque chose qui a déjà été dit.
Ce que j’avais trouvé intéressant en France c’était que pour faire Paris-Toulouse, le TGV se rend jusqu’à Bordeaux où il lâche quelques wagons. À partir de là il utilise des rails normaux et roule plus lentement (même si pas mal plus vite que nos petits trains tchou tchou!) jusqu’à Toulouse.
Je pense que ce système est utilisé dans plusieurs autres connexions.