Quote:
Originally Posted by canucklehead2
The last Van Horne HSR cost update from 2013 has the the Alberta HSR project costing...
Option 1: CPR at 200/230 km/h @ $2.5B
Option 2: Greenfield @ 250 km/h @ $3.9B
Option 3: Greenfield electric @ 320 km/h @ 5.1B
With those numbers I'd love to throw up a poll and see what people would support... I'm personally a fan of going whole hog and developing a proper 320 km/h line but the cost would be double the CPR option (which the company has been on board with since the mid 1990's even in the study itself) and I think that's a tough sell for a project that already is pushing the limits of what people will accept in a Reagan/Trumpenomic era...
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Sorry to burst your bubble but the numbers cited by the Van Horne Institute are chronically under valued, High Speed 2 in the UK, which is 70km short of the distance between Calgary and Edmonton, is projected to cost over $27 billion.
OVER $27 BILLION!
Also there are very few operationally profitable high speed rail services, one of the most profitable is the Eurostar, this connects London, Paris and Brussels, and recently extended services to Amsterdam. The population of Amsterdam is larger than the combined populations of Edmonton, Red Deer and Calgary, the population in the service area of Eurostar is greater than the population of the whole of Canada.
High speed rail in even the Montreal-Toronto corridor is decades away, in Alberta we need to learn to walk before we start running, which is the main reasoning to my idea. Once the population number justify, maybe then we can start thinking about High Speed Rail.