Quote:
Originally Posted by Mister F
The most important part of high speed rail isn't the trains, it's the infrastructure that they run on. The Turbo had it completely backwards and was doomed to fail.
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IIRC, there were also only 5 Turbo trainsets, later reduced to just 3. After infrastructure, the next most important thing is to have a consistent, frequent service, and all they could do is run two trains per day per direction.
CN ran other TO-MTL trains, but they would have been using the conventional equipment, running much more local service with even longer travel times than VIA's slowest trains today.
People glamorize the Turbo as a high speed train that was too ahead of its time, but operationally, I think it was the opposite: the last example of a private railroad running a flagship streamliner. It was a daily luxury service on unimproved track. It was definitely more like the "Burlington Zephyr" or the "Twentieth Century Limited" than it was like Shinkansen or TGV, which were built-from-the-ground-up frequent high speed rail systems.