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Originally Posted by nito
France and Spain also have large areas of land that limit their habitable land, the Alps, Pyrenees, Cantabrians, Sierra Nevada, Massifs, etc… Even then, the contrast in the level of infrastructure between France and Spain and that of the Windsor-Quebec corridor is stark.
Which of course comes back to a previous point I brought up, where is the infrastructure to support this future growth? The Windsor-Quebec Corridor doesn’t have an equivalent to the West Coast Main Line.
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Yes, the federal and provincial governments have been pretty bad at building infrastructure, especially non-automobile infrastructure. That's been slowly changing in the last two decades but we have a long way to go. As for the infrastructure to support future growth, the most significant intercity rail project in the works is Via Rail's high frequency rail project. It proposes to upgrade or rebuild a series of old rail corridors to create a new mainline connecting Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec City. It's not approved yet. Further along are expansions to urban and regional rail, especially GO Transit, which is being expanded and electrified to be similar to existing European systems. They were even calling it RER for a while.
We'll never have an equivalent to the West Coast Mainline because unlike most countries, the government doesn't control the rail system. Most of it is owned and controlled by private freight railways and they don't play nice with passenger trains. Sure the government could nationalize the system and run it as public infrastructure but there's no political will to do that. So in the last 15 years or so GO has bought as much track as it could and now owns most of its system, and Via is proposing to build its own separate line. Basically we're building an entirely new rail system for passenger trains separate from the existing freight lines.
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Originally Posted by The North One
Canada has been working on high speed rail for a long time but who knows when it actually happens. But I think it's safe to predict it will go vastly smoother than any US attempts.
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There are no active high speed rail plans. Via's plan isn't high speed, but it doesn't really have to be. If it's successful then high speed will be more likely sometime in the future.