[Hybrid247]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

I was just perusing some UK intercity rail pages on Wikipedia and it seems like their history is pretty similar to the HFR proposal in that other than HS1 which was prompted by the chunnel megaproject, the other railways are at most "higher speed" lines that are incrementally upgraded legacy routes that support speeds not much higher than proposed for VIA HFR. Both the East Coast Main Line (ECML) and the West Coast Main Line (WCML) seem to have top speeds of about 200km/h with that speed necessitating the use of tilting train technology on the WCML due to the curves.

Quick little note on HS1. I did a little digging into some of the investors VIA was in talks with for HFR, one of which was the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan (OTPP). It turns out they jointly purchased HS1 about 10 years ago with OMERS Worldwide. Had no idea. So rail investment would very much align with their portfolio. Question is, are they bullish enough on HFR to invest in it.

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

I have to wonder if tilting technology (along with super-elevation) could increase the potential speed of VIA's routes without much more expensive and disruptive curve re-alignments?

I've wondered this too. Also, if they can't work in tandem, I wonder what would be the best option between superelevation and tilting trains regarding costs and performance.

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

Yes the UK has nearly double Canada's population, but about 1/2 of Canada's population is within the corridor which is similar in length to the ECML and WCML. So that would make our frequent rail-viable population base roughly equivalent to a quarter of theirs (and of course they have two such mainlines averaging around 50-100km apart. Yet some people scoff at the idea that a similar quality of service could attract even 7 million riders/year to VIA's corridor service which would still only be 20% as much as that one service on the WCML. And while the UK does have higher car ownership costs, they're also the epicenter of low-cost discount airlines.

A few things about this. The 7 million riders was touted for the T-O-M section of corridor, which serves a population of about 12-13M. So that's roughly 18-19% of the UK's population, not quite 1/4. However, that actually doesn't have much to do with my reasoning to doubt the 7M figure.

If you've followed the HFR proposal over the years, you'd notice that much of the purported benefits and costs have significantly changed. Back when VIA was touting 7M riders, they were also touting a Tor-Ott run time of 2.5 hours (!!!) and project cost of $2.5B for just the infrastructure (excluding rolling stock and electrification). If 2.5 hours was actually the possible run-time, then 7 million riders would be far more believable. However, they've since changed the purported run-time to "as low as 3.25 hours" and increased the cost to $4B for just the infrastructure. Not to mention they seem to have dropped the 7M ridership figure for T-O-M and are now touting 9.9M for the entire corridor by 2030.

When you consider that and the rate of service and ridership growth over the years (that I broke down in my earlier post), I think my skepticism is warranted.