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Originally Posted by esquire
Poland wouldn't have high speed rail or anything close to it on a run like Winnipeg-Brandon. There would be a few conventional trains a day of reasonably high standard, but not much more than that.
For context, the only thing close to true high speed rail lines in Poland is the Warsaw-Krakow-Katowice route, which is roughly on par with Toronto-Montreal-Ottawa in Canada. There are no HSR lines radiating out from, say, Bialystok to Augustow.
For what it's worth, population densities and shorter densities make passenger rail transportation a more viable option throughout most of Europe. I'm not saying it can't happen in Western Canada, but it's going to be a lot harder to make it work outside of a couple key corridors like Calgary-Edmonton.
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What Truenorth said. I agree with him about the speeds and frequency; two trains heading to Winnipeg in the morning and back in the evening would be a good starting point. If the trains stopped near route 90, Jubilee, and at Union station, you can't pretend people wouldn't take those for shopping, game days, and handling business in the city. That would be so much more useful than a coach that dumps you off at the airport (and doesn't even exist anymore).
Eventually you'd want to have hourly trains, which is what they would run on a line like this in Europe, but... baby steps. What this line would represent, as much as anything, would be the start in a generation-spanning project to building a regional rail system and ingrain rail use in the Manitoban culture. Manitobans are very quick to burn down anything the second it shows a hint of being less than an unqualified success, and, well, that's why Manitoba doesn't have much to show for itself.
As for Poland and high-speed rail, I'm not sure they even have a real high-speed rail line. I know you can get around at 200kph between major cities, but true 300kph HSR is actually pretty rare in Europe. Spain and France have it, but even in Germany there are only a few high-speed stretches between western cities. It's been 30 years and they still haven't been able to upgrade any eastern track to high speed standards. Only recently can you travel between Berlin and Hamburg at 200kph!
That's a big point Canadians need to understand: building rail takes time. Nobody but China jumps up and builds HSR from scratch. If Canada wants to one day have HSR, it's going to start with modest regional rail like this. If Canada started building today, in 30 years people in Brandon might not only be able to take an hourly train to Winnipeg, but one to Kenora, or Winkler, or Gimli. And after another 30 years of incremental improvements they'd realistically be able to make their trips in half the time. Then it would make sense to start building the moonshots between Brandon and Regina, or Kenora and Thunder Bay, or Rimouski and Moncton, or Kelowna and Banff.
One more thing about Poland that I think is instructive: Lodz.
If you went there on your travels, forgive me for boring you.
Lodz is probably the most rundown place I've ever seen. It's like the '90s version of the Exchange District writ over an entire city instead of just 20 blocks. It's the city's feature most strongly reminiscent of Winnipeg (besides the Polish people).
It's dead-centre in Poland. It used to be one of the most important textile centres in the world. That kept on until the end of communism, when it stopped having any textile industry at all. It suffered a precipitous population decline since. The cityscape--itself chewed up with falling-down tenements and empty lots--is studded with some massive, abandoned industrial hulks. Some have been repurposed; there's even one near the city centre that's been repurposed as a Forks-esque space.
Beyond that, the Winnipeg comparisons dry up, because despite the city losing hundreds of thousands of residents and its main industry, they've doubled down on it and made some massive infrastructure investments. The largest is a tunnelled connection between the two rail stations at the edges of the city, uniting them in the centre at a massive train station. They know they occupy a vital place in their country, and they're investing to capitalize on it.
Anyway, that's where I came up with the Poland test.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Truenorth00
It's easier in Europe because they use rail for passenger services and road for cargo. We're the other way around here. But I wish there wasn't such a hesitancy to support some regional rail services.
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They also move a lot of freight by water. The place is almost all coastline, but they've also spend, what,
centuries? building canals, weirs, and locks all over the place. The result is that they can send barges pretty far inland, down secondary and even tertiary rivers, to river ports in a lot of inland cities. This obviously supports some honking urban and industrial areas like the Rhine-Ruhr, but also cities far inland like Berlin (and the significant industrial presence of Siemens there), and the enormous VW Wolfsburg plant (which also does rail shipping.)
I mention this because it's demonstrates how older forms of infrastructure don't lose their utility. Western Canada missed out on developing river shipping because railways usurped the role of rivers almost as soon as the west started developing. That's fine; it would be nice to have canals and navigable rivers, but the railways have served. However, I see a lot of people these days claiming that investing in rail is pointless because of next-gen technology like self-driving cars and hyperloop. Whether either of those deliver on their wild promises, they won't replace, but rather complement, existing infrastructure.
An aside, for those who like to lick the salt off Elon Musk's balls like pregnant does: the new Tesla gigafactory in Germany will take advantage of none of the legacy infrastructure available to it. Musk must assume his battery packs will drive themselves to market.
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