Dang this country needs a unified HSR plan like yesterday especially with the sheer volume of $$ being dumped into the economy right now just to keep it afloat...
Even if we settled at the most affordable "HSR" option of 200 km/h I'd be happy over the crap system we have now and it would be a most welcome use of tax dollars...
My dream is to resurrect the eastern route. A few people have suggested that they should widen the Mount Royal tunnel to add an extra track, but if they're going to go through the cost and huge disruption of doing that which I suspect would be as large as building a whole new tunnel, I think a new tunnel would actually be better. I propose adding back track to the whole eastern corridor and running a tunnel (slightly shorter than the Mount Royal tunnel) to allow through routing of trains. This would reduce the HFR route length by about 12 km which may not be a huge percentage of the total trip but is still greater than the whole length of St. Laurent Blvd for comparison. it would also allow the Mascouche Line to share the route with service to two branches say, every 1/2 hr allowing a train to serve the central corridor every 15 minutes leaving plenty of capacity for HFR to run every 1/2 hr as well. The commuter rail would use smaller rolling stock than current, probablly about 6 car EMUs matching the train length of the new underground platform, and there would need to be some grade separations but an overall improvement. There there would probably even be some extra peak capacity for a couple additional trips if needed.
The part of north Montreal that would lose the Mascouche line service should get an REM branch running as far as perhaps the gare Anjou area (but not in that actual spot) and each of the four branches would get 8tph to downtown peak and 6tph off peak. There would also be a booster line running from the eastern branch out to Roxboro at an additional 6-8 tph. This would facilitate crosstown trips and allow for transfers to the Orange line at Sauvé.
Have you ever looked at what is under street level around Gare Centrale? First the Underground City, then the Metro lines, northwest of Rue Saint-Antoine W also the Mont-Royal tunnel and then the biggest obstacle: the Highway tunnel of the Autoroute Ville-Marie (Montreal's version of Boston's "The Big Dig") with its multi-layered ramps onto Boul. Robert-Bourassa, Rue Mansfield, Rue de la Cathedrale, Rue Jean-D'Estree and Rue de la Montagnes.
I've written a very detailed post on Urban Toronto about why building a second rail tunnel in Montreal will be a monumental task (in any aspect: financially, but also in terms of the year-long paralysis its construction would force onto the city), but these are just two images to illustrate the problems caused by the Autoroute Ville-Marie alone:
Dang this country needs a unified HSR plan like yesterday especially with the sheer volume of $$ being dumped into the economy right now just to keep it afloat...
Even if we settled at the most affordable "HSR" option of 200 km/h I'd be happy over the crap system we have now and it would be a most welcome use of tax dollars...
The problem is that no "affordable option" exists for HSR: once you exceed the boundaries of "Conventional Rail" (that is intercity rail at speeds up to 110 mph over existing rail corridors with level crossings and in most cases also the sharing of the ROW or even of the tracks with freight trains), your costs jump so significantly that you have to get deep into the 150+ mph (240+ km/h) "true HSR" region to gain enough benefits to offset your dramatically escalated construction costs, as I've demonstrated with the Ecotrain Study (i.e. the most recent study of HSR in the Quebec-Windsor Corridor) - again in a post on Urban Toronto:
Quote:
The key thing your figures show is that once you leave existing right-of-ways, it doesn't really matter what your design speed is. If you look at the per-km cost of the Ecotrain study, building the Quebec-Montreal-Toronto Corridor for a design speed of 300 km/h only costs 12.2% more than for 200 km/h ($22.0 vs. $19.3 million per km) and once you substract the costs for electrification (the 200 km/h scenario was fuel-operated), the cost premium decreases to only 3.8% ($20.1 vs. $19.3 million per km):
Compiled from: Ecotrain Study (2011, deliverable 6 - Part 1 of 2)
Therefore, leaving the existing/former ROW except for where it is unavoidable only makes sense if you can go to true HSR (150-200 mph / 240-320 km/h) and that means ploughing an entirely greenfield ROW through difficult and sensitive terrain if you stay anywhere close to the Havelock Subdivision east of its name-giving community...
Have you ever looked at what is under street level around Gare Centrale? First the Underground City, then the Metro lines, northwest of Rue Saint-Antoine W also the Mont-Royal tunnel and then the biggest obstacle: the Highway tunnel of the Autoroute Ville-Marie (Montreal's version of Boston's "The Big Dig") with its multi-layered ramps onto Boul. Robert-Bourassa, Rue Mansfield, Rue de la Cathedrale, Rue Jean-D'Estree and Rue de la Montagnes.
Yes I'm certainly aware of all those items. I suppose I assumed we'd take the east side access approach and go super deep with twin bores below that other stuff.
__________________
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw Don't ask people not to debate a topic. Just stop making debatable assertions. Problem solved.
Yes I'm certainly aware of all those items. I suppose I assumed we'd take the east side access approach and go super deep with twin bores below that other stuff.
Sure, you can dig yourself below the Ville-Marie Highway tunnel, but do you have any idea about the implications of building a busy rail station almost 50 meters below street level?
I don't know Montreal that well, but it seems there is a rail line (or spur really) that runs through the Old Port between the Molson factory and the Lachine Canal. It seems to me that there is an opportunity there to tunnel a connection to Central Station and then double-track and trench that line until it gets further east.
A few years ago, while in Europe, I had to change trains in Antwerp. Trains were on an incredible FOUR stacked levels!
Quote:
The station has four levels and 14 tracks arranged as follows:
Level +1: The original station, 6 terminating tracks, arranged as two groups of three and separated by a central opening allowing views of the lower levels
Level 0: Houses ticketing facilities and commercial space
Level −1: 7 m below street level, 4 terminating tracks, arranged in two pairs separated by the central opening.
Level −2: 18 m below street level, 4 through tracks, leading to the two tracks of the tunnel under the city (used by high-speed trains and domestic services towards the north).
Quote:
In 1998 large-scale reconstruction work began to convert the station from a terminus to a through station. A tunnel was excavated between Antwerpen-Berchem station in the south of the city and Antwerpen-Dam station in the north, passing under Central station, with platforms on two underground levels. This allows Thalys, HSL 4 and HSL-Zuid high-speed trains to travel through Antwerp Central without the need to turn around (the previous layout obliged Amsterdam-Brussels trains to call only at Antwerpen-Berchem or reverse at Central).
The major elements of the construction project were completed in 2007, and the first through trains ran on 25 March 2007.
This complete project has cost approximately €1.6 billion
wikipedia.
That having been said, it would cost a monumental amount of money to tunnel beneath the VME in Montreal (as someone pointed out there are parts where there are three stacked road levels...a complete interchange...all of which are below ground).
__________________
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."-President Lyndon B. Johnson Donald Trump is a poor man's idea of a rich man, a weak man's idea of a strong man, and a stupid man's idea of a smart man. Am I an Asseau?
The Hannover-Würzburg HSL - certainly not a precedent for an Ottawa Bypass
Given that the gods mods at Urban Toronto apparently believe that calling "an idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on a person's mind" someone's "obsession" could somehow justify a 2-day ban and a threat of a permanent ban, I have no intentions of testing further which words might hurt their overly sensitive feelings.
Therefore, I'm going to respond to Roger1818's own preoccupation with the idea that Ottawa ought to have a bypassing route once it is has been served by HSR in this thread.
***
For those who didn't follow the discussion on Urban Toronto, I had asked him to provide an example of a HSR line bypassing around a city at a distance comparable to the Winchester Sub (he keeps reacting offended when I suggest that that's the only route such a bypass could follow, but he has yet to suggest a different one, which is why I assume such an alignment until he presents his own suggestions):
Quote:
Originally Posted by Urban Sky, post: 1662181, member: 61924
Other than that, you seem to ignore that the higher your average speed, the higher the per-km construction costs of rail infrastructure and the less time you save with every km you shorten a train's route, which makes it increasingly difficult to justify that expense to only benefit a minority of trains serving this particular HSR corridor (i.e. only those trains which run around the bypassed city).
In any case, I challenge you to find any example of a city of a comparable size and importance as Ottawa being bypassed by a HSR line which is almost 100 km long and runs 40+ km away from the bypassed city and doesn't serve anything on its route. Have a look at Lyon (less than half the size of Ottawa and negligible political importance) and you might see that building a bypass around that city (while serving its airport on the way!) was much more compelling than bypassing Ottawa along the Winchester Subdivision will ever be:
Originally Posted by roger1818, post: 1662458, member: 82537
Considering bypasses could be much less than "100 km long" and could be much less than than "40+ km away" (there are many options but it could easily be less than 50km long and less than 20km from Ottawa Station if you wanted to keep it short to minimize construction and maintenance costs), that seems like a needlessly demanding challenge. Having said that, have a look at the German ICE route from Hamburg to Munich, a 250-280km/h bypass was built around Frankfurt (which is bigger than Ottawa), that is about 85 km as the crow flies (though rail maps show the actual route to be longer) and about 68 km east of Frankfurt (using the route shown on Google Maps).
[Re:Lyon]
Not really a fair comparison as the TGV is aligned to travel straight through Lyon, so significantly more track would be needed to circle around the city rather than cut the corner. If the plan was to use the M&O sub, then maybe it would be more comparable, but with the Alexandra sub, there is a triangle that can be cut off somewhere (once again, not necessarily to create the shortest route overall, but to shorten the length of the bypass required).
With this argument set out, I would like to respond to the claim that the Fulda-Würzburg HSR line is a Bypass around Frankfurt, by demonstrating that that couldn't be further from reality. Have a look at the map below (sorry, this was the only resolution with still-readable labels!) and note the red line going from Hannover south to Flieden, where it splits up into one leg continuing South to Würzburg via Gemünden and another splitting off towards the Southwest to Frankfurt via Hanau.
Map of the North-South railway and the Hanover-Würzburg HSL
Source: Wikipedia by user Hbf878
That red line is the North-South railway (in German: Nord-Süd-Strecke) and the dark indigo line is the Hanover-Würzburg HSR line (H-W HSL). As you can see, the HSL (High Speed Line) is basically following the same corridor as the red line, except that it also serves Kassel (pop. 200k), at the expense of the railway towns of Bebra (pop. 14k) and Eichenberg (pop. 2k) and that even ICE trains heading for Frankfurt still has to take the conventional "Kinzigtalbahn" line after splitting off the H-W HSL at Fulda, just like ICE trains travelling from Frankfurt to Würzburg have to take the conventional "Main-Spessart-Bahn" before joining the H-W HSL via the Nantenbach Curve (just south of Gemünden).
If you look at above map of InterCity services in 1985 (i.e. 3-6 years before the H-W HSL opened), you will see that all sides of the Fulda-Frankfurt-Würzburg triangle were used by distinct routes:
InterCity Line 3 used the Fulda-Frankfurt leg (i.e. the Kinzig valley railway) for its hourly services between Hamburg and Basel,
InterCity Line 4 used the Fulda-Würzburg leg (of the H-W HSL) for its hourly services between Hamburg and Munich and
InterCity Line 5 (erroneously labelled as "IC-Linie 2" in the map above) used the Frankfurt-Würzburg leg (i.e. the Main-Spessart railway) for its hourly services between Dortmund-Cologne and Munich.
The point is that even before the construction of the H-W HSL, it would have been pointless to travel from Hamburg to Munich (i.e. between the two largest cities in pre-unification Western Germany) via Frankfurt and that's why no train was routed Fulda-Frankfurt-Würzburg, as the detour via Frankfurt would have escalated the travel time between Fulda and Würzburg from (back then) 62 minutes to 130 minutes (55' Fulda-Frankfurt plus 75' Frankfurt-Würzburg). Fast forward to the InterCityExpress network map of 2021 and you will see this has not changed until today:
So what's the implication for Ottawa? In the case of Germany, it is perfectly feasible to operate at-least hourly High Speed trains on all sides of the Fulda-Frankfurt-Würzburg triangle, because the Fulda-Würzburg leg still lies on the by-far fastest route between Hamburg and Munich, whereas most services serving the Fulda-Frankfurt leg extend to Mannheim and beyond, just like most services serving the Frankfurt-Würzburg leg originate from Cologne and beyond. Conversely, no Toronto-Ottawa train will extend north towards Val-d’Or and Rouyn-Noranda, just like no Montreal-Ottawa train will extend west towards North Bay and Sudbury (Sorry, swimmer_spe!).
I would hope that this provided a sound rebuttal of your suggestion that Fulda-Würzburg is a template for a HSR line bypassing Ottawa, but if you plan at continuing to follow that fantasy, please provide a map with where you would place your bypass and what real-world example you can find for such a bypass...
Have a great evening!
PS: In case that I managed to succeed in getting someone interested in the evolution of Germany's HSR network, I highly recommend the following 3-part Youtube series with surprisingly usable English subtitles:
Given that the gods mods at Urban Toronto apparently believe that calling "an idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on a person's mind" someone's "obsession" could somehow justify a 2-day ban and a threat of a permanent ban, I have no intentions of testing further which words might hurt their overly sensitive feelings.
Sorry to hear that. Certainly it has become a very hostile environment there. I guess UT's loss is SSP's gain. I only started reading UT because you were active there and I respect your opinion.
Quote:
Therefore, I'm going to respond to Roger1818's own preoccupation with the idea that Ottawa ought to have a bypassing route once it is has been served by HSR in this thread.
Because this is a completely different forum, I would like to clarify a few things:
I fully support the HFR route through Ottawa. Combining the Montreal-Ottawa and Ottawa-Toronto passengers onto the same trains as Montreal-Toronto will allow for a significant improvement in frequency of service on all 3 routes. It is also a lot cheaper to build and maintain a dedicated track single route than multiple routes.
An HSR bypass would not be built for the purpose of making the route shorter. It would be done for the purpose of making it faster by avoiding the need for express trains to slow down in Ottawa. This problem becomes worse with HSR where it takes a long time for trains to slow to a stop and then accelerate back up to speed.
This bypass would only be built when demand on all 3 routes (Montreal-Ottawa, Ottawa-Toronto and Montreal-Toronto) is high enough to support high frequency trains along all 3 routes (we can debate if that means 60 minute service or 30 minute service).
None of this would happen until several decades after HFR is complete.
Quote:
For those who didn't follow the discussion on Urban Toronto, I had asked him to provide an example of a HSR line bypassing around a city at a distance comparable to the Winchester Sub (he keeps reacting offended when I suggest that that's the only route such a bypass could follow, but he has yet to suggest a different one, which is why I assume such an alignment until he presents his own suggestions):
To be fair, I wasn't offended by that. I was frustrated that you kept misunderstanding what I was trying to say and putting words in my mouth. It is rather odd that while you would support me calling out other people's strawman arguments, when I started accusing your representations of my arguments as strawman arguments you got offended. For my part I apologise.
Quote:
With this argument set out, I would like to respond to the claim that the Fulda-Würzburg HSR line is a Bypass around Frankfurt, by demonstrating that that couldn't be further from reality. Have a look at the map below (sorry, this was the only resolution with still-readable labels!) and note the red line going from Hannover south to Flieden, where it splits up into one leg continuing South to Würzburg via Gemünden and another splitting off towards the Southwest to Frankfurt via Hanau.
Map of the North-South railway and the Hanover-Würzburg HSL
That red line is the North-South railway (in German: Nord-Süd-Strecke) and the dark indigo line is the Hanover-Würzburg HSR line (H-W HSL). As you can see, the HSL (High Speed Line) is basically following the same corridor as the red line, except that it also serves Kassel (pop. 200k), at the expense of the railway towns of Bebra (pop. 14k) and Eichenberg (pop. 2k) and that even ICE trains heading for Frankfurt still has to take the conventional "Kinzigtalbahn" line after splitting off the H-W HSL at Fulda, just like ICE trains travelling from Frankfurt to Würzburg have to take the conventional "Main-Spessart-Bahn" before joining the H-W HSL via the Nantenbach Curve (just south of Gemünden).
If you look at above map of InterCity services in 1985 (i.e. 3-6 years before the H-W HSL opened), you will see that all sides of the Fulda-Frankfurt-Würzburg triangle were used by distinct routes:
InterCity Line 3 used the Fulda-Frankfurt leg (i.e. the Kinzig valley railway) for its hourly services between Hamburg and Basel,
InterCity Line 4 used the Fulda-Würzburg leg (of the H-W HSL) for its hourly services between Hamburg and Munich and
InterCity Line 5 (erroneously labelled as "IC-Linie 2" in the map above) used the Frankfurt-Würzburg leg (i.e. the Main-Spessart railway) for its hourly services between Dortmund-Cologne and Munich.
The point is that even before the construction of the H-W HSL, it would have been pointless to travel from Hamburg to Munich (i.e. between the two largest cities in pre-unification Western Germany) via Frankfurt and that's why no train was routed Fulda-Frankfurt-Würzburg, as the detour via Frankfurt would have escalated the travel time between Fulda and Würzburg from (back then) 62 minutes to 130 minutes (55' Fulda-Frankfurt plus 75' Frankfurt-Würzburg). Fast forward to the InterCityExpress network map of 2021 and you will see this has not changed until today:
Sorry if I am not understanding something, but why would it "have been pointless to travel from Hamburg to Munich (i.e. between the two largest cities in pre-unification Western Germany) via Frankfurt" but it isn't pointless to travel from Montreal to Toronto (i.e. between the two largest cities in Canada) via Ottawa, using a similar detour once demand is high enough that we can have a similar frequency of service between all three cities?
Quote:
So what's the implication for Ottawa? In the case of Germany, it is perfectly feasible to operate at-least hourly High Speed trains on all sides of the Fulda-Frankfurt-Würzburg triangle, because the Fulda-Würzburg leg still lies on the by-far fastest route between Hamburg and Munich, whereas most services serving the Fulda-Frankfurt leg extend to Mannheim and beyond, just like most services serving the Frankfurt-Würzburg leg originate from Cologne and beyond. Conversely, no Toronto-Ottawa train will extend north towards Val-d’Or and Rouyn-Noranda, just like no Montreal-Ottawa train will extend west towards North Bay and Sudbury (Sorry, swimmer_spe!).
Why does it matter if trains don't extend beyond Ottawa in a straight line? I would expect that Ottawa, as the nation's capital, is a significant enough destination that it wouldn't need to piggyback on service to another city once rail travel is accepted as a normal mode if intercity travel (which admittedly it isn't today).
Quote:
I would hope that this provided a sound rebuttal of your suggestion that Fulda-Würzburg is a template for a HSR line bypassing Ottawa, but if you plan at continuing to follow that fantasy, please provide a map with where you would place your bypass and what real-world example you can find for such a bypass...
I was going to send this to you privately as I am finding UT a particularly hostile environment, but since you posted this here, I will post it here instead. I will give you two possible options (note: these are approximations and I haven't smoothed out all of the curves):
Option 1 (Richmond/Vars)
This is approximately a 40km bypass running just south of Barrhaven. Probably the biggest issue with this route is that by the time anyone would consider building it, the land between Barrhaven and Manotick will have been developed, meaning it would have to be rerouted a bit (either south of Manotick or north of Barrhaven, in the greenbelt).
Option 2 (Modified Walkley)
This would be the cheapest and easiest option, but its benefits would be lower. CN's 3 year plan states that they plan to discontinue their half of the Walkley Yard (Capital Railways uses CP's half for the O-Train MSF). The eastern approach (in grey) has some tight curves, so I would propose a short, new approach be build along an existing ROW (orange).
As for a real world example, I will do that once you provide a recent, real world example of a country where almost all of the rail lines are owned by private freight railways, who don't have any requirement to give passenger trains priority, so the publicly owned passenger railway decided to refurbish some unused/underutilized tracks to allow them to build their own dedicated tracks. Joking aside, the point is, we have a very unique situation here in Canada and just because there isn't a perfect example of someone else doing exactly the same thing somewhere else, doesn't mean it isn't appropriate here.
Quote:
PS: In case that I managed to succeed in getting someone interested in the evolution of Germany's HSR network, I highly recommend the following 3-part Youtube series with surprisingly usable English subtitles:
My apologies for the long delay in responding, but it took me quite a week until I finally got my head around how best to contrast the Hamburg-Frankfurt-Munich triangle of Germany with Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto!
Quote:
Originally Posted by roger1818
Sorry to hear that. Certainly it has become a very hostile environment there. I guess UT's loss is SSP's gain. I only started reading UT because you were active there and I respect your opinion.
I used to think that having active moderation was a relative strength of Urban Toronto (especially compared to SSP), but I start to think the inverse...
Quote:
Because this is a completely different forum, I would like to clarify a few things:
I fully support the HFR route through Ottawa. Combining the Montreal-Ottawa and Ottawa-Toronto passengers onto the same trains as Montreal-Toronto will allow for a significant improvement in frequency of service on all 3 routes. It is also a lot cheaper to build and maintain a dedicated track single route than multiple routes.
An HSR bypass would not be built for the purpose of making the route shorter. It would be done for the purpose of making it faster by avoiding the need for express trains to slow down in Ottawa. This problem becomes worse with HSR where it takes a long time for trains to slow to a stop and then accelerate back up to speed.
This bypass would only be built when demand on all 3 routes (Montreal-Ottawa, Ottawa-Toronto and Montreal-Toronto) is high enough to support high frequency trains along all 3 routes (we can debate if that means 60 minute service or 30 minute service).
None of this would happen until several decades after HFR is complete.
I'm glad to hear that we are in agreement on point 1 and it is in my view the only reason why HFR is able to substantially grow the frequency of its services while constraining the capital (for infrastructure and rolling stock) and operating cost for making it happen.
Believe me, I see the same discussions in Germany, where Hartmut Mehdorn (CEO of Deutsche Bahn between 1999-2009 and responsible for a planned IPO which was cancelled amid the financial crisis of 2008) famously said that high-speed trains like the ICE could not stop "at every milk can" (while referring to Mannheim, the heart of the Rhein-Neckar area, which is Germany's 11th-largest metropolitan area hosting close to 3 million people and the HQs of the world's largest chemical producer and the largest non-American software company by revenue). However, no aspiration can escape the fact that the larger a city is, the less trains can afford to skip that city and the worse the economic case for building a bypass around it becomes. Therefore, if you want to cut travel time between the largest cities in your HSR network, you are almost guaranteed that you receive much better value-for-money if you cut travel time on the busiest segments of your network rather than on bypasses which will inevitably remain amongst the least busy segments.
Quote:
To be fair, I wasn't offended by that. I was frustrated that you kept misunderstanding what I was trying to say and putting words in my mouth. It is rather odd that while you would support me calling out other people's strawman arguments, when I started accusing your representations of my arguments as strawman arguments you got offended. For my part I apologise.
Unlike the other people against which I defended you, I wasn't misrepresenting what you said. I was just trying to deduce from what you had said what kind of bypass you might have in mind. Thankfully, with your detailed maps you provided this time, I no longer have to rely on my bad track record in reading your mind...
Quote:
Sorry if I am not understanding something, but why would it "have been pointless to travel from Hamburg to Munich (i.e. between the two largest cities in pre-unification Western Germany) via Frankfurt" but it isn't pointless to travel from Montreal to Toronto (i.e. between the two largest cities in Canada) via Ottawa, using a similar detour once demand is high enough that we can have a similar frequency of service between all three cities?
Maybe you can spot the difference below:
Notes:
"Option 2a" refers to the orange and red lines in your "Option 2" scenario, whereas "Option 2b" refers to the gray and red lines.
"Length" refers to the distance covered from the point where the "Bypass" and "Detour" routes deviate (Fulda-Würzburg: Flieden for 1985 and Fulda for 1995 and 2019) to the point where they meet again (Fulda-Würzburg: Gemünden am Main for 1985 and Rohrbach for 1995 and 2019).
In the case of Fulda-Würzburg, "travel time" refers to the fastest scheduled travel time between Fulda and Würzburg Hbf (for the "Bypass") and the sum of the fastest scheduled travel time between Fulda & Frankfurt(M) Hbf and Frankfurt(M) Hbf & Würzburg Hbf (for the "Detour") and were obtained with the "Extract of Timetable" function of the Fernbahn.de database. Conversely, for the Ottawa bypass scenarios, an average speed of 200 km/h was assumed for the "Bypass" routes and of 100 km/h for the "Detour" routes.
Quote:
Why does it matter if trains don't extend beyond Ottawa in a straight line? I would expect that Ottawa, as the nation's capital, is a significant enough destination that it wouldn't need to piggyback on service to another city once rail travel is accepted as a normal mode if intercity travel (which admittedly it isn't today).
If you refer back to the InterCity network map from 1985, InterCity line 3 was the fastest service between Hamburg and Frankfurt (4:30h), InterCity line 4 was the fastest service between Hamburg and Munich (Minimum travel time: 7:01h) and InterCity line 5 (miss-labeled as line 2 in that map) was the fastest service between Frankfurt and Munich (minimum travel time: 3:44h).
As you can see in the schedule below, InterCity line 3 didn't just link Hamburg with Frankfurt, but it also stopped in places in-between Hamburg and Frankfurt (Hannover, Göttingen and Fulda) and beyond Frankfurt (Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Offenburg, Freiburg and Basel):
Note: above schedule only shows those trains which go from Hamburg all the way to Basel. Click here for the full hourly service between Hannover and Mannheim.
Similarly, InterCity line 4 didn't just link Hamburg with Munich, but it also stopped in many places in-between (Hannover, Göttingen, Bebra, Fulda, Würzburg and Augsburg, with half of the trains taking a detour via Nürnberg):
Note: above schedule only shows those trains which go from Hamburg all the way to Munich. Click here for the full hourly service between Hamburg and Würzburg.
Finally, InterCity line 5 didn't just link Frankfurt with Munich, but it also stopped in places before Frankfurt (Dortmund, Essen/Duisburg/Düsseldorf or Hagen/Wuppertal, Cologne, Bonn, Koblenz and Mainz) and in-between Frankfurt and Munich (Würzburg and Augsburg, with again half of the trains taking a detour via Nürnberg):
Note: above schedule only shows those trains which go from Dortmund all the way to Munich. Click here for the full hourly service between Cologne and Würzburg.
Now, let's look up the population served by these three Corridors and compare them with the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto triangle:
Source of population figures: Wikipedia ([1] for German metropolitan areas,[2]+[3] for Karlsruhe, [4] for Offenburg, [5]+[6] for Freiburg, [7]+[8] for Basel, [9] for Bebra, [10] for Fulda, [11]+[12] for Würzburg, [13]+[14] for Koblenz, and [15] for Canadian CMAs)
As you can see above, the combined metropolitan population of Hamburg and Frankfurt are already twice as much as Montreal and Ottawa (10.3 vs. 5.4 million). Furthermore, InterCity line 3 served another 3.9 million (thus just over the population of Montreal) with the intermediary stops in Hannover and Göttingen and another 6.6 million (thus more than Montreal and Ottawa combined) beyond Frankfurt, serving a total population of 20.8 million (or almost 4 times that of Montreal and Ottawa).
Similarly, even though the combined metropolitan population of Hamburg and München is slightly below that of Montreal and Toronto (9.5 vs. 10.2 million), the stops inbetween the two cities add another 8.1 million. Therefore, InterCity line 4 served a total population of 17.5 million, thus almost twice that of Montreal and Toronto.
Finally, the combined metropolitan population of Frankfurt and Munich is 50% higher than that of Ottawa and Toronto (11.2 vs. 7.4 million), with the stops prior to Frankfurt and those between Frankfurt and Munich both adding another 11 million each. Therefore, InterCity line 5 served a total population of 26.8 million, or close to four times that of Ottawa and Toronto.
Granted, you might argue that trains running between Montreal and Ottawa would continue to Toronto and those running between Ottawa and Toronto would originate in Montreal, but if the travel time differential between the "bypass" and the "detour" routing was so insignificant that passenger flows between Montreal and Toronto would still spread across both service types, then what would be the point of building that "bypass", as opposed to just speeding up the trunk route (i.e. via Ottawa)?
Quote:
As for a real world example, I will do that once you provide a recent, real world example of a country where almost all of the rail lines are owned by private freight railways, who don't have any requirement to give passenger trains priority, so the publicly owned passenger railway decided to refurbish some unused/underutilized tracks to allow them to build their own dedicated tracks. Joking aside, the point is, we have a very unique situation here in Canada and just because there isn't a perfect example of someone else doing exactly the same thing somewhere else, doesn't mean it isn't appropriate here.
You are right: the specific circumstances in Canada make it impossible to identify any precedent for HFR, but that's because what would be the obvious corridor choice anywhere else (i.e. upgrading the existing InterCity corridor for fast and prioritized operations) is not attainable in Canada. However, none of these strange and unique circumstances alters the laws of Economics which predict poor value-for-money for any proposal to bypass Ottawa...
Quote:
Thanks, I will have to give that a look.
You'll quickly note why I prefer to explain traffic patterns in Germany through the InterCity network of 1985 than through today's ICE network, as it was much less convoluted and complex...
My apologies for this late response, but I hope it was worth the long wait...
Last edited by Urban_Sky; Apr 5, 2021 at 1:42 PM.
Reason: Hid all figures in Spoilers to avoid extra width
This was posted in the Ottawa local VIA Rail thread, but thought it would also be of interest in this national thread:
Quote:
Originally Posted by rocketphish
High-frequency rail service from Québec City to Toronto is a sustainable economic recovery project With the 2021 federal budget about to be tabled, Mayor Jim Watson and his counterparts in Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City want the federal government to invest in a 'nation-building' initiative.
Jim Watson
Publishing date: Apr 17, 2021 • 6 hours ago • 2 minute read
As mayors of the largest economic centres in Ontario and Quebec, we call unanimously on the federal government to invest in high-frequency rail to support Canada’s post-pandemic economic recovery and long-term environmental objectives.
As businesses, communities and all levels of government across Canada continue to manage the impacts of the ongoing pandemic, it is imperative to invest in sustainable and large-scale infrastructure projects that will support a green and inclusive recovery for our cities and regions.
The federal government has repeatedly shown its interest and commitment in investing in sustainable projects, which would create a more resilient and greener Canada. If we are to come out of this unprecedented crisis stronger, we need projects that will serve the needs of present and future generations. This is exactly what VIA Rail’s High Frequency Rail (HFR) project will achieve by connecting Québec, Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto.
High-frequency rail will upgrade and build new tracks dedicated to passenger service, connecting surrounding regions at the same time. It will offer more daily departures, shorter trip times, and increased punctuality. In other words, by connecting our communities more efficiently, this project will have huge repercussions for millions of Canadians and visitors from around the world.
This large-scale endeavour will have a substantial economic impact. In the short term, HFR will contribute to Canada’s economic recovery by creating thousands of jobs during the construction phase. In the long run, HFR will further increase the mobility of workers, as well as local economic development and tourism in communities along the corridor. That said, its impacts will be felt on a national scale, as it will operate in the most densely populated region of the country.
Beyond the direct economic benefits, VIA Rail’s HFR project will also transform the way Canadians travel and live. By providing more departures, HFR will make travel easier, offer a viable and sustainable alternative to the car, and therefore reduce road congestion, the cost of maintaining highways and greenhouse gas emissions.
For all the reasons stated above, we believe this VIA Rail project is in line with the government of Canada’s stated commitment to invest in sustainable infrastructure. Therefore, as the tabling of the 2021 federal budget approaches, we ask the federal government to invest in this nation-building project.
In times of crisis, we need to invest in projects that will not only boost our economy in the short and long term, but also ensure the resilience, sustainability and competitiveness of our communities. High-frequency rail is part of the solution.
Jim Watson is the mayor of Ottawa; Régis Labeaume is the mayor of Québec City; Valérie Plante is the mayor of Montreal; and John Tory is the mayor of Toronto.
At this point, getting anything built, unfortunately, requires the Liberals to get re-elected. The Conservatives haven't said a peep on this. Leads me to believe it'd be a target for cuts.
At this point, getting anything built, unfortunately, requires the Liberals to get re-elected. The Conservatives haven't said a peep on this. Leads me to believe it'd be a target for cuts.
Conservatives? Not caring about transport? You can count on that. At least the NDP and the Greens are behind it, in case of an even slimmer minority govt. What about the Bloc?
Conservatives? Not caring about transport? You can count on that.
Makes me sad. Conservatives elsewhere don't have an issue with public transport. In the UK, the Conservatives are building HS2 as part of a large unifying nation building exercise.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ShavedParmesanCheese
What about the Bloc?
They should like the Montreal-Quebec City segment that's apparently left in despite a weak business case.
Prev
The Hannover-Würzburg HSL - certainly not a precedent for an Ottawa Bypass
Linear Mode
