VIA Rail

[esquire]

^ That is fair, but if ssiguy had said 1970 instead of 1960 he would probably be right

[Urban_Sky]

Originally Posted by esquire

^ That is fair, but if ssiguy had said 1970 instead of 1960 he would probably be right

My apologies, I only saw your response now. I only found a recent travel time claim for the Toronto-Ottawa Corridor (3:15 hours), so let's take that corridor:

HFR will still be half an hour faster than any travel time which was ever reached between this country's capital and its largest city, a full hour faster than today and two hours faster than back in 1970...

[Truenorth00]

I absolutely detest this Turbo Train bullshit. It ignores the fact that Ottawa is a disproportionately large ridership generator, for various reasons (public service preference for rail, cultural and economic ties to Montreal). And it ignores the fact that the Turbo Train was a token service with a handful of fast trains. Hourly service that takes under 5 hrs to Montreal, is an improvement on a handful of trains a day that took 4 hrs. And HFR does that while connecting Ottawa en route. If the Turbo Train was so great, why didn't it last that long anyway, and why didn't anybody want to invest in it?

[swimmer_spe]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

I absolutely detest this Turbo Train bullshit. It ignores the fact that Ottawa is a disproportionately large ridership generator, for various reasons (public service preference for rail, cultural and economic ties to Montreal). And it ignores the fact that the Turbo Train was a token service with a handful of fast trains. Hourly service that takes under 5 hrs to Montreal, is an improvement on a handful of trains a day that took 4 hrs. And HFR does that while connecting Ottawa en route. If the Turbo Train was so great, why didn't it last that long anyway, and why didn't anybody want to invest in it?

The equipment had a fatal flaw - the turbine engines. Turbines are not good at changes in speeds. They like to be run at 100% speed all the time. Having to run in neutral at stops is not good for them and will wear out prematurely. That one reason why they never took off. They are also worse on fuel when compared with the same output diesel engine. Even a turbo alternator is a bad thing for fuel consumption over the Diesel electric.

They were built just before the oil crisis.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by swimmer_spe

The equipment had a fatal flaw - the turbine engines. Turbines are not good at changes in speeds. They like to be run at 100% speed all the time. Having to run in neutral at stops is not good for them and will wear out prematurely. That one reason why they never took off. They are also worse on fuel when compared with the same output diesel engine. Even a turbo alternator is a bad thing for fuel consumption over the Diesel electric.

They were built just before the oil crisis.

And still just a token service that didn't do half as much as HFR would.....

[GoTrans]

Originally Posted by Urban_Sky

My apologies, I only saw your response now. I only found a recent travel time claim for the Toronto-Ottawa Corridor (3:15 hours), so let's take that corridor:

HFR will still be half an hour faster than any travel time which was ever reached between this country's capital and its largest city, a full hour faster than today and two hours faster than back in 1970...

Great graph. It clearly shows how little money has been spent on infrastructure improvements, the focus has been on frequency additions. It is unfortunate that the money spent to triple track the CN's Lakeshore route has not really resulted in any tangible increases in average speed. Once again part of this is due to abandoning the Ottawa Valley route for freight trains and rerouting them via Toronto.

What is good for CN is obviously not good for the network as a whole. This is where one has to be very careful with TCI's proposed changes to the board and claiming to want to expand capacity while reducing the operating ratio. The only way this will happen is if they rip up rail on lesser used lines to expand heavier used lines. This will result in the same thing that happened while Hunter Harrison was CEO which is part of the reason why we are in the current situation. There are still sections of right of way east of Jasper where double track has not been replaced. My fear is that TCI will downgrade the route through northern Ontario and route trains through the US via Chicago and Port Huron. The route of the Ocean through New Brunswick would also probably become threatened.

[esquire]

Originally Posted by Urban_Sky

My apologies, I only saw your response now. I only found a recent travel time claim for the Toronto-Ottawa Corridor (3:15 hours), so let's take that corridor:

HFR will still be half an hour faster than any travel time which was ever reached between this country's capital and its largest city, a full hour faster than today and two hours faster than back in 1970...

That's interesting, but I was referring to the Toronto-Montreal route, which is what you were speaking to in the post I responded to. Do you have a graph for that one?

[Urban_Sky]

Originally Posted by esquire

That's interesting, but I was referring to the Toronto-Montreal route, which is what you were speaking to in the post I responded to. Do you have a graph for that one?

Here you are (assuming the travel time of 4:45 quoted by the Globe and Mail in July 2019, as I don't recall any more recent figures for that corridor):


As you can see, the minimum travel time first fell below 4:45 hours in 1973* and has been constantly above that value since 2016, while the average travel time (i.e. the timing most representative for the entire service) has only been below 4:45 for some short periods in the 1990s.

*You can safely ignore the two drops underneath the threshold in 1968/69 and 1970/71, as they could not be sustained over longer periods, thanks to the dramatic issues with the Turbotrains:




Source: "The Railway Game" by Julius Lukasiewicz (1976, pp. 151-153)

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

And still just a token service that didn't do half as much as HFR would.....

Just to highlight how unrepresentative token travel times of 3:59 were for the Toronto-Montreal service, in most years where at least one train was scheduled faster than 4:45, the number of such fast departures was no larger than 3:



Finally, it would really help if all the HSR-fanatics would finally acknowledge that the first time a travel time of 3:59 hours was offered between Toronto and Montreal, it only lasted one month (the ill-fated first roll-in attempt in December 1968 mentioned in the book excerpt above) and that that token travel time was only ever reached again in 1993. All this bullshit you hear from morons like Paul Langan about "The travel time in the 1970s was 3:59" refers to nothing but one month of operations in the late 1960s...

Which brings me to ... [see next post]

[Urban_Sky]

Given how obsessed railfans are about how slow rail travel seemingly is today between Toronto and Montreal and will supposedly remain post-HFR, I'm cross-posting this historic travel time comparison with Berlin-Munich, which I first posted on Urban Toronto this July:

***

Just to put things into perspective:

Toronto is the largest metropolitan center in Canada (5.9 million in 2016) and Montreal the second-largest (4.1 million), whereas Berlin is the largest city in (and capital of) Germany (3.5 million in 2015) and Munich is its third-largest city (1.5 million).

When measuring a straight line (euclidean distance - or "as the crow flies"), Toronto's Union Station and Montreal's Gare Centrale are 504.5 km apart, whereas the respective main stations (Hauptbahnhof in German) of Berlin and Munich are 504.2 km apart.

In 1977, when VIA took over the passenger rail services of CN and CP, the fastest scheduled train between Toronto and Montreal was 4:30h, whereas between Berlin and Munich it was ... *drumroll* ... 8:45h (yes, almost twice as much!).

In 1989, when the Berlin wall fell, it was still 4:30h between Toronto and Montreal, but even 9:43h (i.e. more than twice as much!) between Berlin and Munich.

In 1992, when the collapsed GDR had been absorbed by the Federal Republic of Germany, the fastest travel time between Toronto and Montreal had fallen to 3:59h and (thanks to some urgent repairs on the dramatically under-maintained rail network in the former GDR) to 8:47h between Berlin and Munich.

In 2006, the fastest travel time between Toronto and Montreal increased to 4:15h, whereas it decreased to 5:49h between Berlin and Munich (thanks to the opening of the North-South mainline with its tunnel underneath Berlin - thus avoiding the detour via Berlin-Schönefeld Airport - and of various High Speed Lines just in time for the FIFA World Cup 2006, which upgraded speeds on 77.4 km to 300 km/h and on another 194.4 km to 200 km/h).

Finally, in December 2017, the fastest travel time between Toronto and Montreal increased further to 4:49h and was overtaken (for the first time!) by Berlin-Munich, which decreased to 3:58h, thanks to the opening of the final (but most crucial) piece of the Berlin-Nuremberg HSR axis: the 107 km long HSL Erfurt-Ebensfeld.

This means that Germany had to first invest a total of $22.7 billion in 2021 dollars (€3.6 billion by 2006 for Nuremberg-Munich and €10 billion by 2017 for Berlin-Nuremberg) to upgrade 73% of the route to at least 200 km/h and 40% even to 300 km/h, until they finally beat (by only a heartbeat!) what Toronto-Montreal had achieved for a few days during the ill-fated first passenger service trials of the Turbo Train in 1968/69 and then in regular revenue service with the LRC trains between October 1992 and May 1999 and again between May 2000 and May 2005.

So, why did Germany have to invest so much money to match the travel time which Canada achieved (over virtually the same - euclidean - distance!) almost exactly 50 years before? It's because the Kingston Subdivision is so incredibly direct: 539 km length between two points 504.5 km apart equals a detour of just 7% compared to the straight line, whereas the fastest route between Berlin and Munich (via Halle-Erfurt-Nuremberg-Ingolstadt) is still 622.0 km long, which equals a detour of 23% (compared to the straight line of 504.2 km) and is in fact only 11 km shorter than the 633 km which #51 covers between Montreal and Toronto as the only remaining M-O-T train:


Compiled from: timetable data obtained from official VIA schedules and the Fernbahn.de timetable database, as well as infrastructure data obtained from DB Netze.
Notes: above break down of speed limits refers to the design speed of the respective segments (a bit like Canada's track classes impose certain speed limits), while ignoring any more local speed limits (e.g. for tight curves). Also, the 80.8 km of 200 km/h infrastructure shown for the years 1977-2005 opened between Donauwörth, Augsburg and Munich between 1965 and 1977; however, equipment capable of reaching at least 200 km/h rather than just 140-160 km/h only seems to have been used from 1994 onwards. Finally, the fastest travel time has been found between München Hauptbahnhof and either Berlin Zoologischer Garten (for years 1977-1991 and 1993), Berlin Ostbahnhof (for years 1992 and 1994-2005, confusingly called "Hauptbahnhof" between 1987 and 1998) and the new Berlin Hauptbahnhof (for all years since its opening in 2006).


***


Why do I write all of this? Because the tragic of Canada's passenger rail sector is that whereas Germany continuously improved the travel time between Berlin and Munich (less than 9 hours by 1992, less than 8 by 1994, 7 by 2000, 6 by 2006 and less than 4 by 2018), we are paralyzed in this country, because at some point, the track was cleared from all other passenger and freight trains, so that one measly train per day (and direction) could achieve the travel time of 3:59h (or at least on paper, as more than the absolute minimum in track switches would make this travel time infeasible).

Therefore, no, the biggest liability of HFR (or any attempt to fix the Corridor at a price tag which doesn't instantly kill the project) is not the targeted travel time between Toronto and Montreal (even today's 4:49h is almost an hour faster than what was ever achieved between Berlin and Munich before the 108 km long and 300 km/h fast HSL Erfurt-Ebensfeld opened in December 2017), it's the historical coincidence that that distance has at some point been covered at just under 4 hours.

In other words: we can't have faster train service now because we once had even faster train service (even if it was just one train per day). If HFR fails and we'll still have just a pathetic 6 trains per day between this country's two largest cities in 10 and 15 years' time, then it will be mostly because of that 3:59h. I'm afraid that we will never achieve a service standard which is remotely comparable with what similar corridors in Europe receive, unless we stop compulsively talking about that stupid figure. It doesn't have the slightest effect on the benefits which any improvement to the current passenger rail services would bring...

[Nouvellecosse]

We probably shouldn't be complaining about the slightly higher trip duration on a route passing though Ottawa compared to one directly between Toronto and Montreal because those are obviously not the same things. It's a different route and one that offers much greater utility in the form of an important additional destination compared to a slight increase in Tor-Mon trip time. In an urban setting, it's not uncommon for a transit route such as a metro line to have an extra stop or a route deviation to take in an important transfer or destination even if it adds a slight delay, so why would intercity transit be any different. Especially considering that the faster trip speeds on the existing route are well in the past and are unlikely to ever return givin the level of track congestion.

[swimmer_spe]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

We probably shouldn't be complaining about the slightly higher trip duration on a route passing though Ottawa compared to one directly between Toronto and Montreal because those are obviously not the same things. It's a different route and one that offers much greater utility in the form of an important additional destination compared to a slight increase in Tor-Mon trip time. In an urban setting, it's not uncommon for a transit route such as a metro line to have an extra stop or a route deviation to take in an important transfer or destination even if it adds a slight delay, so why would intercity transit be any different. Especially considering that the faster trip speeds on the existing route are well in the past and are unlikely to ever return givin the level of track congestion.

Because the goal is to compete with air travel. It is already comparable to driving or a bus.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by swimmer_spe

Because the goal is to compete with air travel. It is already comparable to driving or a bus.

I don't think that's true.

[Nouvellecosse]

The main problem with that statement (HFR is meant to compete with flying) is that it assumes the only way in which modes compete is through the duration of the main trip segment when in reality they also compete in terms of things like total trip time, reliability, price, scheduling, comfort, etc.

VIA is trying to attract passengers from whatever modes it can, and most people make decisions in terms of total pros and cons rather than just one factor. Each person weighs each factor differently. One person may wish they could take the train if the scheduling was just a bit better but choose to drive instead. Another person may consider taking the train and saving some money if it were just a little faster and more reliable, but after experiencing several past delays, have switched to flying. A third person may consider spending a little extra if the train had enough advantages but can't currently justify it over the bus, etc. HFR was proposed simply to improve VIA service and attract more ridership, not attract it specifically from any mode in particular. Improving the other factors would change the pro/con balance even if the tripduration stayed the same.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

I don't think that's true.

It's not. Every presentation from YDS when he was CEO said he wanted to get people off the roads. One of his old presentations, he even criticized HSR, for its lack of affordability.

There are sectors like Ottawa-Toronto, Ottawa-Montreal and Montreal-Quebec where HFR is marginally competitive with air on downtown-to-downtown. It's just a function of improving the service, not necessarily by design.

[Nouvellecosse]

I think the best statement would be "The goal of many HFR critics is to push for a service that competes with flying." But the goal of HFR's critics =/= the goal of HFR.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

The main problem with that statement (HFR is meant to compete with flying) is that it assumes the only way in which modes compete is through the duration of the main trip segment when in reality they also compete in terms of things like total trip time, reliability, price, scheduling, comfort, etc.

VIA is trying to attract passengers from whatever modes it can, and most people make decisions in terms of total pros and cons rather than just one factor...

And it's pretty clear that the HFR plan is an effort to change the dialogue from decades of all-or-nothing high speed rail plans that got us nothing. Building a decent service will not only get ridership, but also political support for further investment in the future. This is how a lot of the HSR and HrSR came about in Europe. And even in Asia where a lot of HSR was built from scratch, they still had a substantial train riding culture before. We lack the cultural aspects that would create political support for massive HSR projects.

[Mister F]

The Turbo Train was fundamentally flawed from the start. It was a fancy train running on conventional tracks optimized for lower speed diesel freight, with many at grade crossings. There were no upgrades to the tracks themselves to allow the trains to run to their full potential. 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.

[hipster duck]

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.

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.

[Truenorth00]

And even if the Turbo was around today. It wouldn't be running at 4 hrs anyway. Nothing will change as long as VIA doesn't own the tracks they run on. And even with HFR, there's still a far amount of terminal pieces that run on corridors or tracks owned by the freight companies. But at least HFR will prove educational to the public on what real intercity rail can deliver. If and when HFR is built, I expect the demand for upgrades and extension to come in quickly.

[swimmer_spe]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

And even if the Turbo was around today. It wouldn't be running at 4 hrs anyway. Nothing will change as long as VIA doesn't own the tracks they run on. And even with HFR, there's still a far amount of terminal pieces that run on corridors or tracks owned by the freight companies. But at least HFR will prove educational to the public on what real intercity rail can deliver. If and when HFR is built, I expect the demand for upgrades and extension to come in quickly.

My concern about the eastern ON section is that it is not straight like the Lakeshore Corridor. What I hope is that the Havelock sub is taken and blasted straight to ensure the limiting factor of the trains are the trains themselves and regulations.