اخبار العرب-كندا 24: الاثنين 15 ديسمبر 2025 10:20 صباحاً
The federal government has announced the start of an ambitious project to bring high-speed rail to Quebec and Ontario.
Popular in European countries, high-speed trains have the ability to link cities and provide service that can be even faster than flying, when you take into account checking in and security inspections.
The project has been brought forward by Via Rail, and will be built in partnership with the private sector, but it’s not a cheap project, and it will take a long time to build. While there are many unanswered questions about the project, we break down some of the most obvious ones.
Q: What is high-speed rail?
A: It refers to any train that can run at a speed of 200 km/h or faster. In this case, the high-speed rail link is expected to run trains along dedicated tracks that will achieve speeds of roughly 300 to 350 km/h.
Q: What cities will be linked by the network?
A: Toronto, Peterborough, Ottawa, Laval, Montreal, Laval, Trois-Rivières and Quebec City.
Q: I’m sorry. I think you said Laval twice.
A: That was no accident. Quebec’s third-largest city will actually have two stations along the network, according to the current plans, since the tracks will follow the north shore of the St. Lawrence River. There will be one station between downtown Montreal and Quebec City, as the train heads east, and another station on the westbound tracks heading to Ottawa.
Q: Why is Canada building this?
A: The project began because Via Rail had been hoping to build what it called high-frequency rail, which aimed to build dedicated tracks along the Windsor-Quebec City corridor. High-frequency rail was deemed essential for Via to improve its reliability and add more departures to attract more customers. Because the passenger train company currently shares its tracks with freight trains, they must often give way to them. Following public criticism, the high-frequency rail project was transformed into a high-speed rail project at the behest of the federal government. One of the arguments for the project is as an electric train, there will be a huge reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions, the equivalent of taking an estimated 100,000 cars off the road per year, according to current evaluations.
Q: Who’s building the network?
The new group running the project is Alto — a wholly owned subsidiary of Via Rail. The project has already received $3.9 billion in funding commitments from private companies that include SNCF, Air Canada, SYSTRA Canada, Keolis Canada, AtkinsRéalis, and CDPQ Infra, which is the builder of the REM in Montreal. It is expected the project will be built as a public-private partnership.
Q: When will the first trains run?
A: The answer to that is also unknown, but the group managing the project has a deadline of four years to get shovels in the ground, which brings us to late 2029 or early 2030 to begin construction.
Q: What is the status of the project now?
A: As of Dec. 12, the Ottawa-Laval-Montreal portion of the project received the green light from the federal government. This segment was chosen because it represents about one-quarter of the 1,000-kilometre network, and because it appears to be one of the easiest segments to built, with few turns and relatively flat terrain.
Q: How much will the trips cost and how often will the trains run?
A: These questions currently have not been addressed by the consortium building the system. However, the group now has four years to come up with most of those answers because that’s the deadline to begin construction.
Q: What happens between now and then?
There will be public meetings in all the cities expected to be part of the new network, and the group will conduct studies to come up with the best route.
Q: This all sounds great, but how realistic is this? Is there any money for such a pipe dream?
A: The biggest question mark around this project is its price tag, and the eventual payoff. Estimates peg the cost of building such a project around $80 billion, which would be the largest investment in public transit in the country’s history. Critics have said the cost is far too high considering all the transit projects in the country already starving for cash. One estimate says it will take 44 years for the project to pay for itself.
Q: I feel like high-speed rail is something that has been promised before.
A: That is correct. There have been dozens of studies and numerous proposals dating back to the 1970s. There was even a turbo train that was put into service by Via Rail Canada in the 1970s. It could achieve a speed of more than 200 km/h, but was limited to 160km/h because of the poor quality of the track, which is shared with freight trains. The train was pulled out of the fleet because of reliability issues after about six years.
jmagder@postmedia.com
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