Is VIA HFR the Canadian Brightline?

A look into Canada's first attempt at a modern, intercity passenger rail network

*Authors Note: Since this article was originally written there have been numerous developments and changes to the HFR project making some sections of this piece outdated. Since a lot of the article focuses on the geographic, and social context of the where the proposed line would run most of it is still relevant, but in the future an updated version will be published in order to reflect recent developments.*

There shouldn’t really be anything too complicated, or even that interesting, about the VIA High Frequency Rail (HFR) project. After all its just a train, how difficult or controversial could that be? But as it turns out, there is a lot going on with this project, and a lot to investigate, unravel, and unpack. Some of it is rather clever and exciting, while other parts are simply abysmal. Compounding it all is the fact that the project remains in a hazy state, with new announcements eliciting more questions rather than clarifying what is going on.

The article really centres around a tour of the line, following it for its entire length, pulling back the layers, and revealing the complexity of the project. Like an Icelandic landscape, the line never really stays the same for very long. Each section illustrates a different part of the HFR project, along with all the communities along the way and the associated opportunities and challenges. Canadian storytelling is often rooted in journeys across the land and while this article lacks the poetic beauty of a Tragically Hip song, the spirit of it is there.

In theory, HFR could be a transformative project. It could radically change how people move between cities and towns from Toronto to Quebec (and eventually the full length of the Quebec-Windsor corridor). The entirety of the corridor is home to 61% of the Canadian population and while not everyone will stand to benefit from it, a large minority of Canadians could. In many ways it is remarkably thoughtful and pragmatic… the ideal project for a largely suburban, but urbanizing, country that is looking to take its first kick at the can at building properly modern intercity rail.

But HFR is not without its faults. There are quality of life concerns for those who will suddenly find a busy line running through their town, farmland, or backyard. It could serve as a way to do some union busting, sell off federal land to developers with deep pockets instead of using it to address the housing crisis, and further fuel the resentment many people have towards those with anti-rural attitudes. And most damning of all, it could turn out to be a project for “the best of us”, not “the rest of us”.

Boring origins for a bureaucratic endeavour

The simplest way to describe the HFR project is that it’s going to be like VIA Rail today, but with modern trains, more frequent service, faster travel times, lines free of freight traffic, and…. it will actually be reliable. Yes, there are many more details about the project beyond that, but for the public, that is what they are going to see (though modern trains are something that will be arriving much sooner than that). Some parts of the first phase of the project will be on lines that currently have VIA service, while other sections will be all new. That will result in several cities that currently do not have VIA service, or any train service for that matter, being connected into the VIA network.

A new VIA Rail train is out on test and stopped at Napanee station. The trains themselves can do 200km/h in their current state and are quite comfy and modern inside. This is also essentially what HFR will look like, except with overhead wires for electric trains, and tracks that are free of freight trains.

Since the 1980’s, there has almost always been a push, from one group or another, to build high speed rail in Canada, primarily modelled after France’s TGV or the Shinkansen in Japan. Prior to the HFR concept becoming public, the most recent high speed rail report had been in 2011, which put the costs of a high speed line from Windsor to Quebec at CAD21.3 billion, and like most HSR proposals in the past, dropped service to many towns and cities along the existing routes. Not surprisingly, it went no where and became another dusty collection of papers on a shelf.

This is a map of the most recent Quebec-Windsor high speed rail proposal (though an Ontario centric one from Toronto to London was released several years after this one). It has all the hallmarks of previous proposals, in that it had no concern for places in between the major cities, or even the suburban stations (Fallowfield is gone, and there is just one station for the east end of Toronto and the eastern GTA). Image via CatBus.

In 2015, a different kind of proposal emerged, if if the map looked rather familiar. This one was not from consultants or a consortium of rail manufacturers looking to drum up federal investment so that it could make some sales. It came from VIA Rail itself and it would be a CAD4 billion project. One of its key selling point was that it would use existing, and abandoned, Canadian Pacific corridors, in addition to some of the limited track it owned itself, to create a moderately faster and more frequent service.

One of the earliest maps showing the HFR proposal. Several stations on the early maps would disappear from later iterations. Image by VIA from Railway Age.

At first glance, it was kind of boring. It wasn’t the “spend just enough so that a failing system doesn’t completely breakdown” approach towards passenger rail funding that had been the mantra since VIA’s inception. But it avoided being a “lets go from zero to a thousand and spend at least CAD20 billion on a high speed rail” report that would ultimately be mocked, or simply ignored. It fell somewhere in the middle. The project was developed by VIA Rail bureaucrats and would offer improved, modernized, service without a scary price tag. In the early life of the project there was even a tag line “HFR: 1/3 of the cost, 2/3 of the benefit" which, god bless their best intentions, is the most Ottawa committee brained slogan they could have come up with.

It was also naively optimistic in its cost projection. Then VIA Rail CEO Yves Desjardins-Siciliano put the price tag at CAD4 billion. When broken down this equated to CAD2 billion for infrastructure, CAD1 billion for trains and stations, and the remaining CAD1 billion for electrification. For the most part, this is the number (or CAD4.4 billion) that only until very recently, was most often quoted by the media or government officials. The reasons why this number was never realistic will become clear as the article progresses.

Early reaction to the idea was mixed, though it wasn’t overly terrible. There was a lot of cynicism about yet another proposal that was going to go nowhere. But, among the local communities it was going to serve, especially places like Peterborough, there was genuine excitement.

For the next few years the project was not really in the public spotlight. There were of course newspaper articles about it from time to time and from an outside perspective it may have looked dormant or dead. But work was going on behind the scenes. The 2016 federal budget allocated CAD3.3 million to Transport Canada to investigate the viability of the project, and the 2018 federal budget added another CAD8 million for the work to carry on and the scope to be expanded.

It would be in June 2019 that it became apparent the project was starting to be taken seriously. A total of CAD71.1 million in funding was being dedicated to further the project. CAD55 million of that amount was for the Canadian Infrastructure Bank to create a joint project office that would work with the third party groups needed to conduct detailed studies. And CAD16.1 million went to Transport Canada with the focus being on interoperability of the new service with transit agencies in Montreal and Toronto, those being EXO and GO.

It was also in the later half of 2019 that VIA themselves began to promote the HFR project, something they had never done in the past. They released a video on their YouTube channel outlining the proposal, included information on their website, and even put up posters in their train stations. As was discussed in detail in a previous article about the evolution of VIA’s brand and marketing, this was tied into a much larger modernization and rebranding campaign.

On 19 April 2021, a little under two years after the funding for the now joint CIB and VIA Rail project was allocated, the 2021 federal budget was announced and it was very good for HFR. CAD4.4 million would go to Transport Canada for risk assessment and mitigation, and CAD491.2 million for VIA Rail over 6 years. That money would not only be used to further the project through the procurement phase, but also undertake some early infrastructure work (though the details of what kind of work that might be are not yet known).

On 6 July 2021 Minister of Transport Omar Alghabra went on a mini tour, starting in Quebec City, to announce that HFR was going to be moving on to the procurement phase. A few weeks later, on 21 July 2022, the minister took a small tour of Southwest Ontario to announce that they would start investigations into Phase 2 of HFR which would see it serve London, Windsor, Sarnia, and presumably at least a few points in between. Originally set to launch in Fall of 2021, the procurement site, and process, for HFR officially began on 9 March 2022, which is where the project currently stands as of today.

These might be somewhat boring details, but they are important. The cultural and political viability of this project, something that will be discussed later, is a central factor in its progress to date. The rather bureaucratic process it has undergone thus far is illustrative of that fact.

But that isn’t what most people will care about. Where does, and doesn’t, the train go? What will be built in order to get the project done? What will the impacts on people nearby be? And most importantly is it something that will be useful? Those are the kinds of details that will be relevant. And there is no is better way to get a sense of what the project is really all about then to go on an 850 km long tour of the line.

The changing nature of Canadian cities

Toronto has in many ways, and for a long time, been at the vanguard for how cities across the country have developed. Kicking off in the 50’s and 60’s, and really carrying on at full steam until well into the 00’s, Toronto and the GTA were the poster child of suburban living. Being so heavily tied to the automobile this off course had massive implications for how people moved not just within their city, but to cities near and far. While there were many factors at play, including the rise of affordable airline travel, intercity passenger rail was never on the agenda in a serious way once people had decided that public money was better suited for highways and airports, but not trains.

This is Toronto in the 1960’s. Suburban living and plenty of highways is what people wanted, and that is what they got. This model served as a template for many other cities in the corridor and across Canada and there was very little deviation from this up until the late 1990’s. Trains were largely irrelevant, and not really viable, in landscapes like these. Images from City of Toronto Archives via BlogTO.

Throughout the 80’s and 90’s, while the great suburbaning was in its final years of a triumphal run, people were slowly moving back to Toronto’s urban core. At first it was primarily filling up existing housing, but in the late 90’s and early 00’s it would evolve into constructing all new urban homes, primarily in the form of townhomes, warehouse conversions, and increasingly condo towers. Eventually it would spread outside of the urban core and into the suburbs on the lands of dead malls and parking lots.

The rest as they say is history and before long a full scale urban revival was taking place in Toronto, along with many other cities in the Quebec-Windsor corridor and across Canada. With urban living comes a need for urban transport. After all, part of the appeal and joy of living in a city is not needing a car for most, if not all, the trips you do. And that has sparked a willingness to invest in public transport in a serious way, though the focus is still primarily on more local needs rather than regional and longer distances, at the moment.

At Union Station, change is already afoot. GO has embarked on a massive modernization campaign that is going to turn it into one of the busiest train stations in all of North America. And not surprisingly this is where the HFR line will start as well. Toronto as a destination is going to be a key factor in the success of intercity rail in the future. Not only is it the largest city in Canada, but it has many people who are car-free or car-light. If you don’t have a car, or your partner needs the one household vehicle, you have no choice but to find other options for intercity travel. In 2019, the percentage of VIA Rail trips that involved Toronto as either a departure point, or arrival destination, was 62.2%. It might also be surprising that the busiest city-pairing for Toronto was not Montreal, but Ottawa, in large part owing to a higher frequency of service between the two cities.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the largest cities are the top destinations and sources of traffic for Toronto. But even substantially smaller centres such as Kingston, London, Windsor and Cobourg, provide a respectable amount of traffic. Data from VIA Rail Canada.

Unlike the current VIA Rail service, HFR is going to take an entirely different line, one that runs north of the Lakeshore corridor and the 407. Right away a big question emerges, how do you get trains from Union Station to the northern edge of Toronto so that it can head out of the GTA?

There are a few ways this can be done. The first, and probably most likely option, is to take the GO Lakeshore East line, then head north on the GO Stouffeville line before cutting onto the Canadian Pacific corridor. HFR could also take the GO Richmond Hill line for roughly half the trip, then the Canadian Pacific corridor for the other half. While super scenic, this is probably not great as the line is incredibly curvy as it goes through the Don Valley and wouldn’t do a good job of quickly getting trains out of the city. There is also a third option, that uses a long abandoned freight corridor, and then building in the existing Canadian Pacific corridor. That is probably the most ideal as it would essentially give HFR its own corridor in and out of the city. But it is also the most expensive.

The map shows 3 options for getting trains from Union Station to Agincourt, and beyond. What kind of agreements or partnerships can be negotiated with Metrolinx will likely have just as much of an impact on route selection as factors like cost and travel time. For being so close to the GTA, there is not a huge amount of urban development between Markham and Peterborough (in part because of the greenbelt). Most of the land is used for farming, with the odd gold course or forest tossed in just to mix things up.

Publicly, there has been no firm indication as to what direction this section might take. In theory the Stouffeville line would be the best option since it will soon be electrified and modernized, and require the least amount of infrastructure work. But with Metrolinx having some very aggressive plans to run services up to every 6 minutes on some of its GO lines capacity could be an issue. This section of the HFR line is very much a wait and see situation.

It is important to recognize how critical urban parts of the HFR network will be. Whether it is a highway or a rail corridor, both can become extremely busy, congested, and slow through the most central part of urban areas. Because of quality of life concerns for residents nearby, trains are unlikely to go much beyond 140km/h, which will be the top speed of GO trains on their modernized network. But if a train has to limp along at 50 or 60km/h, due to traffic or other factors, that is going to add a significant amount of time to a trip, depending on how long the train has to do that for. In a July 2021 announcement about HFR, it was stated that they were looking to accelerate “dialogue with partner railways to negotiate dedicated routes in and out of city centres”, so those in charge of the project seem to be aware of the value of dealing with these sections correctly. But there is also a much higher cost for building in urban areas, so it will have to be a fine balance between speed, capacity, and cost.

What are the ingredients for a modern railway?

Not all the rail lines are the same and at a quick glance it might not seem obvious what the difference is between a line that can only suit freight trains moving at 40km/h, and one that allows trains to travel along at 177km/h, or faster. Once the HFR line gets past the Canadian Pacific rail yard in Agincourt and starts heading to Peterborough, it is quite easy to illustrate a number of factors at play when it comes to the design of a rail line.

In general there are about half a dozen key factors that need to be considered when determining the quality rail line that can be built, and how fast a train can go: geometry, track quality, number of level crossings, topography and geology, signalling, and whether it operates in mixed traffic. Some of them seem straight forward enough. A straight line is going to allow trains to go faster than a twisty, curvy line. Building a line through the prairies is going to be easier, and cheaper, then building a line throughs the Rockies, even if you do follow the contours of landscape, let alone try to build straight through it.

Some are perhaps a little less intuitive. The current line from Agincourt to Peterborough has track which is in pretty rough shape. From a distance you wouldn’t really notice it, but up close you can see that the sleepers (the wood that tracks rest on, and are secured too), are heavily rotted in many locations, and the rails are bolted together instead of welded (which is what creates the classic ‘clickity clack’ sound). There is also the signalling system, which is fine for slow moving freight trains, but not really suitable for fast moving passenger trains.

And then there are all the crossings, the parts of the line where roads, bike/pedestrian paths, driveways, or farm crossings, go directly over the track.

Various shots of the existing Canadian Pacific line just west of Peterborough and at the cities urban fringes. At a distance, it just seems like any other rail line. But up close it is clear the line is completely unusable for passenger rail service in its current state.

How well crossings are protected are a huge determining factor in how fast trains are able to operate on a rail line. If a line has crossings that are only marked by cross hatches and stop signs (so no lights, no bells, no gates), then its speed is effectively restricted to 41 km/h or 49 km/h (depending on if it is a freight or passenger train though some lines are, at the moment, able to operate faster). In the past farm crossings were exempt from this though that has changed in recent years. Both private and farm type crossings will be covered in more detail later as they provide their own unique challenges.

If a line has a continuous string of crossings which are protected by automated signalling, so lights, bells, and gates, then speeds up to 177km/h can be achieved if all other aspects of the track, and the trains being used, allow for it. For anything above that, crossings must be completely grade separated, meaning vehicle, pedestrian or bike traffic goes under or over it.

On a line with a dozen, slow moving, freight trains each week, grade separated crossings are really only necessary for freeways, super busy provincial roads, or other busy rail lines. But the faster trains go, and the more traffic the line sees, the more they become a necessity, least in part to increase safety, but also so that constantly stopping traffic in its tracks as they wait for trains to pass can be avoided. Along the HFR line, there are a lot of crossings. How many exactly? 891, and that does not include the sections of the line that run through the urban parts of Toronto, Montreal or Laval.

Of those crossings 71 are already grade separated, so there is a chance most of those won’t be a concern (though some might be narrow enough that they have to be modified or replaced, depending on the situation). There are 367 regular, level road crossings, many of which are rural roads with just signs, or lights but no gates. And then there are the 426 farm crossings, and 27 private crossings.

A breakdown of the different crossing types through the various sections of the HFR line (excluding the urban areas of Toronto and Montreal). This does not include the crossing on a potential bypass from Smiths Falls to De Beaujeu. Once crossings from that section, and the urban areas included, the number of crossings tops the 1100 mark. Data from Statistics Canada and Google Earth.

Needless to say that is an extraordinary amount of crossings that either need to be deleted, upgraded to modernized automated signalling, or fully separated if higher operating speeds are desired. The cost of adding automated signalling systems is not excessive. A 2017 report by the city of Abottsford put the cost at around CAD275,000 per crossing. In some cases it might be a bit higher if power lines have to be run to the site, but that number seems a reasonable estimate. Grade separated crossings however, are much more expensive, by a factor of at least 100.

For example an underpass on Adelaide St in London, Ontario cost CAD58 million. A program to do 5 grade separations in the City of Ottawa would be CAD430 million. In the Barrhaven, a satellite suburb of Ottawa, a rail underpass on Greenbank Rd was CAD43 million. An underpass to separate Main St and the Canadian Pacific line through Milton, ON cost CAD49 million, in 2015. These were all within cities, mostly 4 lane roads (or more), underpasses, and require extensive work to deal with sewers and utilities. But even a simple two lane provincial highway, or even rural road, overpass is going to be in the CAD25 - 30 million range, at a minimum. It is easy to see how quickly the cost of grade separation can add up.

Through Peterborough there are going to be some challenges with the number of roads the line crosses. There are a dozen level crossings from where the line enters the city limits to the river, and only a single grade separated one at the cities periphery. To ensure quality of life for residents once the number of trains increases, this will mean a handful of those at a minimum will need to be separated so that people can still have a consistent flow throughout the city.

Looking west to where the current Canadian Pacific line, and future HFR line crosses George St, a critical artery for heading into Peterborough’s downtown. Right now having a level crossing is no big deal when its one or two freight trains a day. But 30-40 passenger trains in a day will be a very different story. Also visible, to the right of the track, is the old train station.

Peterborough did at one point, up until January 1990, have VIA Rail service. Like many VIA lines in the 1980’s, it struggled as passenger counts dwindled. Even with the line using RDC Budd Cars, a self propelled diesel passenger car that could operate as just a single unit to try to save money on lines that were bleeding cash, it eventually met the axe. Unsurprisingly, due to the cities decades long lobbying and advocacy efforts, and cheerleading for the the project, when major HFR announcements have been made, the city is often one of the locations they head too.

On the left is an undated image of a VIA RDC train stopped at a then painted Peterborough station, probably towards the end of the lines life. On the right is Transport Minister Omar Alghabra and local representatives having a photo op outside the station. Left image from Peterborough Chamber of Commerce via PTBO Canada. Right image from Global News.

Community advocacy and engagement have played a sizeable role in building public support for this project. Trois-Rivieres was another city that was active in pushing for the return of rail service, which it also lost that first month of 1990. Other communities along the line, which have currently been left of the maps, such as Perth and Sharbot Lake are finding their voice and communicating not just their desire for a station, but the ways they hope the line can be designed to reduce the impacts of dozens of high speed trains whizzing through their towns each day. These voices, both positive and negative in tone, are only set to increase as the project moves along.

A big consideration for the line into Peterborough (and a bit further east to Havelock), is going to be the existing freight traffic. This section is not part of Canadian Pacific’s mainline between Toronto and Montreal so the amount of traffic is relatively light. But there are still customers on the line. It serves Masterfeeds west of Peterborough, Quaker which still has its plant right in the heart of the city, a few quarries owned by Unimin Canada that are connected via a track that heads north from Havelock, and a rail yard in Havelock itself.

The Quaker facility in Peterborough. As with many agricultural industries, rail is essential as it is the only cost effective way to move the product long distances, in this case oats coming from western Canada or an eastern Canada port. Even though the line doesn’t serve that many customers, for those that need it is the difference between staying afloat, and shutting their doors.

Because freight traffic is not particularly heavy on this line, it does mean that VIA could negotiate a deal in which they assume full control of the corridor, and offer running rights to Canadian Pacific when the line isn’t in use so they can continue freight service to their customers. This would be ideal as it means there would less work required on the corridor itself. Using the existing line will result in some cost savings, but not as much as one might intuitively think it would. As was seen in the photos above in its current state the rail line is completely unsuitable for passenger service. Level crossings would all have to be updated, except for the few that might need full grade separation. There would also need to be signal upgrades, preparing the right of way for electrification, and vegetation clearance, so there is still a reasonable amount of work that would be needed to modernize the line.

Just put a track on it

By and large the section from Peterborough to Havelock is not much different from the previous one. The track is in poor shape, and even the landscape is pretty much the same. Perhaps the only major difference is that many of the level crossings are on rural, gravel roads, as opposed to paved ones, meaning a potentially higher cost to install automated signalling at them.

A rural road west of Norwood. These are a staple along many parts of the HFR route and most are simply protected by a cross hatch and stop sign.

The line does pass through the small community of Indian River, and the charming little town of Norwood. But aside from that it primarily runs through farm land. Interestingly there are very few farm crossings on this section, perhaps owing to the frequency of local roads.

From Peterborough to Tweed the landscape does start to shift a bit. The line isn’t particularly straight, but it is not excessively twisty. There are some communities along the way and the majority of the line still runs through farmland.

As the line heads east from Havelock it officially enters a state of abandonment, and it remains this way until reaching Glen Tay, 130 km down the line.. Many moons ago there was an active rail line the full length of this section. But at this point it has been abandoned for at least 30 years. Immediately east of Havelock there are even some sections of the corridor with track still in it, but they are overgrown and in some cases even have roads simply paved over top of them.

Looking west on a section of the now abandoned Canadian Pacific corridor east of Havelock. It isn’t just cities that pave over old streetcar or freight line tracks. Luckily there are not many sections like this along the HFR route as it will take some work to rip out the track and ties, old signals, cut back brush, redo the drainage, and get it into a good state.

From the start the use of existing corridors was a selling point for the HFR project. This often times questionable marketing ploy is not entirely new though. It is essentially an iteration of a type of public transport proposal that can best be summed up as “put a train on it”. If you see a rail line, and it has no passenger trains on it (bonus points if it had passenger trains on it in the past), then you know, just put a train on it. Its a rail line after all, so clearly that strategy just makes sense.

Part of the reason it became popular is because it has worked recently… once… kind of. The first GO train line was a sort of precursor to this, but the modern version emerged when Ottawa launched the Carelton University shuttle (also known as the O-Train pilot project) in 2001. They took a minimally used freight line, added some basic stations, and “put a train on it”.

If one of the main selling points of a public transport project is that “it’ll be easy because we can just put a train on it and let’r go” it is probably not a well thought out idea, and is likely going to cost way more than originally marketed as. Image from Portlandia.

If you were going to Carelton University then this line proved useful and a much nicer experience then taking one of the buses to get there. But that was really the extent of the lines function and though being a Carelton U shuttle isn’t a bad thing, it would ultimately take numerous, much more expensive, investments down the line to create something that was useful beyond the lines original, limited scope (and even then the current round of upgrades still fall short). None of that has stopped people from adopting the “put a train on it” philosophy for other projects, whether it was extending the Carelton U shuttle line across the river into Gatineau, or putting passenger trains back on to Vancouver Island.

Those two examples are not just the most consistent in beating the drum of that strategy, but they also show why this idea is rather simplistic and flawed. Sure you could extend the line into Gatineau, but it skirts around the most central part of the city, the place that most people would actually want to go, really limiting how helpful it would be for everyday commuters and riders (great if you want to get to the casino though). And in the case of Vancouver Island, where the line does actually go to the places people would want to get to, there are major repairs, to the tune of CAD728 million that are needed to be done to the line before a further investment of CAD599 million could be made to actually establish a commuter service on it (the poor state of the line was part of the reason it was shuttered in the first place). But the “just put a train on it” slogan is great from a marketing perspective in that it seems to offer a cheap, simple solution to a complex problem, which is why it is so commonly used.

The early days of HFR were a twist on that concept, opting for a “put a track on it” strategy. Presumably part of the reason this route was chosen is because there were abandoned sections where the rail beds were still fully in place, whether they had rotting tracks, or a recreational path on top of them. In sections with active freight lines, there are sometimes empty rail beds owing to once double tracked lines now being a single track. Even VIA Rail themselves trumpeted this approach as part of its public pitch in a YouTube video released in 2019.

Looking west on the old Canadian Pacific corridor, just south of Arden. Sections like this are good because a lot of work is already done. But they are far from track ready. All the culverts and bridges will need to be replaced (or heavily refurbished). It will need all the supporting infrastructure, probably some widening near old timey rock cuts. These sections are no doubt cheaper than all new right of ways (if they are suitable for modern service), but not “we can do this for CAD4 billion” cheap.

If the line is useful (ie it actually goes to places where people are and want to travel to), then there is nothing inherently wrong with this approach. It can actually save money versus having to build an all new right of way, with land acquisition costs and constructing the corridor itself being hugely expensive. But in this case it has also lead to a simplification of the project, and an underestimate of its costs in the early days. The idea that a 850 km long modernized rail corridor could be built for CAD4 billion was, at best, rather naive.

A case in point is the town of Tweed. The right-of-way, which at this point hasn’t seen a train in decades, runs right through the town. As it stands today there is no grade separation between the corridor and local streets, one of which is a semi-busy provincial highway.

Even if there are places where you can simply “put a track on it” the costs associated with reducing the impacts on people living nearby can be significant. Not only would the HFR line run right through the centre of Tweed, it would even run through the middle of the yard of a busy pallet factory. It might be easy to dismiss that and just tell them to move elsewhere and deal with it. But for 3 decades the town has evolved to function without a railway running through it. Suddenly sending at least a dozen trains a day flying down the track is going to be a disruption. And from an operations perspective, sending trains flying at every possible opportunity is exactly what you want to do.

It is easy to make jokes about a pallet factory. But this is what has happened along the abandoned sections of the line. In this case the right of way that goes through Tweed now has a large yard on both sides of it to support the local pallet factory (they do have to be built somewhere). Life hasn’t stood still since trains stopped running 30 years ago, or more in some cases, and bringing rails and trains back to the corridor means finding ways to reintegrate back into the various communities along the way so that it is not completely disruptive.

There are mitigation efforts to reduce the impact on people living nearby and keep traffic flowing, but they will add a not insignificant cost versus just throwing some track down. The situation in Tweed isn’t unique either. Many of the towns along the line east of Laval, and in particular east of Trois-Rivieres, are nestled right up to the currently slow moving freight line. It is the difference between drawing lines on a map and actually recognizing there are people along the way. People who aren’t just a potential passenger count, but are doing what everyone does and just trying to live a cozy, comfy life.

After the line leaves Tweed the terrain quickly changes as it heads into classic Canadian Shield country. This is a landscape that is all about granite, trees, and lakes. When this line was originally constructed, the primary consideration for its routing would have been to avoid tunnels, bridges and blasting and only use them as an absolutely last resort. This means that the line had to follow ridges and valleys in order to keep costs and construction time down. Since the goal wasn’t to build a line that could handle trains speeding along at 150 or 200km/h it didn’t matter if some sections were curvy and circuitous. It was a worthwhile trade off.

This is a photo of Sheffield Conservation Area, just south of Kaladar. This is pretty much what the terrain looks like across the full length of the line from Tweed to just outside of Glen Tay. It is very pretty, but all the granite, lakes and rivers make straightening existing sections of the line an expensive proposition. Image by Peter Sherlock-Hubbard via Canada 247.

Fast forward to 2022 and the needs of the line are far different than what they were in the past. All things considered, the alignment is surprisingly suitable for many parts of the corridor through the rocky landscape. However, there are some sections where trains will no doubt have to slow down in order to navigate tighter curves, less than ideal when the goal is to build a reasonably fast service. One solution would be to simply build a new right-of-way through some of the sections to create a straighter alignment that would meet the standards the rest of the line is looking to achieve. But that will require blasting, bridges over lakes, rivers, or valleys, and maybe even some short tunnels. Even if it was only 12-15km of realignment that was needed to achieve the end goal of a modern right of way, it would require a good amount of money.

It is very easy to see how the contours of the landscape and the presence of many lakes and rivers dictated the route through this area. While realigning some of the right of way would be an easier task today than when the line was originally built, it would not be cheap to do through the granite landscape.

Though this land looks relatively remote, there is another consideration that it brings up, and that is the indigenous communities along the way. Official HFR documents actually put the total number of communities along the full length of the line at 30 and of course they say all the correct things about consulting with them throughout the process. The maps show far fewer than this but that is because they only show federally owned or recognized indigenous lands. In reality most of the land is still unceded and not officially recognized.

In the past, railways very often destroyed indigenous communities and ways of life as they were laid down. It is entirely possible this corridor was no different in that regard. This makes rail lines a particularly sensitive and challenging issue so that the same pattern isn’t repeated today. The subject of negotiations, how to respect the land and, hopefully, how to include the communities in some of the lines benefits is an incredibly complex one. Devoting just a few paragraphs to the topic isn’t because it is being dismissed. It is important and a future article will go deep into the topic as this is not the only project in which this issue matters.

The HFR line is lucky in that geology and topography are not are a key consideration throughout most of its length. The section through the classic shield landscape is only about 95km and once the line gets to Glen Tay (which is really just a few minutes west of Perth) the landscape levels out. From there it starts a near continuous run through relatively flat agricultural land, with the odd bit of scrub brush in between, until it reaches Montreal.

Though few have likely heard of Glen Tay it is as a key point along the route. This is where the abandoned corridor ends and there is once again a rail line with active freight traffic. Unlike the previous section from Agincourt to Havelock, this one is much more active as it is part of Canadian Pacific’s mainline between Toronto and Montreal. While the track is in good shape that doesn’t matter. The line is busy enough that VIA will need to build its own tracks in the corridor instead of taking over it and offering running rights. Luckily the right of way is wide enough that while some earthworks will be needed, it shouldn’t be overly complicated to add additional tracks for HFR.

Looking east down the Canadian Pacific freight line through Glen Tay. Numerous parts of this line once had additional track, and in this section that appears to be the case, making it a bit easier and cheaper for the HFR project.

From Glen Tay to western edge of Perth, it would probably only take a couple strategically placed grade separations to minimize the impacts of increased rail traffic through the town. The corridor is reasonably buffered from built up areas so a bit of thought and care will go a very long way in adapting the line to the growing community.

Scalability, HFR’s party piece

Once the line leaves Perth and heads to Smiths Falls, what is perhaps the most important and underrated aspect of HFR really comes into play, scalability. Simply put it is building infrastructure, be it roads, railways, or computer networks, with an eye towards the future so that they can easily have additional elements added plug and play style as needed. The proposed HFR line has numerous sections, plus a 100km section of a wild card bypass, which are nearly dead straight and would provide excellent opportunities for trains to open up the taps and take er’ out for a rip.

You can create a single track corridor, electrify, modernize signalling, and maybe make some slight adjustments on alignment, so that the corridor is good to go in the future. Need higher speeds? You can start to grade separate. Need more capacity? Add a second track. In particular when it comes to grade separations the cost or complexity, for the most part, really doesn’t change as the rest of the infrastructure evolves (underpasses are an exception because it will be cheaper and easier to create one when a corridor that does not have an active rail line, versus one that does). As long as the backbone of the system is in place from the start, you can go back and add separations to bump up line speeds with little or no financial penalty for doing it after the fact.

There is an immediate benefit as well and that is keeping the price tag of the project down. Its clear there was no way it could have been done for CAD4 billion, and the recent announcements of a cost in the range of CAD6 - 12 billion really didn’t ruffle too many feathers. But somewhere there is a cost ceiling for the project after which point the public is going to quickly turn against it. Avoiding that is going to be critical. While the project is potentially going to have a fair amount of private funding, it already has, and will continue to receive public money, and public resources like land. That means it will stay in the same line of fire that any other public transport project does.

Demonstrating that investments in modernized intercity rail are worthwhile is not going to be a one time thing. HFR, will have to prove over the course of a few decades, through the design, consultation and construction phase and into the first decade of operation, that intercity rail modernization is a good use of public money. Having a network design that can be upgraded to respond to demand quickly and easily will be a part of that process.

From Perth to Smiths Falls the line is essentially straight and marks the first part of the route where a grade separated network, alongside the proper supporting infrastructure, could easily support speeds of 200km/h or more. Smiths Falls itself is a bit of a mess. Without going too far into the weeds, the existing station will almost certainly need to be moved, and a short 3 km bypass constructed, so that trains passing by don’t have to slow down, and to avoid what would currently be a very wonky situation of trains driving in and backing out, whether they were stopping there or not.

From Perth to Ottawa and onward to Casselman, straightness is the name of the game. The only parts of the line with any major curves are in Ottawa, where trains will have to slow down regardless, and Smiths Falls, though that can be sorted out. Equally important will be the growth of the communities on the eastern and western approach to the city.

The section from Smiths Falls to Ottawa (and east of Ottawa) is one of the few parts of the current VIA Rail network that the agency actually owns. And it will also be one of the most critical parts of the HFR line. At Smiths Falls, trains going to Ottawa via the Lakeshore services are going to join with HFR trains and use the same line at that point. Depending on the final design choices, only some of the Toronto to Montreal trains may go through Ottawa. But it could well be all of them, resulting all the HFR traffic, and some lakeshore traffic, using that one section of the line.

In some regards, this will be a fairly straightforward part of the network to upgrade. Level crossings are already signalled and gated, and throughout much of its length, the corridor runs through flat, relatively easy to build in terrain. A lot of the key elements are already in place so in this case a “put another track to it” approach would actually work super well.

While this section of VIA owned track, just east of Smiths Falls, may not have a rail bed reading and waiting for track to be laid down, that doesn’t matter. The line is pretty much straight and flat until the city limits and the terrain should make it relatively easy to widen the corridor to allow for a second track and all the required supporting infrastructure.

Grade separating this section from day one might not be an unreasonable expense. There are a number of crossings that are close enough together one of the two could be deleted. Farm crossings are close enough to roads that access corridors next to the rail line could likely be built for a decent price. And within the urban part of Ottawa, there are not many level crossings left to deal with. For a line that could be the busiest part of the network, it could be one of the sections worth going all out on straight away.

Just west of Barrhaven (Ottawa), is an example of how two crossings that could become one without a major impact for people in the area. All it would take is a road next to the rail corridor and that would leave one less crossing to manage. These are the kind of “easy” choices that people on the HFR team will start with to help simplify the rail corridor, especially if a section is being considered for full grade separation. Image via Google Earth.

The concept of scalability that has been described isn’t a theoretical, untested approach to moving a network from antiquated to increasingly modernized. The GO train network, since 2006, has been the poster child for exactly these kinds of strategies, with a carefully though out, iterative strategy to move lines from what were in many cases only slightly better than goat paths with a rail line next to them, to what will soon be fully electrified, double tracked, fast and frequent running. The full details were covered in a previous article from this site on the evolution of the GO train network.

There is a song and dance that has to be played in terms of balancing what aspects beyond the basics get added, as value for money propositions are continually examined and weighed against each other. But it is absolutely possible to make an iterative approach to the HFR network successful.

Attempting to unravel the unknowns and wildcards of HFR

Currently there are no major changes planned (at least publicly) for the urban Ottawa portion of the line, beyond electrification, and possible double tracking. But Ottawa, being the Nation’s Capital and having a lot of Federally owned land, is where one of three recent plot twists in the HFR proposal comes into play. That first wildcard that will be looked at is the role that Transit Oriented Development (TOD) on federal land could play.

This is something that has only officially come to light this past March 2022 when information relating to the start of the procurement process was released. In Canada, TOD is nothing new. In fact In cities like Vancouver and Toronto, around Skytrain, subway, and increasingly GO stations, it is has become a central part of transit expansion and modernization, with developers increasingly paying for updated or new stations themselves. It is is becoming standard for major urban rapid transit projects.

Lincoln Station in Coquitlam, on the Skytrain station, offers a good example of how transit oriented development has become a critical part of transit projects. Most new stations will see towers much taller than these, but the idea and spirit is the same…when possible, integrate the building of new transit and new housing from the start. Image via BC Business.

At the federal level however, neither VIA nor the government, have ever really done TOD before. In fact there has been shockingly few developments on federal lands despite the fact that a number of their landholdings are in prime, urban territory. Astute followers of Ottawa will probably point out that the NCC has engaged in TOD with LeBreton Flats, but they are separate, anti-democratic agency, from the federal government. The feds themselves were the primary party behind Wateridge Village on the former CFB Rockcliffe site, but there is no transit involved in that project. The track record thus far is not encouraging.

On the left is one of the many renderings of a fully built out LeBreton Flats. On the right is the actual state of LeBreton Flats, 17 years after the opening of the new War Museum kicked off redevelopment in the area. To make the situation even more depressing, just to the north of Lebreton, a huge redevelopment on the shores of Gatineau and La Chaudiere Islands, which started a decade later, is now outpacing the NCC run Lebreton. Left image by Claridge Homes via Global News. Right image from 6/2021 via Google Earth.

Trying to find geodata that accurately maps out all the federally owned land in Canada is not easy. There is plenty of data for National Parks, Indian Reserves (that is still the name used in official Government of Canada geodata), and other odds and ends. But trying to find mappable data for its commercial holdings is a real struggle. There is some data for land and buildings owned by the National Capital Commission (NCC), but it is only viewable online. But with a good knowledge of Ottawa, it is possible to at least make note of some of the larger plots of federally owned lands that are either directly beside the rail line, or in areas next to the Confederation Line where a trip to a train station would be anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes. Within the city, there are many opportunities, and even the NCC has sold off small plots of land to developers over the years, so they would likely be willing to get in on the action to some degree. What it could look like outside of Ottawa… that is a lot harder to get a sense of.

Views of some of the various federal and NCC properties throughout Ottawa. The top left shows the Ottawa Station area, with the beige overlay being NCC owned properties. Top right is the Confederation Heights area with many office in the park buildings, and also next to the VIA line and the shitty O-Train line. Bottom left is an under-utilized area of land in Gloucester (just north of Blair Station on the good O-Train line). And bottom right is the infamous Tunney’s Pasture, one of the most prime pieces of property in all of Ottawa being absolutely wasted on parking lots. Top left image from NCC data via ArcGIS. Remaining three images from Google Earth.

Compounding the lack of data on the scale of suitable federal lands across the whole length of the HFR line is that there are a lot of unknowns about the general plan and strategy for HFR and TODs right now. In fact basically everything is unknown. There is no idea what the overall scale they are looking to achieve is. No clue if it will be a developer gift, or actually used to address housing affordability. No idea about how the revenue generated from it will be used to fund the project, or if it will even go to the project and simply be a bonus for investors. So it could fall anywhere in between remarkably progressive and a game changer for the housing affordability, to developers rolling around in free cash (the latter is probably much closer to what the outcome will be). Either way, it is story to keep on an eye, though mostly for how wrong it could all go.

Once the line leaves Ottawa, which it does in short order when it heads east from Ottawa Station, it comes across another lengthy straight stretch, in this case one that is about 40km in length. It has a relatively high density of crossing at 29, of which zero are currently grade separated. And it runs directly through the communities of Vars, Limoges, and Casselman at the end of the section. The track and right of way is owned by VIA and overall it should be pretty easy to add additional capacity through this section.

The corridor is reasonably wide for the sections that are right in the communities themselves. This should make it easy to mitigate the effects of HFR through towns like Vars and Limoge, which will be crucial because this will be a very busy section of the line with potentially higher speeds than are seen today. If quality of life can’t be maintained through these towns, it will be out of laziness and disregard, not because it’s super challenging to do.

Looking west on the existing VIA Rail line through Limoges.Having this relatively wide corridor should make it much easier, and cheaper, to both upgrade the line and implement mitigation options to reduce the impact of increased, and faster, trains through the community.

On the surface, the corridor from Ottawa to to edge of Montreal might not seem all that exciting. Some small towns, a lot of farm land… probably seems rather uninteresting too many people. Except for the fact that this is a region which is growing at a rate that is often well above the national average of 5.2% (for the 2016 to 2021 census period). Ottawa itself grew by 8.9% in that timeframe, and could quite easily see its population rise to 1.3 million by 2036 (and that is just Ottawa, that does not include Gatineau which forms the second half of the National Capital Region). Just outside of Ottawa the town of Limgoes grew by 8.1% over the same period, and Casselman was even higher with a rate of 11.6% . As the line approaches Montreal it runs through the city of Vaudreuil-Dorion which topped all of the previous places with a growth rate of 13.5% and could easily be a city of 65,000 - 70,000 by 2036.

While places like Caseelman and Limoges are small at the moment, development is starting to pick up. In Limoges there are plans for at least 3 new subdivisions of around 958 homes, and those were just what was approved over a one year period from late 2020 to October 2021. In Casselman there is a plan for a 600 unit subdivision, and equally as interesting, a 540,000sq/ft Ford Motor Company distribution centre is now under construction and will empty around 150 people. Because of its location near the 417, and being semi-in between Ottawa and Montreal, Casselman could see additional distribution facilities set up, which would only boost the need for even more local housing, in addition to being a commuter suburb for Ottawa. If you are curious how much those seemingly boring industries can alter a city, just take a look at Mississauga or Brampton.

As is sometimes the case small towns are small until one day they are not. Once an area falls into a major cities commuter shed, its growth can take off very quickly. From the urban edge of Ottawa to the urban edge of Isle Montreal is only about 130 km via the current rail line. In just a few decades the regional and commuter connections in between the two cities could start to become a central function of the line. It shouldn’t be hard to accommodate that change, and there should be agreements and understandings in place that if VIA isn’t going to provide that service, someone can.

Once the line leaves Casselman it does get a bit quieter. The route goes through towns like Maxville and Alexandria, both of which have seen their populations stagnate or decline slightly as aging populations outpace younger people moving in, or sticking around. Much of that trend is tied to an important factor in the life and times of these towns and that is the changing nature of farming in Ontario, and all across Canada for that matter.

Casselman and Vaudreuil-Dorion is the last relatively straight forward section of the route before entering Isle Montreal. Worth noting is the bypass that can be seen on this map (and the previous one). This will discussed later but it is one of the 3 wildcard factors that are at play with the HFR project.

Consolidation in farming is a trend that has been going on for decades…since at least the 1950’s actually. Bigger farms are needed in order to remain financially viable. In the prairies, where farms were already much larger, the trend has been far more pronounced, with the average farm size increasing from 550 acres in 1951 to 1784 acres in 2016, or 324%. In Ontario the change is not as dramatic, with the average farm size in 1951 being 139 acres and 249 acres by 2016, an increase of 79%.

However the impact it has on communities in Ontario, and in Quebec, is still very real. Farm consolidation means less people over time have a reason to stay in the communities since many people sell their farmland and are no longer attached to the land they once made their living off of. And so as is more often than not the case, young people simply never take up the family tradition and move out, leaving one less long term resident, and resulting in a very slow decline in population. But the farmland still remains and as a result they still impose specific needs relevant to HFR in the form of farm crossings.

These have been casually mentioned before and there is a reason for that. For a long time, essentially since the start of railroads, they have been a staple in rural settings. It was relatively easy to get them installed if you needed one since all they required was some wood between the tracks and a pretty basic sign (in some cases it wasn’t even a cross hatch, just a small black and white private crossing sign).

This is what most farm crossings look like. Some of them are not even signed with cross hatches and stop signs. These are not great for cars, but for farm equipment, they are just fine.

They had two purposes. To allow farm equipment to get from one field to the next through the most direct route. Or in some cases they were driveways that actually lead to peoples homes, or ancillary farm buildings. In the case of driveways these fall under the category of private crossings which may or may not be able to be accommodated in the same way as the farm variant.

This is a driveway, on the CN line just east of Belleville, which actually crosses 3 incredibly busy tracks. In the near future this will need to have signals updated to include gates, as will all private crossings on the HFR line. But if sections are to be grade separated, then these become a lot more challenging, and in the case of homes not attached to a farm, may even require expropriating the property.

On lines where you have perhaps a few freight trains a day plodding along these crossings are not much of a concern. Yes the heavy farm equipment can sometimes take a while to cross. But trains aren’t clipping along at a speed where a stalled vehicle, even if a train is a few kilometres out, can easily result in an accident. But a 150 car freight train doing 80 to 90km/h, or a passenger train doing 160km/h or more, is a much different story. Accidents can be catastrophic and the margin for error is much narrower. Over time, as more lines found speeds increasing, so too did the concern over safety.

That is why on November 2014 Transport Canada implemented new rules around crossing protection. Some of the rules came in to effect immediately when it came to new crossings. But for existing ones, like farm or private crossings there was a 7 year timeframe for them to be updated (which has since been extended, in part due to the pandemic, but also because of the scale of the project). There is a variable set of criteria to determine which crossings need to be updated. But in general if a line has design speeds higher than 41km/h for freight trains (49 km/h for passenger trains), or has more than one track at the crossing, or has an additional siding track within 30m of the crossing, it needs to be updated to an automated system. While the federal government does have a program in place to help with cost of having those systems installed, this has meant that farmers are often saddled with an enormous cost to keep their crossings.

Along the HFR line there are not a particularly high number of farm or private crossings until the line heads east of Casselman, at which point they ramp up quickly and become the dominant form of crossing type outside of the urban areas. Due to farm consolidation, it is likely that many of these crossings can simply be deleted as there might be multiple crossings on what is now land owned by a single farmer. Where the challenges arise are the ones that need to stay.

There are a few options. One is to simply upgrade them to automated signal systems, which is the strategy taken across many farm crossings in the prairies. However, because there could be a desire to grade separate the line in the future, the goal might be to eliminate as many as possible straight away. One strategy that can be employed is building access roads next to the rail corridor so there is a public right of way to access fields. Not always a cheap option, but one that is possible.

When there are level crossings it is easy enough to ensure they can accommodate the larger size and width of farm equipment. But if grade separation is done, it has to be able to accommodate the largest of farm machinery, which is likely going to mean wider bridges and a slightly more expensive structures (a two lane bridge with narrow shoulders means a single combine will take up both lanes and block oncoming traffic). There may even need to be grade separated farm crossings in some cases. Solutions do exist. But running higher speeds trains through active, highly productive farming communities is not as straight forward as it seems. And if the project wants to garner some rightly deserved hostility towards it in a hurry, then failing to meet the specific needs of farmers is probably the fastest way to do it.

Why not use the Lakeshore corridor?

Once the line gets to De Beaujeu indications are that VIA will shift back onto the Canadian Pacific corridor and take that all the way in to Dorion-Vaudreuil. This is not the route VIA currently takes. Right now it goes on a 9 km trip down the last section of track it owns to the CN lakeshore corridor (which runs along the St Lawrence at that point), and heads into Montreal via that route.

It might seem odd to not use a section of track that it owns, but there is a reason for this. Once the VIA line merges into the CN line it would have to mix with freight traffic, which is the exact problem they are trying to move away from. So, one might ask, why not just build dedicated tracks in the CN corridor, like the they are doing in the Canadian Pacific corridors, instead of abandoning a section of track they already own? In fact, why not just build in the full length of the lakeshore corridor in the first place?

The simple answer is because CN has no interest in letting that happen. In fact up until the past 4 or 5 years, Canadian Pacific had no interest in working with passenger railways either. What caused the company to so radically change course? Who knows. They haven’t really publicly stated why, but they have likely realized leasing out unneeded corridor space could generate some good revenue for them. What is known is that the change of course has already had a radical impact. GO’s Bowmanville extension is making use of the Canadian Pacific corridor from Oshawa onward, and emerging plans to modernize the Milton line similarly will take place in one of the company’s previously off limit right-of-ways. A cross border link between Windsor and Detroit, operated by Amtrak, checked off one more requirement (on a very long and challenging list) when Canadian Pacific agreed to let them use the tunnel for passenger rail service (just 2 years after they bought the tunnel outright for their own freight projects). For VIA, HFR couldn’t have happened without Canadian Pacific’s new found co-operation.

Without the option of at least using some of the CN corridor, a modernized lakeshore route would have to be in an all new right-of-way which would be incredibly expensive. There are some parts of the Canadian Pacific mainline that run parallel to the existing VIA route, which could potentially be used. However even that has its own challenges.

The corridor itself is interesting because although the population is much more spread out, there are actually more people living between Pickering and Cornwall than there are in Ottawa. 1.17 million people in 2021 to be exact, and growing at a rate of 7.5%. VIA ridership numbers stations in that stretch of population was 561,323 in 2019. Though this is lower than the 779.697 that departed Ottawa that year, improving access for the suburban cities of Pickering, Ajax, and Bowmanville would likely do a lot to bring the two numbers much closer together. The cities and towns along the lakeshore corridor should not be dismissed simply because they are not an amalgamated population blob like Quebec or Ottawa.

But even if CN would allow VIA to build in its corridor there are many challenges that would lie ahead. The line is a busy freight corridor, and in addition to traffic heading to ports in Montreal and the Maritimes, or onward to Western Canada, there are 42 freight customer along the line between Pickering and Dorion-Vaudreuil which results in 35 sidings/branches coming off the mainline. A dedicated corridor could not conflict with those movements meaning many fly-overs or fly-unders to stay on the quiet side of the track, or avoid crossing the sidings at grade, would be needed. There is also going to be the need to grade separate even more crossings, given that traffic would rise to about 75-80 passenger and freight trains per day once a dedicated line opened. And it would only rise from there.

It might be easy to just dismiss freight railway needs. But Canada has some of the highest per capita use of freight railways in the world. CN itself is the third largest railway in all of North America. The role they play in moving goods is critical, and under appreciated. Ensuring their existing operations, and any future expansions, are protected, is a must.

These are just a few of the challenges that a lakeshore corridor modernization would face. They are not exactly insurmountable, but they add up to a very costly endeavour. When it is all said and done, the cost of a modernized lakeshore line (similar in design and spirit to HFR) would likely be as expensive as the current HFR project from Toronto all the way to Quebec City. Even if it was an option that could be picked from, it would be debatable if it would be the right one to do for the first intercity rail modernization project. Though it should still be done at some point and this might be the one of the few corridors in Canada in which a case could be made for investing serious amounts of money to build the majority of it to high speed rail standards.

Once the HFR route leaves Dorion and starts to head towards Iles Montreal the CN and Canadian Pacific lines converge (for a while). And this is where the chaos that is Montreal begins.

The Montreal challenge

In recent years of the project very little information about what could happen to HFR through Montreal has been given. And there is a very valid reason for that. The situation on the island of Montreal is an absolute fucking disaster.

This has been the strategy for Iles Montreal and Iles Laval. Should work out fine though. Image from South Park.

The ridiculousness of the situation is exemplified by the fact that instead of someone, anyone, building a new tunnel through Mont Royal in order to provide enhanced service, everyone seems to be trying to figure out how to cram everything through century old infrastructure. People who want better VIA service hate REM for taking the tunnel. People who like REM don’t care about VIA’s plans. No one wants to spend any money, even though it is going to have to be done. It’s all incredibly stupid.

But that is far from the only issue. The passenger rail network is an antiquated mess. As it stands today trains heading to the south shore, on what should be an incredibly busy and viable route to Mont St Hilaire, have to cross a 150 year old, single tracked Victoria Bridge which is not only shared with CN and part of its mainline to the east coast, but even has a drawbridge when taller ships need to pass through the St Lawrence Seaway. There are two passenger stations 500m apart with most of the EXO commuter trains going to Windsor Station, while some EXO trains and VIA (and now REM), use Central Station. Commuter trains coming from the North and East take a long route around the mountain instead of a tunnel being built so that they can avoid that and probably save a good 10 minutes on each trip.

In Toronto there have been serious, forward thinking efforts to modernize regional passenger rail (ie GO) services, which have had the money to support them. In Montreal… not so much.

Even with financial backing, and it will take a lot to fix the mess that is the rail network on the island, there are no easy answers. There has been little public information in recent years on what approach might be taken, so there isn’t really much else that can be said right now. Montreal and the North Shore will just remain a giant question mark for the time being.

The importance of the suburban station

Even if the specifics are uncertain, Laval is going to be an important station on the HFR network. It will make the service vastly more accessible, and desirable, to those who live on the North Shore. One of the most under appreciated aspects of rail service is how much more attractive it can be if you are close to a station (a station that is 10 minutes away is better than one that is 50 minutes from you). And for residents of Laval, that is very much the difference between using a local station, or having to drive to a metro and then take that to Central Station (or god forbid, having to drive all the way into Montreal).

According to the 2021 Census, Laval had a population of 438,366. So the potential for strong ridership is there. The idea that adding a suburban station can help attract an all new customer base isn’t just theoretical. In 2001 a second station was added to the Ottawa region on the northern boundary of satellite suburb of Barrhaven. Fallowfield, as it is known, actually became (according the 2019 numbers, the last non-pandemic year), the 8th busiest station on the VIA network, with 126,918 departures, and accounted for 16.3% of all departures in Ottawa. It played a critical role in the sizeable growth of VIA ridership in Ottawa since 2001.

Opened in 2001, Fallowfield Station was built at a bargain basement price of CAD1.2 million and has grown to the point of being the point of departure for 1 in 6 people travelling from Ottawa, and the 8th busiest station in the corridor in terms of absolute ridership numbers. Data from VIA Rail Canada.

But as good as Fallowfield has performed, Ste-Foy Station in the western suburbs of Quebec City has performed even better. In 2019 36.3% of all passenger in Quebec departed from the suburban station, and that share of passengers, like Fallowfield, has also been increasing over the years, up 5.1% from 2008.

A 5.1% increase in ridership share for Ste-Foy might not seem dramatic. But it isn’t insignificant and either and it goes towards demonstrating the continued and growing importance suburban stations can play when it comes ridership. Data from VIA Rail Canada.

Across the whole of the corridor, the 4 suburban stations of Fallowfield, Dorval, Ste-Foy and Oshawa were the 8th through 11th busiest stations on the network. And while ridership across the corridor as a whole grew by 48.8%, the growth of the above 4 suburban stations (plus the south shore station of St-Lambert), grew by 177%. Even if you take Fallowfield out of the equation and only compare the performance of stations that existed in 2001, their growth was still 99.1%, just a touch over double the overall corridor growth.

On the left is a chart showing the number of boardings at each of the top 20 stations and as can be seen positions 8 thru 11 are all suburban stations. On the right is the ridership growth for 5 suburban stations from 2001 to 2019 which have seen a lot of growth and represent a key ridership market which is still not even close to being fully served. Data from VIA Rail Canada.

As much as Canadian cities are urbanizing they are still overwhelmingly suburban. Better serving (ie directly serving) these parts of the Montreal and Toronto has the potential to tap into a lot of ridership. This is why a station at Eglinton in Toronto will be important, and why a station in Markham, at the edge of the GTA before HFR starts to head into the countryside, should also be seriously considered.

Fallowfield Station also illustrates another point, which is sometimes travel time reductions can be achieved just by having a better station to go too. A train going from Ottawa’s primary station to Toronto Union might take 2h50 or 3h00 on the HFR network. But if someone can catch a train in Barrhaven, it will mean the actual travel time by train will probably be reduced by 15 minutes, give or take, along with a shorter trip to the station itself. For those people, a trip to Toronto could be 2h45 or maybe even 2h35 depending on the stops. Like items that end in 99 cents, having the travel time of a train trip to Toronto be advertised as 2.5 hours (if they could save another 5 minutes on the trip) for those in the southwestern part of the Ottawa, becomes an enticing proposition (same is true for someone able to use a station in the Markham area to get to Ottawa).

Once the line leaves Iles Laval it very quickly becomes very straight. Along the length of the HFR network this is the longest straight section at around 60km. And it ultimately goes 80km in total before encountering a curve that might restrict super fast running speeds.

Straight. Flat. Relatively simple and easy terrain to build on. This is the line, looking west, from Ste-Genevieve-de-Berthier, roughly half way between Laval and Trois-Rivieres. There are certain challenges, such as managing the 160 farm crossings on the section from Terrebonne to Trois-Rivieres alone, and quality of life concerns with the line passing through the heart of numerous communities. But a new track built with scalability in mind has a lot of potential through this area.

However, this section also has an incredible number of farm crossings, along with regular road crossings. That will probably make it cost prohibitive to fully grade separate the line and bump up running speeds on day one. But it does mean that an incremental approach towards removing level crossings could easily open up that opportunity in the future.

This section of line also brings up a relatively big failing of HFR. If you look at some of the most recent maps for the HFR proposal, it doesn’t show any stops between Laval and Trois-Rivieres, which is a distance of around 140km. This isn’t because the line travels through remote hinterland. Many towns, and even cities, exist along the way. VIA has tried to cover their ass by including the asterisked comment *additional stations may be added…..* but publicly they haven’t given any indications that they are seriously considering other stops beyond canned responses and lip service.

This is one of the recent maps released showing the HFR route. Definitely not a lot of consideration for the small or rural towns. Of course they say more stations could be added after community consultation, and some probably will. But it is rather embarrassing that most of those communities will have to fight for something that should really be part of the plan from day one. Image by VIA Rail Canada from Daily Hive.

When the line leaves Iles Laval it skirts along the edge of Terrebonne, a city of 119,944, as of 2021. A little further east it runs across the northern edge of L’Assomption, which in 2021 was home to 23,442 people. Further down the line you come across Berthierville, home to 4386 people, and the Gilles Villeneuve Museum (a must visit place for any F1 fans). There is Maskinonge, a town of a few thousand people, which is just down the road from Louisville, a town of 7340 people, before the line heads into Trois Rivieres.

Once the line leaves Iles Laval and heads toward Trois-Rivieres it passes by, or comes close to, quite a few built up areas, many of which are not exactly small either. Just leaving these populations on the table is one of HFR’s more egregious choices.

It highlights one of the biggest faults of not just HFR, but of pretty much all intercity rail proposals over the past 3 decades. There is a near total disregard for smaller cities and towns in between the major centres, which in itself is part of the broader problem of accessibility. Justified as a “prudent” strategy, it is really little more than an anti-rub, urban-centric attitude in action. Especially on a project like HFR, there really isn’t a justification for this to happen.

Imagine for a moment a new freeway is being built. It could be the upgrading of Highway 69 between Parry Sound and Sudbury to get rid of the often busy and dangerous two lane road that still serves some sections of the route. It could be Autoroute 40 between Laval and Trois Rivieres. Whatever freeway you pick, ask the question of whether one would be built that goes 140km without a single interchange. The answer is no, not a bloody chance. Freeways don’t have interchanges with every single road they encounter. But unless a freeway is going through completely remote territory, as in no roads, no people, just untouched landscapes, there are going to be interchanges at least every 10 - 20km, even if it is sometimes serving roads with limited traffic or tiny communities.

However, when it comes to building modern, intercity rail lines, which are the freeways of passenger train service, there is not the slightest bit of hesitancy to have a line run for 140km without a single stop, even when there are communities directly along its path. Between Terrebonne and Trois Rivieres, A-40, which essentially parallels the HFR line, has 22 interchanges, while the proposed rail line will currently have 0 stations.

And it isn’t as though interchanges are cheap either. When you factor in the cost of a bridge, and the on and off ramps, they are typically in the range of CAD25 - 40 million for a basic interchange. In Kingston, when the bridge for an interchange was replaced, and some changes were done to off ramp alignments, the cost was CAD25 million. In London, the repair of and construction of 4 interchanges was CAD110 million. And in Belleville, the construction of a new interchange with the 401 and an east access road is estimated at CAD40 million. Interchanges should be built so that they connect into a healthy number of roads of communities, but they do come with a substantial price tag.

The cost of stations on the other hand, so long as they are not the kind of large stations needed for medium- to large-cities, are much less in comparison. There was the bare bones structure in Smiths Falls which was built at a cost of CAD750,000 (in 2010 dollars) when the station had to be relocated further up the track. Even the new Belleville station which included a pedestrian overpass above the tracks, elevators to a second platform and a large interior was just CAD14 million (in 2011 dollars). If an additional siding is needed to help manage traffic, the Wass siding in Ottawa offers a cost example as the 0.8km section was built for CAD3 million in 2014. Even if a basic station, that didn’t interrupt faster express operations, was in the CAD4 - 5 million range, you could still get 8 - 10 small stations for the same price as just two highway interchanges. And that would probably be enough to provide adequate service to small, remote and agricultural communities across the full length of the line

The top left shows the new Smiths Falls VIA station, which is small, basic, but also does the job of offering people protection while waiting for the train. The station in Belleville, completed in 2010, is much larger, has multiple platforms and needed an elevated walkway, and provides the kind of space needed for the ridership the station sees. Combined, both of these are still cheaper than a single highway interchange.

The Laval to Trois Rivieres stretch is not the only place on the HFR line this happens. From Peterborough to Smiths Falls there are currently no stations. On the way to Ottawa the line will pass right by the fast growing suburb of Richmond. On the line between Ottawa and Montreal, there are numerous communities such as Vars, Limoges, and Maxville, the latter of which even had VIA service up to 2001. And between Trois Rivieres and Quebec communities such as Sainte-Anne-de-la-Perade, Portneuf, and Pont-Rouge will all be passed by.

Just because a station exists does not mean every single train has to stop at it, just as cars or trucks don’t have to use every single interchange they encounter. Of course a rail line does not need to have as many stations as a highway has interchanges. That would be silly. But having 0 over a 140km stretch is really quite unacceptable. In Quebec options for a few trains a day doing local service would currently be limited to VIA. However in Ontario, with GO expanding to London, the idea that they could operate a service between Toronto and Ottawa that would focus on local communities is not out of the question. And as will be discussed, a low fare, local service option, is really a critical element that is missing from this project.

The strategy may not be as arrogant and egregious as Brightline passing by the 647,000 residents in the Treasure Coast counties. But it isn’t much better. Not only should a project that is in part funded through public money do a better job of serving as many people as possible, but places outside of Toronto or Ottawa or Montreal can actually be quite successful, and should not be discounted.

The power of the mid-sized city

In 2021 Trois-Rivieres had a population of 139,163 and is nestled half way between Montreal and Quebec. With both those destinations set to be around a 1h30 train trip, and a trip to Ottawa around 3h30 - 3h45 (depending on dwell time in Montreal), this puts the city in an excellent spot to generate riders. There is a similar parallel on the existing VIA Rail network and that is Kingston. Its population is roughly the same as Trois-Rivieres and owing to it having a large number of trains stopping there everyday, and being a 2 hour trip to either Toronto, Ottawa, or Montreal (the more places you can go, the more a service will be used), the city punches well above its weight. In fact, using 2018 ridership numbers, only one station in the corridor produced more departures per capita than Kingston (and the reason for that is that VIA serves as a defacto commuter service for Cobourg and Port Hope with 78.9% of all departures from those stations being for Toronto). Keep in mind this is on a network known for its delays and unreliability.

Using Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs) as the catchment area for train ridership (not perfect but could be applied relatively consistently throughout the corridor) the per capita ridership of those areas was calculated. Among the larger centres Ottawa has the highest per capita ridership, but it is the small- to mid-sized cities, like Kingston, Brockville, and Woodstock, which really perform the best. Cobourg/Port Hope is a bit an anomaly since VIA serves as a commuter service to get into Toronto and that number would drop if GO were to enter the market. Ottawa Data from VIA Rail Canada and Statistics Canada.

There are two concurrents trends happening. The first, the low capture rate of the Montreal and Toronto CMA, is likely due to VIA just not having that many stations across the region. As of right now there are no stations on Montreal’s north shore, and even on the south shore those who live in Bouchverille, Candiac, St-Bruno or Beloeil don’t have great access. In Toronto there is no service in Markham, Vaughan, Richmond Hill or even Mississauga, a city of 717,961 people in its own right. Diving further into that issue goes beyond the scope of this HFR article, but the opportunity to draw in more passengers in those two CMA’s is huge.

The second factor at play is the high levels of ridership in the smaller centres of the corridor. Cities like Toronto, Montreal, and even Ottawa have become more urban over the past decade, and will continue to do so. A consequence of that has been cheap surface parking lots, once a staple of the downtown cores, are disappearing as they are redeveloped. The days of being able to go to Toronto for a weekend and park at the corner of Yonge and Gerrard, right in the heart of it all, for 12 to 15 bucks a day are long gone.

On the left, in black, are all the surface parking lots in Toronto in 1978. On the right is the state of parking lots in 2019. And by 2029 there will be fewer still. This is a good development for a number of reasons, but it also means that the less cars are accommodated (in a super easy and cheap way) the more reason people will have to take a train into major cities. Image via mapTO.

Driving into the cities is simply becoming less convenient, just by nature of the cities developing and urbanizing. This means taking a VIA train, or even driving to Oshawa GO and taking a much more economical trip into the city, are becoming more desirable options. As long as cities keep growing the higher per-capita ridership levels of smaller centres is unlikely to change and will probably increase (unless they get GO service in which case VIA ridership will decline, but overall train ridership could skyrocket, as happened when GO service was introduced to Guelph and Kitchener-Waterloo).

As the line heads east of Trois-Rivieres it once again enters a rural landscape where farm crossings outnumber regular road crossings 3 to 1. The line is not nearly as straight as the section west of the city, and there are some tighter turns on it, such as when it goes through the town of Pont-Rouge. This might cause some sections to be a bit slow, and if the line were ever fully grade separated some realignments would be needed to allow trains to run at 200km/h for the majority of its length. This section won’t be the fastest part of the HFR route, but it’s not terrible.

The final section of the line from Trois-Rivieres to Quebec. The line is not nearly as straight, it passes through a number of small towns and communities, and the final leg of the trip to Palais du Gare is shared with freight. This will probably be the slowest section of the entire HFR route.

The last stop on the line before heading to its final destination is a station in the suburban quarter of L’Ancienne-Lorette. It will also be just north of quartier Ste-Foy, where the existing suburban station is. Owing to the routing of the Canadian Pacific line, HFR will not be passing by it, which necessitates the need to build an alternate station for the line. Probably just a few kilometres after stopping at that station the train will hop onto the CN corridor currently used by VIA in order to finish up the last 9 km it will take to get to the brilliant Gare du Palais at the edge of the cities centre. This final section is one of the few sections of the HFR line that is confirmed to run in a freight corridor.

The Smiths Falls to De Beaujeu bypass, or HFR’s second wildcard

There is one last stop on the tour and for that we head back to Smiths Falls. In 2021 a new twist to the proposal emerged, and that was the option of a bypass that would allow Montreal bound trains from Toronto to divert down the Canadian Pacific corridor at Smiths Falls, head past Kemptville and Winchester, and eventually meet back up with the existing VIA line (or the new VIA line if the Canadian Pacific corridor is used for the run in to Dorion). The communities along the line are not large, but they are very active. There are strip malls, grocery stores, charming main streets with day to day businesses on them, bowling alleys, and even small apartment blocks.

Various shots of some of the communities on the possible bypass route. None of them are particularly large, but they are very active and serve as hubs for surrounding farms and hamlets.

The reason for considering this bypass is to reduce the travel time of trains going between Toronto and Montreal. How much time would it save versus going through Ottawa? If existing travel times are used, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 55-60 minutes. However, with the minimum amount of upgrades that will come as a result of HFR, the time savings might be closer to 40 minutes. An additional bonus however is that it would solve operational issues with Smiths Falls station, allowing trains from the Lakeshore line to serve Ottawa, and trains from the bypass to serve Toronto, without wonky reversals (though it would still require another station relocation).

The question of whether it is a worthwhile investment to save 40 minutes will ultimately come down to how much it would cost to add dedicated track through the 130km corridor that the bypass would use. It does have some things working in its favour. A large stretch of this line was until very recently two tracks, and as a result of freight operations now being single tracked, that means there are long stretches in the right of way where a rail bed is already in place and would make putting down a new, dedicated track much more cost effective. Many crossings have automated signalling. Of the 80 farm crossings, many are likely duplicates to due land consolidation. And the line is very straight through much of it’s length.

This section of Canadian Pacific’s mainline near Mountain, ON, just west of the 416, was up until a few years ago double tracked. This does present a good opportunity for HFR in that the “put a track on it” ethos actually works well in this situation. Of course there is much more that is needed….signals, electrical systems, overhead wire, vegetation clearance, etc…but this is a good place to start from.

The idea of a bypass does bring up a few questions. If travel times between Toronto and Montreal need to be faster, why not upgrade sections of the main HFR route for faster speeds instead of building an all new line? And that inevitably leads to the question many people ask, why not just build full high speed rail?

The former question does not have a simple answer. It basically requires knowing exactly how much the bypass would cost, and then working out whether taking that money and applying it to the main HFR network (grade separations for faster running, that sort of thing), would result in the same time saving for trains going between Montreal and Toronto. If the same time savings could be achieved for those trains, then it is a no-brainer since, as a consequence, you will have made trips between Toronto and Ottawa, and Ottawa and Montreal, faster as well. If not, then it is a question of how close would the time savings be and getting into much more detailed analysis of value for money. This is what further design work will determine but there are reasons to believe that applying that money to the primary corridor would be the better option.

The latter question is much easier to answer. There are two reasons why high speed rail doesn’t make sense (at the moment). The first is all about money. Costs of high speed lines do vary from country to country. A World Bank report puts the cost of China’s high speed rail network at around USD17 - 21 million per km (or around CAD21 - 26 million/km). That is among the cheapest in the world, but they also do not have to worry about respecting property rights, worker rights, human rights, or be concerned about the impact it has on the environment and communities it passes through. That same report puts European high speed rail costs at around USD25 - 39 million per km (or CAD31 - 49 million/km). Using European numbers, that would put the cost of a 400km section between Oshawa and Vaudreuil-Dorion at around CAD12.4 - 19.6 billion. A route that went through Ottawa would be around 460km of high speed sections between the urban areas and cost between CAD14.2 - 22.5billion.

It should be clear why the costs for these lines are so high. They need to be straight or have very gentle curves. And grade separation is not an optional element, it is a must. As an example on the TGV Rhine-Rhone line there needed to be 160 bridges, 12 viaducts, and one tunnel over a 140km distance.

This is a view of the TGV Rhine-Rhone line. When the landscape starts to get in the way, it gets expensive very quickly. Image via Territoire de Belfort.

If the only barrier for constructing high speed rail was costs, it might (and that is a big might) be something that could be overcome but there is more to the equation. To start with, it is important to understand why high speed rail was developed in the first place. In Japan and France, the two trendsetting countries, they were built because the existing lines from Tokyo to Osaka, and Paris to Lyon, were at capacity. These were not antiquated lines like we see in Canada. They were busy double tracked, electrified, high capacity, dedicated passenger rail lines. There was a need for something better and there was the infrastructure and widespread cultural support to build not just new rail lines, but higher quality, more expensive lines.

Canada lacks both of those elements. In the Quebec-Windsor corridor the existing infrastructure is shit and trying to plug high speed rail into it would be like trying to stick an SD card into a floppy drive. As modern infrastructure is established you can start to develop incremental projects, ones that don’t have an insane sticker shock that will keep most people away from them. But you need a base network to start with.

The social and cultural support is equally as important though. There is often a romantic notion in Canada that this was once a great, grand railway country. And to some degree that is true. The was a time when many trains crossed the landscape and went “Choo Choo”. But it was more about trains literally being the only option rather than a love for them. Trains were simply faster than steamships, or horse and cart travel. Once car ownership and the suburban era took hold, it was game over for trains. They were a technology that simply didn't matter to the overwhelming majority of the electorate, at least not in a way that made them actually want to spend public money on them.

Cultural and societal values are immensely powerful and ultimately dictate what politicians will or won’t do, what policies they pursue, and how public money is spent. To understand why this has mattered for high speed rail there is no better example than marijuana and magic mushrooms.

On 17 October 2018 cannabis was legalized all across Canada. Doing so in the 80’s or 90’s would have been a radical choice. But by the time it happened it wasn’t really a controversial change in policy. Polls in 2017 generally found that 2/3 of all Canadians supported the idea. It was a low risk move to make. However, it could be argued that magic mushrooms are much more fun, in the same way that high speed rail is more fun than standard, but still modern, intercity rail. There is a subsection of Canadians that would like to see magic mushrooms legalized, just as a small but dedicated group are in favour of spending huge amounts of public money on high speed rail. But legalizing mushrooms doesn’t have anywhere close to the backing that legalizing cannabis did, and would be much more controversial. So in the end it won’t be happening anytime soon.

Compared to high speed rail, HFR has made its way through the various processes that public projects and policies face, as was outlined at the start. It started off as an idea, and gradually moved to more advanced steps, to the point of starting the procurement phase today. High speed rail folks on the other hand have been tossing out proposals and ideas for over 3 decades now. The first instance of an electrified TGV style high speed rail line for the Quebec-Windsor corridor was proposed back in 1983 when VIA published its 1982 annual report. The idea has been debated in parliament. It spawned many reports from consultants and parliamentary offices. Rail industry heavy weights and backers who could profit from it put their best foot forward to advance the idea. There was 32 years between that first proposal and when HFR was announced for high speed rail to gain traction. But it never did.

Just as liberalizing policies towards drugs included legalizing cannabis but not magic mushrooms, HFR is an investment in intercity rail that has enough public support for politicians to get behind and for it to get this far through the court of public opinion. Where as despite many peoples best efforts, high speed rail didn’t.

Widespread, mainstream, cultural and social values can, and do change over time. Consider the early 2000’s when it would have been insane for anyone to propose or think a CAD10 or 15 billion urban public transport project could happen. But in 2022 the CAD15.78 billion GO expansion is underway, as is the CAD10 billion Ontario Line project. Ottawa’s good LRT line, the Confederation Line, is already at CAD6.76 billion for its first two phases and will be in it for at least another CAD3 billion for the next phase. For VIA style intercity rail, it is still the early 2000’s in terms of building up the cultural and social support that will allow other projects to be proposed later. This progression of events is neither good or bad. It is just how things work in a liberal democracy.

With the tour of the line at an end there are still a few more aspects of the project that need to be discussed. Service is really the most important element of the project. Clever planning aside, it will be the day to day usefulness of the service for a variety of people and situations that matters most. There are also specific realities of the Quebec-Windsor corridor which will play a big part in how it fits into the overall transportation network.

Will it be better than driving?

There is a popular meme which simply goes “Train good”. And while that is true it ignores the fact that cars can be pretty awesome. They provide a personal space, you can crank up the music and sing along or have a car dance party. You can control the temperature to your exact liking and if you need to fart, you can do so without shame. And for those childish pleasures you can put your foot down and listen to the sound of a finely tuned engine roaring, or let your foot off the gas for a joyous turbo whoosh.

Cars are fun and cars can be a great social experience. If you tried to rock out to Bohemian Rhapsody on a train you would just a huge asshole. In a car, you can just have at it. If you want people to drop driving, be it getting around a city, or for regional or intercity travel, you need to have a strong alternative that will pull people away from what can be a joyous driving experience. Image from Wayne’s World.

But there are also downsides. The cost of entering into car ownership can be very expensive, along with other basic costs such as maintenance and monthly insurance. They need what can often be expensive petrol to go anywhere. Sometimes driving can be incredibly stressful, such as when the weather is terrible, or traffic is heavy. In some cases in can be outright dangerous if someone is tired, or life is simply keeping their attention off the road and onto other things. And in some ways, they are not exactly fast. Obviously they are faster than biking, walking, or a local bus service. Travel times might get a bit faster if a two lane road is replaced by a freeway, which is not often. But unless there is a radical shift in Canadian culture, it is highly unlikely that there will be freeways with speeds above 100 (or 110km/h in some rare cases) meaning travel times by car are effectively topped out.

Within the Quebec-Windsor corridor only 2.3% of all trips are taken by train, while cars capture 94% of that market. The reason why that is so low is not hard to understand. Travel times for VIA’s current services are at best on par, or a tiny bit better, compared with driving under the most ideal conditions (so a Saturday morning for example). In the case of the current Montreal-Quebec route, it is much slower.

The current state of VIA travel times in the corridor versus driving. They are pretty much on par with driving (with Quebec-Montreal being slower by a not inconsequential amount relative to the trip length). Data from Google Maps, and Hfr-Tgf.com.

As has been mentioned before, the reliability of the service is pretty trash along a number of the routes. There will of course be people who will take a train no matter how slow and unreliable it is (and that is probably the majority of VIA’s current customers). But as it stands today if you already own a car, the train is a tough sell.

This is the state of VIA Rail reliability in the corridor. As can be seen, it’s really bad. Travelling between Toronto and Montreal in 2019 meant that you had close to a 1 in 2 chance of your train not being on time. Even between Toronto and Ottawa, which includes some of VIA’s own track, the chance of being late was 1 in 3. Data from VIA Rail Canada.

HFR addresses a number of these problems. First off, the travel times will be lower, and in some cases, they will be drastically lower. This means that for most of the major routes HFR will serve, they will have travel times that are at least 19 minutes faster than driving under the most ideal conditions, and in some cases times that are 90 minutes faster. Only the Quebec-Montreal route is slower, by 10 minutes. Its not entirely clear what factors hold it back from achieving the kind of travel times the other sections do (the cluster through Montreal is probably a big part of that), but at least it will come close to being on par with driving, which is an improvement.

With HFR, the train will, across all but one of the routes, be faster than driving, and in some cases by quite a bit, even if people are driving in the most ideal of conditions. Throw in factors like traffic, and bad weather in the winter months, and the train will very often have a real edge of cars purely based on travel time. Data from Google Maps, and Hfr-Tgf.com.

All of that is good. However the second issue that needs to be addressed is reliability. The biggest problem causing that issue are lines where freight traffic causes havoc with schedules. By having their own dedicated tracks, or running on Metrolinx lines where they are mixing with other passenger rail traffic and could potentially negotiate more favourable deals, this should radically improve reliability.

Another factor that will allow drivers to consider shifting to intercity rail service comes down to the F in HFR… frequency. When it comes to local or inner city public transport frequency is important because it means not having to carefully coordinate you trips to avoid ending up at a bus stop waiting around for 30 minutes. Frequent service means simply being able to leave your home at your leisure and get on with your trip without thinking about it.

With intercity travel, the same principle applies, except that being stranded could mean waiting several hours, or more. While you still need to time out your trip to the train station, having more departures means you can pick a time that is much more ideal (perhaps allowing your spouse or kids to drop you off instead of having to drive yourself and pay for parking). There are likely people right now who would like to take the train, but if missing their departure means waiting around for 3 or 4 hours, and potentially missing a kids football game or a friends birthday, its going to induce anxiety and uncertainty so why bother. But if missing a train means waiting just an hour, and probably having to pay a fee for ticket exchange, that is a far more comfortable buffer to work with. You’re still going to be annoyed and grumpy, but at least there is a backup.

Late trains and limited backup options mean sad kids. Reducing the chances of that happening is kind of a big deal.

There are other factors that impact whether people would switch from driving to a train. Station location, as has been discussed, is one of them. The final factor is ticket pricing. This a rarely discussed aspect of intercity rail proposals, or even current VIA service. And it gets to the heart of what is probably the HFR deal breaker, and that is accessibility. But that is jumping ahead. First there is one other competitor to the train to take a look at, and that is airline travel.

The many challenges of competing with airlines

Among people advocating for high speed rail in North America (this is not just a weird Canadian thing) there is a constant obsession with HSR being a way to steal away short haul airline passengers. It has become a dogmatic part of their pitch at this point. But the idea is one that really needs to be investigated a lot deeper than it has been (and will be in a future article).

There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to capture some of the airline market. Those customers after all are using a public transport mode (albeit privatized and much more expensive, thus much more exclusive), so trying to get some of them into VIA 1 seats is a reasonable business strategy. But the excessive attention paid to these customers has that whiff of “better travel for the better class” and is in line with the same logic that only focuses on connecting major cities and disregarding almost everyone in between. For the Quebec-Windsor corridor (and the same would apply to any urban corridor in Canada for that matter), there are unique challenges which will make capturing the airline market very challenging even if the most gee-whiz rail system was built.

Before jumping too far into things it is worth looking at how HFR will stack up against flying. Not surprisingly most routes are slower, even when waiting time at the airport, and time to get from the airport to the same end point as train trips, are factored in. One route, Ottawa - Montreal, would actually be a touch faster by train, and even Toronto - Ottawa would only be 46 minutes slower by HFR versus flying. Depending on where you are in Ottawa, that time might be even less (someone in Barrhaven, could end up with a train trip to Toronto that is only 30 minutes slower than flying). It is not going to cause a tidal wave of airline travellers to switch, for many reasons, but is close enough that many people would give VIA a second look. The other two routes are a bit longer yet, and might not pluck away too many travellers. But the frequency factor does mitigate those differences to some degree (as was discussed above).

A rough estimate of how currently proposed HFR travel times compare to flying. Flying is still faster in most cases, but HFR does close the gap and with a higher frequency of departures and reliable service, this is going to attract some customers who might want to save a few bucks and don’t mind taking some extra time. Data from Google Maps, and Hfr-Tgf.com.

It is also worth pointing out that back in 2015 when HFR was first being announced, there was a slide during one of the early presentations, which not only included the line “HFR: 1/3 of the cost, 2/3 of the benefit” but also included cost estimates and estimated travel times. While the estimates were only for the Toronto - Ottawa - Montreal segment, the anticipated cost was clearly very optimistic (for both HFR and HSR), as were the estimated travel times (again for both options). It is worth pointing out though that if HFR travel times were closer to the 2015 slide, that would be an additional 20 - 30 minute time savings on the various routes. That would put Toronto - Ottawa within 15 minutes of flying (on par if leaving from Fallowfield), and Montreal - Toronto at 75 minutes slower compared to flying (with Ottawa - Montreal becoming even more attractive than before).

This is a slide from one of, if not the, earliest HFR presentation. Some of the estimates are off, but the spirit of the idea, 1/3 the cost 2/3 the benefit, is still present in the current HFR plans. Image by VIA Rail via CatBus.

HFR might not be able to achieve those numbers right of the gate due to needing to keep costs under control. But with a scalable network, it does mean that over time they can keep reducing travel times and increase the competitiveness of the service.

But even the best travel times don’t solve one of the biggest challenges for the Quebec-Windsor corridor which is that it essentially exists as an isolated network. If you look at Europe one of the reasons why they can be so affective at reducing short haul flights is because there is a good chance you don’t need to get on a plane in the first place. Not just for trips within someones home country, but increasingly to major cities in neighbouring countries. Keep in mind that it has taken 4 decades to get to this point, but with the growing connections between various high speed networks (and traditional lines modernized to support high speed trains as a stop gap) there are a multiplicity of high traffic destinations from any given city in Western Europe. France alone is fed by Eurostar, Thalys, ICE, and services from Italy, Switzerland, and eventually Spain, along with its own domestic TGV service.

Image. Image from WikiCommons.

In comparison, the Quebec-Windsor corridor, be it in its current state, planned HFR state, or with high speed rail lines, is an island unto itself. Flying or driving into the corridor is really the only option in most cases. There are very few services when it comes to trains that actually leave the corridor. There are some that head to Halifax, New York, Vancouver, Jonquiere and Hervey. In the future there will be service to North Bay and maybe even Chicago. But those trains are just once a day at best, and often much slower than driving let alone flying (Toronto to New York can be an 8 hour drive, but is a 13 hour train trip).

In theory it could be viable to have service from Toronto to New York or Chicago that was at the very least competitive with driving. But Canada has zero control over that choice. That requires the US to makes investments on their side and if you follow American political discourse you will know trying to get funding for any kind of public transport in the US on a scale that would even be equivalent to Canada is pretty much impossible right now. It might make sense for Canada to foot the bill and fund service just across the border into Detroit or Buffalo (just as the new Gordie Howe bridge between Windsor and Detroit is being 85% funded by the Canadian federal government). But that still requires sorting out and funding a much better way to do passport control. The free movement of people throughout the EU makes cross-border rail a much simpler and more viable option than in North America.

Compounding the problem is that even if you wanted to pull airline passengers out of planes for the last leg of their trip (such as someone going from Winnipeg to London, ON via Toronto, or someone going from Quebec to Paris via Montreal) you couldn’t. To do that you need to make the transition as seamless as possible and that simply does not exist at any airport in the corridor. Dorval is the closest, but even then it’s pretty poor. From the VIA station to the nearest airport terminal entrance is about 1 km and because walking there would be hostile it requires a shuttle. Pearson is even further away from a station on the main passenger rail line at 3km to the future Woodbine station (yes there is the UP station, but that is not designed to handle intercity traffic).

For those passengers on longer haul flights to consider using rail for the final part of their journey, you need Schipol. What is a Schipol? It is the Amsterdam international airport (and really the airport for all of the Netherlands) and has the kind of rail integration that makes switching between plane and train simple and straightforward. The train station is directly under the terminal and services such as ticketing and information counters are built directly into the airport.

The success of NS’s Schipol Station is that it is literally in the airport and makes transferring from a plane to a local, intercity, or international train as simple as possible. There aren’t even any attempts to “integrate” the NS brand into the rest of the airport. They use standard NS ticket machines, signage, even clocks, so that it is like any other train station on the network. Image via Amsterdam Tips.

The station sees Thalys and ICE trains which serve Brussels, Antwerp, Paris, Berlin, and in the summer there are direct trains to Southern France. This sort of connectivity works in part because the time penalty for switching between the two modes is as minimal as it can be. It takes longer to walk outside and have a cigarette than it does to get to a train platform.

Of course there are no technical reasons preventing proper rail stations at airports from happening, it will just require lots of tunnelling or elevated rail lines detour off the mainline to the terminals, and airport authorities to let intercity rail on the property even when it is going to chip away at some of the airports traffic. The Greater Toronto Airport Authority has proposed “Union Station West” as a new public transport terminal at Pearson (though the primary focus thus far has been on local transport). But doing it properly, in a way that will actually make shifting people away from short haul flights for the last leg of their trip, is not going to be cheap. Pearson and Dorval would both be multi-billion dollar projects. But without them, the impact on reducing the number of passengers on short haul flights is instantly reduced.

This is an early stage rendering of the proposed “Union Station West” plan at Pearson. It is not quite as good as Schipol since the station isn’t directly beneath the terminals, but a 500m walk through covered areas isn’t terrible and far better than the nothing that currently exists. The pandemic put this on the back burner but this is likely to ramp up again in the coming years. Image by GTAA via LindaWardCBC on Twitter.

The general strategy and desire to go after airline passengers isn’t without merit. If the goal of a project is revenue and profit versus passenger counts and accessibility, then it makes sense to target people who have the kind of income that allows them to fly. And that leads into the final, but not at all surprising, third wild card in the HFR project.

The P word…privatization

While third and final HFR wildcard isn’t a certainty, privatization of VIA Rail in the corridor is a pretty clear goal of the HFR project. They are careful not to use that word. But the language is undeniable. HFR will be spun off as a separate subsidiary of VIA, and run by a private operator. In addition to HFR services, they will also take over what are referred to as “local” services, that being existing service on the lakeshore route, and the south shore line between Montreal and Quebec. In the video outlining the procurement process they are also some not so subtle giveaways, such as mentioning that unions will be given advanced notice as the project progresses. Doesn’t take much to figure what direction they are headed.

While it seems highly likely, this does not mean it will happen. In the various addendums that have been posted on the procurement site there are many people questioning the scale of the project and the financial risk that it will bring for investors. This was a problem that Metrolinx encountered during the procurement process for its CAD15.78 ON-Corridor GO train modernization project. Ultimately it had to be altered because no one wanted to take the risk on such a massive project. Because information about specifics are still leaking out very slowly there are mostly unknowns and vibes at this point as opposed to anything concrete. Privatization could be subject to change as investor and public feedback picks up.

How people feel about this development will largely come down to a values judgement of each individual person. Some people won’t care in the slightest. The ends will justify the means and if the collateral damage is that some living wage jobs and labour protection is lost in the process, so be it. Others are going to be deeply bothered and see this as the continued encroachment of the privatization of public transport. And there will be a probably sizeable group that will fall in the middle, rather uncertain if this is the right course for VIA to take.

The HFR project team does try to temper some anticipated fears by talking about “requiring minimum service standards” and the like. This is no different than passenger rail back in the 60’s and 70’s where private operators were federally mandated to keep routes alive… until their lobbying efforts to discontinue them were successful.

This will, rightfully so, be one of the most controversial parts of the project. Individual values aside, it is hard to justify why a project that is still likely to see a substantial amount of public money invested in it should simply be handed over to a private company to reap the profits and best parts of it. Involving private funding and companies isn’t inherently bad. Even having a privatized, premium service isn’t terrible. But if that is the only option that is delivered, that will be hugely problematic.

Is HFR a good project?

After going through all the article it might seem like the final assessment would be that this is an excellent project with a few easily fixable caveats. It should be great. It has all the elements needed to be an excellent project. But, as it stands today, and with the direction and vision being presented, HFR is a bad project.

That assessment has nothing to do with it not being “true” high speed. As terrible as it will be for many existing VIA workers, and that is a legit reason to knock it, it is not the labour concerns that are the primary problem. It has to do with accessibility. It has to do with the fact that it seems destined to fail at what should be its primary goal… to build a system that will be not just be useful in terms of frequency, reliability and travel times, but also affordable to as many people as possible.

If you are looking to travel between two cities in Europe or Japan there is a chance that you can take a shiny, super fast train. But for anyone who has booked a Shinkansen of TGV ticket, you will know that they can be incredibly expensive. However, if you can’t afford that fare, you also have a bog standard, intercity network with longer travel times, but much more reasonable fares, that you can take instead. Even if you could afford a ticket on the high speed trains, many people simply like being thrifty and will trade time for money in their pocket.

Within the Greater Toronto area and beyond you are starting to see how this model can work. If you are going from Kitchener to Toronto, the GO train is a cheaper alternative to VIA at CAD38.60 round trip if you just buy a standard ticket, or CAD32.64 if you use a Presto card. As of today at least, if you are doing a day trip on a Saturday or Sunday, and buy your ticket online, you can get a day pass for just 10 bucks. By comparison the cheapest VIA fare is CAD54, or more, for a trip that is only 15- 20 minutes faster.

Right now, if you wanted to take the train from Kingston to Toronto, the cheapest fare you can find, if you book in advance and stalk the site for the best sales, is going to cost you around CAD103 for a return trip. Even with high petrol prices and parking, it is still cheaper in most cases to drive than take the train. Cars also have the advantage of the cost per passenger going down as more people are in it, versus trains were unless there is a special sale, everyone needs to buy a ticket.

If someone was looking to go from Kingston to Toronto and back, and had to pay regular price for an economy ticket because cheaper fares were already sold out (which they can be, even well in advance), the cost would be CAD201. But if you had a GO train service (and that isn’t a crazy idea anymore since they are piloting trains between Toronto and London), and offered fares at a rate equivalent to what Kitchener sees, then you would be looking at round trip ticket prices of CAD73.62 for a regular ticket, or CAD62.27 if a Presto fare was offered. And those prices would be all day, everyday, even if bought a few moments before departure.

At that price, even taking a VW Golf would be more expensive when petrol and parking for the trip are tallied up (although, and this is a big factor to consider, the fare would still be more expensive than the cost of using an EV that someone already owns).

With the explicit motive of HFR being about maximizing revenue and profits (a very similar mantra to Brightline and their focus on only “certain” customers), it is unlikely that ticket prices are going to be going down. There is nothing theoretically wrong with charging more for a premium service. A privatized HFR service doesn’t have to concern itself with “budget travellers” who would be more than happy with consistently cheap fares, no food or drink service, or in ride magazines. They could even run trains with CAD500 tickets that offered bar cars, sit down dining with white table clothes, real china, and all the other accoutrements of old-timey rich person rail travel that weird trad people love to go on about.

But there should be access to the network, and a service, that is for “the rest of us”. There shouldn’t just be the HFR tier or service and nothing else. Like Europe or Japan, there should the really nice trains, and then the ones that actually make economic sense to most people and also stop at places that are not just the biggest cities. And just as HFR can be designed to be scalable, it can be designed to handle both types of travellers and operations.

Whether it is VIA, or Brightline, or pretty much any North American intercity rail proposal, there is always lots of lovely words about the train being eco-friendly, sustainable and a great alternative to the car. But if they are not offering a service that is also accessible and affordable, it’s all just bullshit.

There is no reason HFR should be a bad project. It should be able to meet the needs of urbanites simply looking to get from one big city to another, along with the smaller communities along the way. By putting effort into the urban sections of the line, it can create the first part of a network that other projects can then connect into. By creating a scalable network it should be relatively easy to upgrade lines as demand dictates. By recognizing future regional needs it can be ready for those changes as they happen.

HFR could not only serve as a template for Southwestern Ontario, but for many regions in suburban North America. It could demonstrate how to create modernized intercity rail that people will be attracted too, without the substantially higher costs of high speed rail (or the truly insane costs of the California high speed project). It could be GO modernization for longer distances.

But unless people push back, HFR will just be another Brightline, which is great for a small group of people and not much else. A project for “the best of us”, not “the rest of us”

---

If you want to find me on social media you can do so @Johnnyrenton.bsky.social on Bluesky. If you have any thoughts or feedback let me know in the comments.