Cross-Canadian bullet train, when?
Cross-Canadian bullet train
Probably never.
The geography between Barrie and the Manitoba border or Calgary(or Edmonton) and Vancouver make it essentially impossible to do in any reasonable way.
Plus, even at 300km/h, those distances will take forever to cross.
Part of the reason very few people take the existing long-distance passenger trains is that is costs more than flying, and it takes days to get between most places.
It would be much more practical to build high speed links that connect places that are seperated by 2-8 hours of driving. That would get hundreds of cars off the streets on a daily basis. (Even though people in other areas will bitch and moan that it doesn’t help them personally)
Calgary-Edmonton-Vancouver can use the Southern pass past Crowsnest where there is already a railroad.
Flying is subsidised in nearly every country world-wide. Kerosene is either tax exempt or there’s a reduced tax. If the tax were to be raised and the money put into trains and public transport, it could very well be affordable. And if building oil pipelines from Calgary all the way to the coast is possible, building high-speed rail for sure is.
Regarding travel time, Vancouver to Crowsnest Pass is currently ~1000km. At 200-250km/h that’s 4-5 hours. Add a few stops of 5-10 minutes each (let’s say 6) you add about an hour. That’s not crazy at all. From Crowsnest to Calgary it’s about 200km so you’ll be there in an hour or less. It it’s a bullet train and the terrain is good, that’s less. Btw, bullet trains operate at 320km/h . With proper adjustments to the track, that would also reduce journey time.
While the flight from Vancouver to Calgary is 1.5h, you have to factor in getting there and waiting on the flight. If you follow the guidelines to be there 2h before the flight, that’s 3.5h and maybe 0.5h to get there + 0.5h to get off the plane, grab your stuff, and get into the city center. That’s ~4.5h. Compared to 6h on the train. On the train you have leg room, stow room, you can walk around, stretch your legs, buy something to eat in the concession cabin, you’d have a good internet connection, and to top it off, you could do the journey at night in a sleeper cabin to wake up in Calgary or Edmonton.
I’d much rather put my legs up in a train than fight through whatever city traffic there is, worry about navigation, breaking down in the middle of nowhere, and pollute the environment while doing it. Once you grow up around functional public transport, it’s hard to look back at cars and go “I want that, I want to be in it, I want to be around it”.
Calgary-Edmonton-Vancouver can use the Southern pass past Crowsnest where there is already a railroad.
For high speed rail, you need track that is straight and level.
Calgary-Edmonton can absolutely do that (and should).
But a straight and level track through the mountains will take massive amounts of tunneling and bridge building. The current tracks hug the edges of river valleys for a reason - its the only affordable way to build in that area.
Not cost effective. Maybe by 2080 or something.
Gotta build another pipeline halfway across the country before that 😉
Hey put the rails in the pipeline
Oh yeah, that’ll get em going! They can make it a vacuum and finally have their hyperloop.
Kind of suspicious. The primary Canadian suppliers of jet fuel don’t get most of their supply from the war zone. Why are their prices doubling?
The price of crude oil went up because, worldwide, we presently have less of it to meet the same amount of demand, so suppliers can afford to charge more. That translates into the prices of all products, worldwide, made from crude oil going up (and as a knock-on effect, the price of pretty much everything everywhere going up, because most goods still need gas/diesel/aviation fuel to be transported beyond a small local area).
In other words, it doesn’t matter what specific source a given company is using, because some of what would normally be their oil is being sold at a premium to people who used to get their oil from that war zone.
(And as the rotten cherry on top of all this, add speculators, hoarders, and the commodities market.)
