Kanadas Hochgeschwindigkeitszug von vor 50 Jahren bietet Lehren für heute

If the lesson is high speed jet engine train through incremental updates of the railway right of way, I would argue this misses the mark. Since – let’s set aside jet turbine train as maybe they don’t mean that – fundementally what we need to do is a greenfield right of way with electrification to separate passenger rail service from freight operations since electrification is real benefit of HSR. Not just speed upgrades. It would largely be unfeasible to electrify the existing right of way due to the need to run double stacked container – this will not go away by the class 1s as this is a *fundamental* economic service the railways run and much money has been spent on normalizing double stacked intermodal across the network notably tunnels like the Sarnia tunnel that was expanded just as NAFTA was coming in to directly connect „hot shot“ intermodals from Montreal through Toronto and into the US (Chicago being the North America class 1 interconnect city). 

The major political economy benefit of HSR is electrification through Quebec Hydro and Ontario Nuclear of the Intercity travel. It’s pretty telling Air Canada is on board and if you know anything about *why* the Japanese and French developed their HSR systems you will understand that it is deeply tied with being fundementally a *systemic energy system* in response to essentially no domestic oil to tap. The TGV (which are the experts we are tapping to build our HSR) was specifically designed because the French had a domestic aerospace sector *and* was facing an oil crisis. So they took aerospace engineering to railway design and moved the entire regional air travel and lots of highway travel over to their nuclear powered gird in response to the 70s energy crisis.  Ontario is – in energy sectors – often considered the France of North America vis a vis our „Ontairo reactor“ the CANDU and the fact we reacted to being a price taker in coal powered plants – where we use to have multiple super coal plants – and built a nuclear fleet to reduce our price taking exposure. 

It’s interesting that the existence of the Paris Treaty seems to be what is really shifting Canada – as a major Petro and aerospace state – towards high speed rail. Why? Because the Paris Treaty is about sectorial carbon emissions and going for what each country *chooses to reduce* to meet it’s targets in relation to their geography and economy. And Canada has a lot of real value sectors that are *hard to electrify*: mining, steel, agriculture, oil and gas. The whip hand is coming for the sectors that can be electrified and that’s regional air and highway travels that can be off loaded to domestic electricity. Not to mention the energy security benefits of this since this is a stable long term cost compared to oil which will remain volatile with a long term trend of *only up* as we will eventually each the tipping point of cheap oil as it’s a non renewal resource that we are depleting at massive rates. And the whip hand is coming for emissions. 

So I would say the real lesson of Turbo is it was a great idea for its era: aerospace applied to rail. But now we need *electrification* which essentially forces a new right of way. So built a new right of way. Separate passenger from freight ops. This is the most important *energy system* we can build this century. It’s about productivity and *energy returned on energy invested* – EROEI – over the long term as we crest the peak of the *carbon pulse*.

> The Turbo proved that a high-speed train could run on Canadian tracks. It was the tracks that let it down. Investment and expansion of our existing rail corridors may not be as bold and exciting as a shiny new high-speed rail line, but it would get the job done at a fraction of the cost.

My conclusion is different. 

Edit: I also believe this is part of the calculus of why the pickering airport reserve lands was given up because regional air is probably going to come to an end one way or another especially through price pressures as air travel will be hard to decarbonize. So it will remain important for trans and inter continential travel. But the clock is ticking on regional air. If regional air shifts out Pearson gains capacity.

The author’s proposal makes little sense quite frankly.

>It was called the Turbo.

There has never been and will never be a diesel-powered HSR. The fastest examples we have are Britain’s HST and that barely hit 200kph, a speed and technology of the last century.

>The West Coast Main Line […] The route was electrified in stages

Here’s one problem with this analogy. Those modernizations happened when the line was under public ownership. The Quebec-Windsor corridor sits on CN-owned track who are not interested in electrification, nor in quad-tracking. To do what the author wants would require buying the corridor from CN. What would the cost of that be compared to a brand new route for faster trains?