High-Speed Rail (HSR) - Toronto/Pearson/Kitchener/London

[ookpik]

One thing to kind of "zoom out" here and look at some realities, is that true HSR is so, so, so much better than what we have now, that we're all kind of missing just how significant some less-expensive, incrementally better service options are.  I'm always amazed when I go to Mainland Europe or the UK and get on a "regular, slow" train and it's some pissant EMU doing 200 km/h and the next one comes along in <10 minutes.  We would be over the moon with service like that, and over there, that's just the basic norm.

Don't get me wrong, at all - as a rail enthusiast there's nothing more that I want to see than HSR in Canada!  I'm just saying, that even if we don't get full HSR, Electrification and sustained 160 km/h are vast, massive, huge improvements over what we have now.

That's exactly what I've been trying to say. I've been on many Inter-city and Railjet trains in AT, CH and DE that covered London to Toronto distances at "only" 160 to 200 km/hr.  These trains are a quantum leap over what we have today and even the expanded GO service that's been "promised" in the next decade.

Now some of those European "fast" if not "high speed" trains, e.g. those that run along the Inn valley in Austria, are constrained by the mountainous geography and legacy rail beds. There's simply no room to add HSR tracks and upgrading in place would unacceptably disrupt existing service. So if we have the opportunity to build our rail service from scratch it only makes sense to provide for eventual full HSR, if not initially then in the foreseeable future.

[With apologies to von Clausewitz, Patton, et al...] While we should all dream (and scheme  ) let's not jeopardize a good plan by the dream of a perfect plan.