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Calgary Regional Rail Transit

YYCguy said:
I see that the Blue Line isn’t going to be extended to the airport. How will customers get from 88th to the airport to catch the passenger rail?
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I really hate that 88th will be yet another freeway/stormpond adjacent rapid transit station, made even worse with a future important transfer point.

The station areas on the further Blue Line extension are a bit better - but woof. Almost no one build them like us. If we are going to spend hundreds of millions per kilometre (or more) for rapid transit, we got to get better at absolutely sweating that asset to maximize every square metre of land nearby.
 

CBC reporter took trips from downtown Ottawa to airport to compare timing/costs with their new train to the airport.
 
darwink said:
Nothing prevents very different vehicles from sharing a lot of infrastructure except imagination tbh.
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Isn't the biggest issue usually signaling? Since many systems are built in different decades, the train control/signally isn't usually compatible. Replacing signaling is a pretty expensive ordeal. Obviously that's not an issue if that was designed from the get go.
 
trtcttc said:
Isn't the biggest issue usually signaling? Since many systems are built in different decades, the train control/signally isn't usually compatible. Replacing signaling is a pretty expensive ordeal. Obviously that's not an issue if that was designed from the get go.
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Yeah. Integrating legacy systems typically have eye-popping price tags as the scopes grow to replace both systems entirely. It might be annoying, but coming to a stop to transition between two signaling systems is perfectly adequate to save hundreds of millions of dollars versus replacing both or trying to integrate them together in a fancy way. Sometimes you can hide that transition as well, at a station by having a different track for each service before they merge for example.

Fortunately we have the great benefit of Edmonton trying and not doing a great job at implementing various solutions in our climate over the past decade, and will hopefully end up with a good solution, rather than trying and failing to implement the theoretical minimum viable product (wheel rotation counters).
 
AllanS said:

CBC reporter took trips from downtown Ottawa to airport to compare timing/costs with their new train to the airport.
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The train took about an hour from downtown and the train + bus took 40 mins. It obviously varies a lot based on your starting/ending destinations, but with the level of expected ridership, a bus connection from South Key more than suffices. Not to mention the fact these run diesel trains so the environmental benefits are pretty marginal. I think good bus service is frequently overlooked. Toronto Airport had a bus connection to their subway which was perfectly usable but very hard to find the single pole for the bus stop. Some marginal investment in bus infrastructure (like the MAX) can really help make the service more visible/ and used.
 
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If HSR out east is still six years of design work away, wonder what our timeline for HSR will be? I think the Alberta Government has the land, but they would still need to do a Request of Expressions of Interest, Request for Qualifications, Request for Proposals and then hope they get international bids. Allowing three years for each of those, we're looking at Summer 2028 to get to this stage. Then maybe another three years for detailed design, it is a much shorter distance. I guess during this time there could still be Commuter and Regional Rail on the existing freight tracks, with some twinning for efficiencies?

Anyways, here's the release for the HSR out east. straight from the horses mouth...

www.pm.gc.ca

Canada is getting high-speed rail

The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, today announced that Canada is developing a high-speed rail network in the Toronto-Quebec City corridor.
www.pm.gc.ca www.pm.gc.ca

Quick Facts​

  • Canadian passenger rail service currently runs on tracks owned by freight rails, which limits the frequency of the service they offer and leads to delays.
  • To address these challenges, the Government of Canada has been advancing better passenger rail since 2016.
  • Canada’s investment in the co-development phase of the project represents $3.9 billion over six years, starting in 2024-25. This is in addition to the $371.8 million that was provided in Budget 2024.
  • Budget 2022 launched an innovative, rigorous procurement process that brought in world-class rail companies. A Request for Expressions of Interest was completed in October 2022, the Request for Qualifications in July 2023, and as part of the Request for Proposals (RFP), three world-class consortiums (bidders) submitted their final bid submissions in 2024.
  • The procurement was completed on budget and was overseen by a fairness monitor.
  • In November 2022, the Government of Canada created a Crown corporation, VIA HFR (now Alto), to provide oversight of this project.
  • Alto and Cadence will be signing a contract setting out the terms of the next phase of the project – its co-development.
altotrain.ca

Alto - Home -

HFR is a world-class transportation infrastructure that puts people first, and redefines the way we live, work and play. This modern rail network will extend over 1,000 km from Toronto to Québec City.
altotrain.ca

Edit: Hilarious that Air Canada was part of the team that won: (Composed of CDPQ Infra, AtkinsRéalis, Keolis, SYSTRA, Air Canada and SNCF Voyageurs)

What has the government of Canada done to advance better rail service, I know they bought new trains anything else?

In their timeline they mention the timeline starting in 2024, I think this was awarded in fall 2024, so that put fall 2030 as the beginning of phase after the co-development phase.

I do like the name Alto, keeps the VIA name away from it. If our government wasn't so anti-feds, I could see them trying to find synergies with the federal effort (Technologies, train stock, etc.) and maybe even share branding.
 
CalgaryTiger said:
If our government wasn't so anti-feds, I could see them trying to find synergies with the federal effort (Technologies, train stock, etc.) and maybe even share branding.
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One often cited reason for gynormous cost inflation in Canadian transit contexts is every city and region uses their own tech, rolling stock and therefore engineering and designs. This makes everything more expensive - consortiums are effectively always building something new that has never been created before, using a different combo of trains, tracks, station designs, power, controls, signals etc. Transit infrastructure is a stop-and-start thing, so once a project is over, they can't just start the project in the next city and keep on rolling, the consortium just fades away and skill and experience is lost, only to be expensively repackaged a decade later for the next city that kind of wants a similar thing. Trains can't be bought easily in bulk discount format either.

Had we has something like a national transit standard - i.e. acknowledge that local and regional needs for trains aren't THAT different between cities and regions - we could have a few designs and trains that are "off the shelf" interchangeable and save tons of effort and cost to make local and regional decisions on everything that gets everyone slightly different trains, tracks and designs for 5x the collective costs.

China and a few other countries use this approach - cities and regions can pick from a few trains/capacity combos but ultimately it's a copy-paste job to industrialize the whole transit infrastructure process as much as possible - signals, stations, power, communication, automation all standardized between dozens of cities. Combined with lower wages, and it's wildly cheaper way to build transit

Of course, this idea of essentially goes against the provincial culture here - the whole country operates by pretending regions and needs are so different that we can't possibly standardize something like a passenger rail service. I can see some industries/systems where those differences are real, but I don't think passenger rail and transit fits that category.
 
I think the above thesis is overblown tbh. Over built stations are over built whether from a standard design or not. The standardization solves another problem, the commitment problem, where our local officials are continuously authorizing changes in scope in response to stakeholder concerns with little concerns for cost, as long as it fits in the budget. Because of the normalization of these late changes, the contingency held on projects now is north america is nearing 50% of the total project budget, and hides the escalation from these late changes.

You can solve the commitment problem by locking in scope early instead.
 
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