Canada’s Minister of Transport promises to study the idea of a high-speed train between Quebec and Windsor, as the militants of the parties in power in Quebec and Ottawa would like, but not before having chosen the consortium which will build its high-frequency rail system next year.
“We will evaluate the options, including the option [d’un train] high speed. Once we have chosen our partner, we will determine what the route will be, what the speed will be,” Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said when asked by the Duty Wednesday.
Above all, the federal government wants to improve the frequency of departures for VIA Rail trains, which should eventually run in dedicated tracks all along the Quebec City-Windsor corridor. Ottawa takes great care never to promise vehicles capable of reaching speeds comparable to certain lines in service in Japan, France, Italy, Germany, China, Spain or South Korea, in particular, which run at more than 300 km/h.
However, Minister Alghabra specifies that he will “ask the question” of the ideal speed for the train promised to the consortium responsible for building it. The laborious process to find this private partner should move into its third phase in August, with the launch of a “request for proposal” in which the government asks three consortia to submit projects to it. The winner will be chosen in the summer of 2024.
“Speed is an option we are looking for. At a minimum we say the speed will be able to go as fast as 200 [km/h], but could it go faster? That’s the question I’m asking. »
Activists want a TGV
Limiting itself to a high-frequency train (TGF) system does not, however, please the political parties that form the governments in Quebec and Ottawa, according to the resolutions recently adopted by their respective activists. They agree on one thing: to prefer the option of a high-speed train (TGV).
The convention of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), last weekend, saw the adoption of a resolution proposing to improve the Quebec section to gain speed. “If the federal government were to favor the TGF project, Quebec could use federal funding to build a TGV on the Quebec-Montreal section,” ask its activists.
Even within Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party, speed is everything. Its activists endorsed a resolution earlier this month calling on the federal government to begin construction of “a separate new line for electric-powered high-speed trains […] capable of effectively competing with air and land transport. »
This idea is also promoted, among others, by the business community of the City of Quebec. A motion in support of the TGV Québec-Toronto was also adopted unanimously in February by the city council of Montréal.
Private decision
The full professor at HEC Montreal, Jacques Roy, finds “a little strange” the federal government’s approach of first choosing a private partner before specifying the characteristics of the project.
“What I understand is that they don’t want to set too many limits, parameters. They want to leave the choices that seem appropriate to the promoter. This includes the route, train speed, ticket prices, etc. The whole work. It seems to me that it would be more logical to choose the promoter according to the projects that are proposed to them, ”he believes.
According to the expert, it is above all the quality of the railway tracks, more than that of the locomotives or the wagons, which limits the speed of a train. This is also what will determine the price of the project. It is thus possible to envisage a system which would be at the same time at high frequency and at high speed, at least on a part of the route, where it would be easiest to build rails in a straight line which do not cross any road.
When will be decided the choice of the consortium which must carry out the TGF project, in the summer of 2024, will follow a phase of “co-development” of “a few years” between the private promoter and the government, specified the chief executive of VIA High Frequency Train Inc., Marc-Olivier Ranger, before a Senate committee in April.
When launching the project in the summer of 2021, Minister Alghabra had mentioned a cost between 6 and 12 billion dollars, for a delivery of a high frequency train in 2030.