this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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You mentioned further down the thread that Canada doesn't have the population for significant passenger rail development, which gets brought up a lot in this discussion. I can't directly dispute that point, but doesn't around 90% of the population live within 100km of the US border? We don't need a network across the entire land mass, just hit at least one major city in each mainland province (sorry territories & maritimes) to start. One line for 90% seems like it would be a good deal unless I am missing something.
The Toronto to Quebec City corridor certainly merits high speed rail. Maybe a line from Whistler down to Chilliwack. There's a few places.
One line from Vancouver to Halifax is 5800km
It's currently estimated to be between $20-40m dollars per kilometer. That puts it at at least $120 billion at the low end to build but probably closer to $200 billion in reality. Then there are costs to actually run it.
That's about 1/6th of the entire national debt just to build a train service that would still take 2 days to get across the country, and there are operating costs on top of that each year.
How would it be a better value that just continuing to use airplanes?
Thanks for your reply. That cost definitely puts it into perspective, especially if it doesn't factor building stations and buying land in or around cities, delays & screwups, etc