Alto - High Speed Rail (Toronto-Quebec City)

[zang]

Something like this:

View attachment 700766

At ~4.4 km, you are probably looking at about $1 billion to tunnel it as per latest cost comparables and $2-3 billion for fitout and a mined terminal station at Union. If you are willing to cut travel speeds you could probably reduce the tunnel length to something closer to 3km.

Expensive, but it would give ALTO completely separate (i.e. reliable) operations in and out of Toronto and would let trains get from Union to the edge of the City, assuming an average speed of 150km/h between Union and Markham, in about 11 minutes. Doing the Union-Kennedy-Agincourt route is probably looking at more like 21-22 minutes.

Why not just exit a tunnel on the approach to Union? A train's going to need to slow down anyway, it doesn't seem like you're going to gain a lot of speed by keeping it completely underground at the station.

 

[Urban Sky]

Why not just exit a tunnel on the approach to Union? A train's going to need to slow down anyway, it doesn't seem like you're going to gain a lot of speed by keeping it completely underground at the station.

The underground station would unfortunately be the most expensive, disruptive and complex element of the tunnel he sketched…

 

[crs1026]

1968 timetable speed limit data applicable to RDC equipment:

CP Agincourt to Leaside (5.3 miles) - 60 mph
30 mph turnout at Leaside, passenger stop at Leaside station
Leaside to Don (3.5 miles) - 50 mph on curves, 75 mph otherwise
Don to Union - (2.0 miles) - 30 mph, 15 mph over turnouts at Cherry and Scott St interlockings

Scheduled timing Union to CP Kennedy (Jct with Havelock Sub) - 16 minutes eastbound, 16-24 mins westbound

Seems to me that spending upwards of a couple billion dollars to bore a tunnel to improve on that performance is pretty wishful thinking. Raise the Kennedy-Leaside speed to 95mph on a dedicated new track, replace the Leaside turnout with a 50 mph flyunder, and that's all that would be needed.

- Paul

 

[micheal_can]

Instead of a tunnel, is there any reason that from around Bloor that it becomes elevated? It then stays elevated right to the station. That could mean it is above the existing Union tracks and not bound to the mess that currently exists. Would it be cheaper? Would it solve many of the issues that exist in the area? Basically, as a rider, you would notice it slow down for the corner, and the stop,. No waiting for a spot. No waiting for other trains to clear. A higher speed the whole way in and out.

 

[CapitalSeven]

You'd need to build a giant structure over Corktown Common. Not going to happen I think. I'm not sure how many minutes a 3 km deep tunnel buys. Not enough to justify the cost I think. Besides, arriving in a city and seeing the central core is kind of a nice experience.

 

[micheal_can]

You'd need to build a giant structure over Corktown Common. Not going to happen I think. I'm not sure how many minutes a 3 km deep tunnel buys. Not enough to justify the cost I think. Besides, arriving in a city and seeing the central core is kind of a nice experience.

Because of how close that corner is, that corner can be tighter. Hence the idea of slowing only for the corner and keep slowing down as they enter Union Station. That corner is only 2.5km from the station. If we assume a 45 mph corner, in those 2.5km,you are going to be slowing down to 0 mph, so it will be a gradual slow down, likely within the range they want to slow down to still be comfortable for the passengers.

 

[guavadelic]

Kennedy undoubtedly is the better location for transit connections. I'm not sure I would plan a stop at Eglinton, however...., perhaps with Lines 2 and 4 both coming to Scarborough, perhaps that stop should be up around Sheppard. Still not as convenient as Kennedy, but the catchment from that location is not insignifigant,

Sheppard and Brimley could be a good location for a secondary stop. Station could be directly connected to a new Line 4 station at Brimley and its close proximity to the 401 would provide convenient access for folks driving in from Pickering, Ajax, Whitby etc.
For a suburban station, its good mix of strong multimodal transit connectivity and "park-and-ride".

 

[micheal_can]

Sheppard and Brimley could be a good location for a secondary stop. Station could be directly connected to a new Line 4 station at Brimley and its close proximity to the 401 would provide convenient access for folks driving in from Pickering, Ajax, Whitby etc.
For a suburban station, its good mix of strong multimodal transit connectivity and "park-and-ride".

ALTO is not a commuter system.

 

[robmausser]

I'm doubtful of Kennedy if only because of space limitations on the corridor. I doubt Metrolinx is going to want Alto intermixing with its services on the corridor.

Luckily, there's plenty of space in this corridor, thanks due to the Scarborough Subway.

There is lots more room in this corridor due to the removal of the RT.

Tear up the busway they are building and now you have a ton of space for extra tracks for Alto. The busway will lose its importance once the Scarb Subway goes online, which will be around the time Alto starts construction if we are being honest.

You will have to share track on a small segment from Agincourt to Ellesmere, and again south of Kennedy, but luckily after a short stint after Kennedy you will be on the Lakeshore quad track line.

Not perfect, but that section of the old RT ROW could put double tracking and act as a good quad tracked area for siding and signalling the Alto and commuter trains to play nice together.

Also, another solution is the Taco Bell method

Have the Don Valley route for outbound Alto trains and the Stouffville for inbound.

 

[nfitz]

The underground station would unfortunately be the most expensive, disruptive and complex element of the tunnel he sketched…

And yet Metrolinx was still considering it after the foundation work for the city's Union Station renovations were complete. Perhaps they are still considering it.

Perhaps not a day 1 item. This doesn't have to be perfect day 1. Look at HS1; initially it left the high speed tracks and ran over low(er) speed tracks into Waterloo. Later they added a 40-km section into London, with a lot of tunnels, to cut travel time (and move the terminus to St. Pancras).

The Paris approach into Gare du Nord is still on slower tracks; I wouldn't be surprised if that's upgraded by the end of the century. And perhaps even extended. Can you imagine an underground central Paris station where all the current high speed trains terminating at Gare de l'Est, Gare du Nord, Gare de Lyon, Gare Montparnasse (and wherever the Paris-Normandy service and Paris-Orléans-Clermont services ends up)?

 

[micheal_can]

Luckily, there's plenty of space in this corridor, thanks due to the Scarborough Subway.

There is lots more room in this corridor due to the removal of the RT.

Tear up the busway they are building and now you have a ton of space for extra tracks for Alto. The busway will lose its importance once the Scarb Subway goes online, which will be around the time Alto starts construction if we are being honest.

You will have to share track on a small segment from Agincourt to Ellesmere, and again south of Kennedy, but luckily after a short stint after Kennedy you will be on the Lakeshore quad track line.

Not perfect, but that section of the old RT ROW could put double tracking and act as a good quad tracked area for siding and signalling the Alto and commuter trains to play nice together.

Also, another solution is the Taco Bell method

View attachment 700996

Have the Don Valley route for outbound Alto trains and the Stouffville for inbound.

View attachment 700997

Why don't we do both? Say you live at one station that is only served by one direction, how do you get to it going the opposite way? Is that way really a good answer?

 

[reaperexpress]

And yet Metrolinx was still considering it after the foundation work for the city's Union Station renovations were complete. Perhaps they are still considering it.

Perhaps not a day 1 item. This doesn't have to be perfect day 1. Look at HS1; initially it left the high speed tracks and ran over low(er) speed tracks into Waterloo. Later they added a 40-km section into London, with a lot of tunnels, to cut travel time (and move the terminus to St. Pancras).

The Paris approach into Gare du Nord is still on slower tracks; I wouldn't be surprised if that's upgraded by the end of the century. And perhaps even extended. Can you imagine an underground central Paris station where all the current high speed trains terminating at Gare de l'Est, Gare du Nord, Gare de Lyon, Gare Montparnasse (and wherever the Paris-Normandy service and Paris-Orléans-Clermont services ends up)?

It makes sense to protect for it. But the only way it would make sense to actually build if we already exhausted all reasonable alternatives.

A much more reasonable way to create capacity for Alto at Union is to build a 1.5 km subway tunnel from Exhibition to near Queen & Dufferin, to extend the Ontario up the UP Express tracks to Pearson. That would free up two tracks and platforms at Union that would otherwise be required for the UP Express and its planned 8-minute headways.

 

[nfitz]

That would free up two tracks and platforms at Union that would otherwise be required for the UP Express and its planned 8-minute headways.

Well, it would create a 13-stop subway to Pearson. They could brand it "UP Express". Or perhaps "Up Yours to the airport".

Metrolinx was envisioning this just for GO services. I can easily see that something will be under there one day.

 

[reaperexpress]

It's no more than 4 trains an hour now at Pickering, and GO still can't integrate even the regular speed VIA trains without delays.

Besides, as day-1 Stouffville service is supposed to be every a MINIMIUM of 15-minutes in each direction off-peak. The idea is to increase service as the year progress. Every 15 minutes isn't the ultimate build-out. It's the minimum. You'll need extra tracks for HSR. Which is presumably why they'd gone back to the Don Valley (and building a new tunnel from Lucien L'allier to Laval).

The capacity of a double-track railway is upwards of 12 trains per hour with ETCS. As I illustrated above, the average speed of GO trains and Alto trains would be about the same between Kennedy and Union, so that's an achievable number in this case.

Even with their old-school signalling system on the Lakeshore East line Metrolinx currently operates 9 trains per hour westbound on a single track between Danforth and Union:

December 2025 AM Peak timetable, Lakeshore East, Stouffville & Via Rail

They also currently operate 8 trains per hour eastbound on a single track between Mount Dennis and Union including a mix of express and local services (the 3rd track is currently out of service there too)

The reason there are delays at Durham Junction is that
1) It's an at-grade junction, not a flyover as I'm suggesting for Alto, and
2) Metrolinx dispatching is actively hostile to Via trains because they are only evaluated on the on-time performance of Metrolinx-operated trains. They make no effort to minimize delay for Via. There's a similar issue from the scheduling side, as you can see in the Lakeshore East timetable above where Via 43 is scheduled to arrive at a time that is physically impossible.

They aren't spending tens of billions of $ to avoid the freight railways, and then have Metrolinx ***** them up the ***.

The difference of course being that Metrolinx is a public agency, so the public and the feds can force them to stop screwing over other public services. It seems irresponsible to spend billions of tax dollars just because Provincial bureaucrats and Federal bureaucrats can't get along. These are issues that can be resolved with inter-agency agreements that cost basically nothing.

The GO vision for the Stouffville line changes regularly, and I'm not sure that we should bake in a 15 minute headway as the proven upper limit. It seems likely that ML will eventually need and attempt 10 minute or better headways and that will constrain what Alto experiences. Moreover, mixing GO and Alto ties Alto to whatever disruptions GO experiences..... do we want Alto held every tine GO has an ill passenger, stuck door, or whatever ? This is why I do not trust the math around an interleaved LSE line....an express/local division with flyover is a better model than two routes with two tracks each.

I can't see Alto going much beyond hourly headway with half hourly at peak....but I do foresee instances where there might be two Alto's fleeted with say 10 minutes between them. And what if a Peterborough regional or GO service does become a need ? To my mind, keeping Alto away from GO altogether is a prudent futureproofing step even at added cost, as having the two together constrains the upper end of both services.

Sharing tracks through Kennedy wouldn't be baking in 4 tph as the limit for Stouffville, it would be baking in 12 trains per hour as the limit for the sum of Stouffville and Alto.

Like you said, Alto is unlikely to run more than 2 trains per hour, and maybe there would be a GO service from Peterborough too. So that's 4 trains per hour coming in on the high speed line, which leaves 8 trains per hour for the Stouffville line. Are we really expecting more than 8 trains per hour on Stouffville? Seems unlikely. Realistically peak period service would be more like 6 trains per hour for Stouffville and 2 trains per hour for Alto:

Reliability is indeed an important consideration, so if we're considering more expensive options such as the Leaside alignment, we should also consider more expensive long-term solutions to Scarborough Junction, such as one that connects the Stouffville Line between the express and local tracks of the Lakeshore line, allowing Alto trains to use the local track if the express track is obstructed:

This could potentially be built as a 2 km tunnel directly from Kennedy, eliminating the sharp curves through that segment. But this would would be a very long-term item. In the meantime Alto and the Stouffville line can share the existing line with plenty of capacity to spare once ETCS is installed.

I would expect a Leaside route to have some double track added down the Don - if ML could design a whole yard up there, some room must exist. Single track over the viaduct only would not unduly limit operability - certainly much less than the unpredictability of inbound GO and Alto trains vying for track from an Agincourt junction, or arriving off their slot and ending up in the wrong order all the way from Kennedy to Union..

I would not expect speed higher than say 95mph west of Agincourt, but it would be possible to match the Guildwood-Cherry quality track speed from there to Leaside, with a 70 mph flyover/under and 60-70 Mph down the Don Branch. True there is a tight curve at the bottom, but again with many trains running to East Harbour I would expect speed on the LSE/Stouffville route to be comparable in that stretch.

The speed on LSE/Stouffville wouldn't be as slow as 25 mph through East Harbour, it would be 45 or 50 mph. The Kennedy alignment allows pretty much continuous 95 mph running from Kennedy to Union, and it wouldn't take much to upgrade the line to 80 mph from Kennedy to the 401.

While one might be able to design a clever interleaved service and implement a better signalling system to enable that, in the interest in saving some dollars....why would we do that when the result constrains both GO and Alto ? Whatever the added cost, it's the wrong place to value engineer or pinch pennies. It's not a prudent place for a "good is good enough" approach. The less Alto requires from ML, and vice versa....the better inho.

We would do that because it produces a better service in the end. Being able to board a high speed train to Ottawa at Kennedy station would be a massive ridership benefit by opening up the eastern GTA much more than any of the suburban station options on the CPKC line. Furthermore, the actual amount of constraint created by sharing a quad-track corridor between GO and Alto is quite minimal, and I'm not convinced it's much more than a single track bridge on the Leaside alignment.

 

[reaperexpress]

Well, it would create a 13-stop subway to Pearson. They could brand it "UP Express". Or perhaps "Up Yours to the airport".

Metrolinx was envisioning this just for GO services. I can easily see that something will be under there one day.

Well if you want a limited stop service that's still possible with metro technology. It's not like stations magically appear when you convert a line to a metro, that's a choice you make during the planning process.

And besides, even with a bunch of stops on the Ontario line, it's only 3 stops on the GO train from Union to Woodbine Racetrack where you can transfer to the Ontario line. So it's a total of 4 stops from Union to Pearson (one of which is a transfer).