Tag: freight rail

  • Where you put a railway

    Coalition for Better Rail · ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · The HPR Research Report

    Where you put a railway decides almost everything else

    Build beside a highway that already exists, or cut a new line through open country. That single choice sets the carbon, the habitat damage, the disruption during construction and the opposition — and it sets the cost too.

    Chapter 5 · The HPR Research Report · September 2026

    −15 Mt

    Carbon removed over fifty years by the brownfield route, on our model

    +15 Mt

    Carbon added over the same period by the greenfield route

    29 v 65

    Community friction scores, brownfield against greenfield

    The environmental case for a railway is usually made with one number: the carbon saved by taking people out of cars and planes. That number matters, and we deal with it first. But the bigger environmental fact about a railway is decided before a single train runs — by where the line is put.

    A route that follows an existing transport corridor inherits ground that has already been cleared, drained, fenced and cut through. A route driven across open country creates a new line of disturbance where there was none. The same choice governs the human side: whether a project takes its land from beside a highway people already live next to, or from farms and communities that never expected a railway.

    This page covers the four consequences that follow from that one decision. On each of them the two routes differ not by a margin but in kind.

    1. Carbon: the two routes have opposite signs

    Over fifty years the brownfield route is a net removal of carbon. The greenfield route, measured the same way, is a net emitter. Not smaller — opposite.

    Three things drive that. Construction carbon is the one-off emission of building the line. Building at grade beside an existing highway needs no tunnelling through the Canadian Shield, no deep cuts, and no treatment of the unstable marine clay south of Ottawa. Our estimate is 4.9 Mt for the brownfield line against 14.9 Mt for the greenfield one — roughly three times more.

    Running the trains turns out to be almost a rounding error either way. On Ontario’s grid, electric traction at 200 km/h emits about 6 grams of carbon per passenger-kilometre.

    Freight is what decides it. A passenger line built beside the existing freight railway frees capacity on that railway. Every long-haul truck that moves off Highway 401 onto rail saves about a quarter of a tonne of carbon on a typical haul. At 3,000 trucks a day — about eight freight trains — that is roughly 13.5 Mt over fifty years. The greenfield route has no freight function, so it cannot claim any of it.

    Fifty-year carbon balance — our estimate, central case
    What countsBrownfield (electric)Greenfield
    Building it+4.9 Mt+14.9 Mt
    Running the trains+1.3 Mt+5.4 Mt
    Roads closed by fencing—+1.7 Mt
    Trucks moved to rail−13.5 Mtnone
    Passengers out of cars−7.9 Mt−7 Mt
    Net over 50 years−15.2 Mt+15 Mt

    Both columns are Initiative estimates, not published figures. A dash means the project structurally has no such term. The two routes differ in length — roughly 485 km against roughly 1,000 km — which is itself part of the comparison, because the longer line is the heavier one to build.

    Why the freight credit matters so much

    The carbon saved by taking a passenger out of a car shrinks every year as more cars become electric. By the 2050s it is close to nothing. The carbon saved by taking a truck off the road and putting the load on a train does not shrink the same way, because trucks stay diesel far longer — and it grows as the electricity grid gets cleaner.

    So the brownfield route’s carbon case rests on something that strengthens with time. The greenfield route’s rests on something that weakens.

    That shows up most clearly in how long each takes to pay back its construction carbon. The brownfield line breaks even in 12 to 18 years and stays in credit after that, and the timing barely changes with passenger numbers because freight carries it. The greenfield line depends entirely on passengers: about 22 years at the ridership its reference class suggests, 39 years at a more central figure, and at low ridership it does not break even within fifty years at all.

    2. Habitat: a new barrier in the wrong place

    A railway is a barrier to animals. Where you put the barrier decides whether it cuts through habitat that is still whole, or adds one more strand to ground that is already crossed by a highway and a freight line.

    The greenfield alignment runs through or beside three of eastern Ontario’s most sensitive landscapes.

    The Frontenac Arch

    A billion-year-old granite ridge linking the Canadian Shield to the Adirondacks, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 2002, and the narrowest point on the wildlife corridor running from Algonquin to the Adirondacks. It holds Blanding’s turtle, the grey ratsnake, the eastern whip-poor-will and somewhere between half and two thirds of Canada’s cerulean warblers, along with fisher, black bear, moose and eastern wolf.

    Because it is already the tightest pinch-point in a continental corridor, a new barrier laid across it does disproportionate harm. It does not just disturb habitat; it narrows the last gap animals still move through.

    The Napanee Limestone Plain

    Alvar — flat limestone pavement with almost no soil, flooded in spring and parched in summer. It exists in only two places on Earth, the Great Lakes basin and the Baltic, and about 85 per cent of North America’s alvar is in Ontario. It supports part of Ontario’s remaining eastern loggerhead shrike population, a bird now down to a handful of nesting pairs province-wide.

    A brownfield route is not ecologically free. Its right-of-way still crosses natural land. The point is comparative: it adds a strand where a barrier already exists, rather than opening a fresh one through the ground that the biosphere designation exists to protect.

    We say that plainly because it matters. The corridor audit in Chapter 4 finds the brownfield spine still crosses about 41 per cent natural cover. It is not a route through nothing. It is a route through ground that a four-lane highway and a Class I freight main already run down.

    3. Construction: where the trucks go

    A 479-kilometre construction site has to be fed. The brownfield spine needs roughly 9.8 million tonnes of fill, ballast, track and concrete — about 20,400 tonnes for every kilometre built. Delivered entirely by road, that is around 390,000 loaded truck trips, running on the same Highway 401 the railway is being built beside, during the decade that highway is itself being widened.

    Britain has already run this experiment. HS2 moved more than 10 million tonnes of material by rail, and the reason it did is the instructive part: it was not a carbon measure. Local councils refused the lorry routes the project had planned. Moving material by train was how the works stayed consented.

    The honest size of the carbon saving

    Moving 60 to 80 per cent of the material by rail instead of road would avoid somewhere between 0.05 and 0.08 Mt of carbon. That is one to two per cent of the line’s construction emissions. It is a real saving and a small one, and the carbon case on this page does not rest on it.

    What it changes is something else: whether people along the route can live with the construction. That is the variable that decides whether a corridor gets built at all.

    And this is not a strategy a project can simply decide to adopt. It is a property of where the line is. A route beside an existing freight railway has yards at Belleville, Kingston, Brockville, Cornwall and Coteau available as railheads, and on the Ottawa legs runs on publicly owned track. A greenfield route through the Frontenac Arch has no railway to deliver to. Materials arrive by road on haul roads built for the purpose, and excavated rock leaves the same way, through the same rural communities.

    4. Communities: friction is priced into the cost

    We score this two ways. The Latent Friction Index measures the structural friction a route will generate, before any opposition has appeared. The Community Friction Index measures opposition that has actually materialised. On the forward measure the brownfield spine scores about 29 and the greenfield corridor about 65. On the realised measure the greenfield project has already reached 54, and is rising.

    This is not only a political point. In our reference-class cost model, community friction is a statistically significant predictor of cost escalation — it carries most of the explanatory power in what a kilometre actually costs to build, across the international sample. The friction a new corridor generates gets priced into the bill.

    A low-friction route is not just quieter. It is cheaper, and those are the same fact seen from two sides.

    The difference comes down to where the land is taken from. Both routes need new land; a railway cannot be laid inside a live highway. But land taken beside an existing highway and freight line is already fragmented, already severed, and already next to infrastructure. Land taken across open country is none of those things, and the people it is taken from had no prior relationship with the project.

    One thing that cuts the other way

    The margin beside Highway 401 that makes the brownfield route cheap is being consumed — by interchange development, logistics parks moving east, subdivisions at growth centres and utility lock-in. Chapter 4 puts the cost of waiting until the corridor fills in at around $20 billion, which would roughly halve the route’s benefit-cost ratio and erase the advantage that is the reason to prefer it.

    The brownfield option is the low-friction one, but only while the window is open.

    5. What the corridor could give back

    Everything above treats the corridor as something done to the land it crosses. There is a reciprocal question worth asking.

    Against the intuition that Ontario’s sun improves as you go south and west, the province’s strongest solar yields are in the east. Kingston records about 1,194 kilowatt-hours per installed kilowatt per year and Ottawa about 1,140, against roughly 1,096 for Toronto and 1,084 for London. The railway is proposed through the sunniest ground in southern Ontario — and developers noticed first. Four ten-megawatt solar farms stand within a few kilometres of the 401 around Ingleside alone — Rutley, Cornwall, David Brown and South Stormont, built between 2012 and 2015 — and at Edwardsburgh Cardinal a partnership including the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation is building the largest battery storage system in Canada.

    This matters for a reason that has nothing to do with electricity. A right-of-way takes a strip of land and pays for it once. A generation lease pays on the land that remains, every year, for decades. The awkward leftover parcels created by a railway are poor ground for crops and perfectly good ground for solar panels. The Rutley farm gives a sense of the scale: ten megawatts across about ninety acres.

    Being clear about the numbers

    The contracts that built the existing solar farms paid up to 44.3 cents a kilowatt-hour and are closed to new entrants. At today’s rates a ten-megawatt facility earns closer to a million dollars a year than the five to seven million those contracts paid. The existing arrays are a poor guide to what a new one is worth.

    A million a year through a lease and a tax roll is still a different thing from a single expropriation cheque.

    The limits deserve stating as plainly as the opportunity. Solar output peaks in summer and stops at night, while a railway’s demand is flat and year-round — so this is a commercial and community proposition, not a way to power trains. Provincial policy restricts ground-mount solar on prime farmland. Connection capacity governs what can actually be built. None of that is a reason to leave it unexamined; it is a reason to examine it while the route is still being decided, rather than after the land has been taken and the relationships have set.

    How to read the numbers on this page

    Figures attributed to a named source — Alto, HS2, the C.D. Howe Institute, Metrolinx, Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Treasury Board, Natural Resources Canada, UNESCO, or a named developer — are quoted from the full chapter’s source lists and can be checked there.

    Everything else is output from our own models: both columns of the carbon table, the freight credit, the breakeven years, the friction scores, the land-cover audit, the materials tonnage and the delay-escalation estimate. These are estimates built on stated assumptions, not measurements. The assumptions are set out in the full report so that any of them can be replaced and the arithmetic re-run.

    Where Alto has not published a figure, we say so rather than inferring one, and we make no claim about why any figure has not been published.

    Read the full chapter

    Chapter 5 — Environmental and Community Impact (PDF)

    Nineteen pages. The full lifecycle carbon account with its discount-rate sensitivity, the traction comparison including bi-mode trainsets, the species and habitat assessments, the materials-by-rail analysis against HS2 outturn, the friction indices, the corridor solar assessment, and the complete source lists for each section.

    Sources and notes

    1Discount rates: Metrolinx Business Case Manual Volume 2 (3.5 per cent); Environment and Climate Change Canada, social cost of greenhouse gas emissions (2 per cent near-term Ramsey rate); Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Canadian Cost-Benefit Analysis Guide: Regulatory Proposals (8 per cent); US Office of Management and Budget Circular A-4, revised November 2023, in which the 7 per cent capital rate was withdrawn.
    2C.D. Howe Institute, All Aboard: The Benefits of Faster, More Frequent Passenger Trains between Ontario and Québec (D. Jones and T. Fariha), February 2025 — 3.5 per cent social discount rate over a 60-year appraisal, and the only published benefit analysis of this corridor.
    3Habitat: UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Programme, Frontenac Arch Biosphere Reserve; Birds Canada, cerulean warbler profile; COSEWIC and Environment and Climate Change Canada recovery strategies; Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas Canada, Napanee Limestone Plain (ON152); Wildlife Preservation Canada, eastern loggerhead shrike. Initiative assessments of the Frontenac Arch (A. Hyett) and the Napanee Limestone Plain (S. Moore and K. Hennige), March 2026.
    4Materials by rail: HS2 Ltd, Materials by Rail, HS2 Learning Legacy, and HS2 media releases 2020–2023; Crossrail Excavated Materials Story; Railway Association of Canada on rail fuel efficiency.
    5Solar: Natural Resources Canada photovoltaic potential data; Canada Energy Regulator market snapshot; Firelight Infrastructure Partners, Saturn Power and Clearlight Energy project data; The Energy Mix on the Skyview 2 storage project at Edwardsburgh Cardinal.
    Coalition for Better Rail  ·  ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  beyondalto.ca  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  The HPR Research Report · Chapter 5 Independent, non-partisan research on Canada’s proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor. This page is a plain-language summary of Chapter 5; the full chapter sets out the models, the tables and the complete source lists. Nothing on this page is a statement about the motives or conduct of any person or organisation. It is a comparison of two route choices and of what follows from each.

  • Incompatible traffic types

    Coalition for Better Rail · ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · The HPR Research Report

    Two incompatible traffic types share one corridor

    Why North America’s freight railways work the opposite way from Europe’s—and what that means for the passenger problem.

    Chapter 3 · The HPR Research Report

    The Toronto–Montréal corridor’s passenger problem has a single physical cause: intercity passenger trains and heavy freight trains are competing for the same tracks. This chapter explains why that conflict is the real problem—and why the solution isn’t to build a new line somewhere else, but to separate the traffic on the corridor that already exists.

    3.1 · The Opposing Models

    North America and Europe run railways in opposite ways

    Europe’s model: Railways are run by the state or with heavy state support. The network is built around passenger service first—high-speed trains get priority over freight. Freight competes for capacity on a passenger-focused network and often loses money or relies on subsidies.

    North America’s model: Railways are private companies that own their own tracks. Freight is the core business, and it comes first. Intercity passenger trains are tenants that run in between freight movements. The freight railways have spent 30 years optimizing for moving more tonnage at lower cost.

    What the freight model bought. The clearest physical expression of the North American model is the size of the trains it runs. Because crew and locomotive costs are largely fixed per departure, length is leverage. North American freight trains routinely run beyond three kilometres and the longest exceed four, against a European standard of roughly 740 metres. The second and larger efficiency is double-stack, introduced in North America in 1984 and now carrying the majority of US intermodal traffic: two containers stacked vertically in a single well car, roughly doubling the container payload of a train of a given length. Europe cannot do either, because siding lengths, signalling design and overhead electrification on a passenger-first network cap both train length and loading gauge.

    The numbers tell the story. In the United States, freight carries roughly 40 percent of long-distance goods movement by weight—among the world’s highest. In Europe, it’s fallen to about 17 percent and still dropping. Why? Because Europe invested in passenger railways, and freight became the secondary user. North America invested in freight railways, and passenger service became secondary.

    This matters because

    Canada’s proposed Toronto–Montréal corridor would run on North American freight railway tracks owned by Canadian National Railway. That means it’s joining a corridor governed by North American logic: the freight railway owns the track, and its tonnage comes first. A passenger plan modelled on Europe won’t work here.

    3.2 · The Incumbent Railway

    CN is constrained, and its problem is capacity—not speed

    Canadian National Railway (CN) owns and operates the Kingston Subdivision, the main freight line through the Toronto–Montréal corridor. CN’s story over the past three decades is a master class in what makes private railways valuable: squeezing more output from existing track without building new infrastructure.

    When CN was privatized in 1995, it was a struggling Crown corporation. By the 2000s, under new leadership, CN adopted “Precision Scheduled Railroading”—moving individual cars on fixed schedules, cutting dwell time in rail yards, and lengthening trains. The operating ratio—the industry’s efficiency measure, where lower is better—fell from 76 percent to 56 percent. CN’s share price went up roughly 60 times.

    Chart of CN market capitalisation against operating ratio from 1995 to 2025, showing market capitalisation rising as the operating ratio falls
    Figure 3.1. CN market capitalisation versus operating ratio since privatisation, 1995–2025. Market capitalisation in CAD billions; operating ratio expressed ×100. The inverse relationship is this chapter’s central premise: as the operating ratio fell, market capitalisation compounded — value created by operating discipline on existing track, not by network construction. Sources: CN annual reports; Bloomberg; Railway Age.

    The lesson: The market rewarded CN not for building new railways but for extracting more value from the railway it already owned. This is the capital-light path to rail value: efficiency on assets in the ground, not greenfield construction.

    Why this matters to the corridor

    CN’s problem today is not speed—it’s capacity. Its three main intermodal terminals in the Greater Toronto Area are running at full capacity. It proposed a new terminal at Milton in 2015 and met a decade of local opposition, environmental assessment and litigation before construction could start; the approval was ultimately upheld on appeal and the terminal is now being built. This tells us something crucial: the cost of building new capacity in a populated landscape is measured in years, not just dollars — Milton took roughly a decade from proposal to construction on a facility of about $250 million — and community resistance is as big a factor as engineering difficulty.

    3.3 · The Other Railway

    What about CP? It runs on its own track

    CN isn’t the only major freight railway on the Toronto–Montréal axis. Canadian Pacific—since its 2023 merger with Kansas City Southern, now Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC)—also runs a line through the corridor. It’s reasonable to ask whether CPKC changes the picture. It doesn’t, and the reason is geographic.

    CPKC runs west out of Toronto on its Galt Subdivision. Its main Toronto–Montréal line is the Belleville Subdivision, which runs roughly parallel to CN’s Kingston Subdivision through the central part of the corridor, then turns north toward Smiths Falls and continues to Montréal on CPKC’s own tracks. CPKC’s eastern freight travels on its own metals, not on CN’s. Since the KCS merger, CPKC’s strategic focus has shifted decisively north–south—to the continental Canada–US–Mexico network that is now its primary growth story.

    Why this matters

    The passenger–freight conflict is specific to CN’s Kingston Subdivision, where VIA’s trains share track with CN’s freight. CPKC, on its separate Belleville Subdivision, is not a party to it—so the freight capacity that separation liberates accrues to CN, the line’s owner. The Belleville Subdivision matters in one further respect: it’s a second existing rail right-of-way running parallel to the CN line and Highway 401 through the corridor’s central section—further evidence that the ground HPR would follow is already a multi-track transport spine rather than open country.

    3.4 · The Root Problem

    Entanglement: two traffic types, one track

    VIA’s intercity passenger trains and CN’s freight trains share the Kingston Subdivision. They have opposite operating needs.

    Freight trains

    Long, heavy, slow to accelerate. Can tolerate delays. Run to commercial schedules. Need to be as long as possible to spread fixed locomotive costs across more cargo.

    Passenger trains

    Short, light, quick to accelerate. Cannot tolerate delays. Need frequent, reliable service. Need short platforms and quick turnarounds.

    Under the “host railway priority” rules that govern shared track across North America, when a freight train and a passenger train want the same track at the same time, the freight train proceeds and the passenger train waits in a siding. VIA cannot unilaterally add frequency because every additional passenger train needs to be negotiated around CN’s freight schedule. CN controls the dispatcher, and under this ownership structure nothing requires the track owner to give up freight capacity to improve passenger reliability.

    This creates a two-sided failure: every passenger path is capacity CN cannot use for freight; every siding meet is friction on a network built and operated to move tonnage without interruption. They are entangled—neither can be optimized without degrading the other. And the owner of the track whose traffic comes first has no incentive to give ground.

    The corridor’s real problem

    It’s not a shortage of speed. It’s not an engineering problem. It’s a structural conflict over who owns the capacity and whose traffic comes first. No schedule adjustment solves this while the two traffic types remain on one set of rails.

    3.5 · The Solution

    Separation: give each traffic type its own path

    If entanglement is the disease, separation is the cure—and it’s the single design principle behind HPR.

    The idea is simple: build a dedicated passenger path engineered for passenger requirements, and hand the shared corridor back to freight. Each traffic type then runs on infrastructure suited to it. The capacity conflict that produces the corridor’s present failure simply ceases to exist. This doesn’t ask a private freight railway to subordinate its tonnage to passenger priority—it removes the passenger trains from the freight railway’s tracks altogether.

    Separation can be achieved cheaply or expensively. The difference between the two approaches is the difference between HPR and ALTO.

    HPR pursues separation through a brownfield-led philosophy: Build the dedicated passenger path along the geometry of corridors that are already disturbed—Highway 401 and the existing rail right-of-way. Upgrade and reuse infrastructure wherever engineering permits; build new only where geometry or capacity genuinely demands it. This keeps the new passenger alignment adjacent to the freight corridor it is relieving.

    What that means in practice: a roughly 479 km new-build passenger spine from Pickering Junction to Dorval, plus about 200 km of upgrade on the VIA-owned Smiths Falls and Alexandria Subdivisions. The spine is the capital project; the upgrades extend it using track already in public hands.

    ALTO pursues separation through greenfield construction: Build a new high-speed line through Eastern Ontario, engineered for 300 km/h, away from the existing freight corridor. This imports the European passenger-first model—a dedicated high-speed line as an end in itself—into a North American freight corridor whose economics it doesn’t engage.

    3.6 · The Insight

    Build one, make one free: the dual-asset structure

    This is where HPR differs fundamentally from ALTO, and where the economics become positive-sum rather than single-purpose.

    When HPR moves passenger trains onto their own dedicated path, they vacate the Kingston Subdivision. The capacity they were consuming—the paths, the priority negotiations, the siding meets—reverts to CN as liberated freight capacity on the line it owns. That capacity bears on the operating ratio and the terminal congestion CN’s own public reporting identifies as central. CN has taken no public position on HPR, and none should be inferred here — the point is that the incentives run in the same direction.

    Think of it this way:

    • “Build one” is High Performance Passenger Rail (HPPR)—the dedicated passenger path. That’s the capital project.
    • “Make one free” is High Performance Freight Rail (HPFR)—the freight capacity liberated on the shared corridor the moment passenger trains vacate it. No additional construction required to create it. It falls out of the geometry of the build.

    One capital project produces two separable outputs. The passenger business case needs only to justify itself on passenger benefits. The freight-capacity dividend is surplus—untouched by any reference-class reduction of passenger ridership forecasts. This is a deliberate bias countermeasure against the benefit-shortfall failure mode that sinks megaprojects.

    Why this structure matters

    On the reference-class basis used throughout this report, ALTO builds one thing — a passenger-only line — at the corridor’s maximum per-kilometre cost of about $142M/km, and captures one benefit stream. HPR builds one thing at about $54M/km de-biased and captures two. The difference isn’t in execution quality; it’s in whether the design is aligned with the corridor’s actual economics and incentives.

    3.7 · Who Gains

    The freight dividend: how the freed capacity translates to real benefits

    The liberated freight capacity is not abstract. It lands on named, motivated beneficiaries:

    The host railway (CN)

    Recovers paths previously consumed by passenger service. Uncongested freight paths translate to higher network fluidity, more predictable transit times, and the ability to grow tonnage without hitting a capacity ceiling. Where clearance is addressed, it enables double-stack container operation—which roughly halves the per-container cost of moving goods by rail. A freight railway that no longer dispatches around passenger priority is materially more valuable on the same physical asset.

    Shippers and supply chain

    Reliable, uncongested rail capacity on the busiest goods corridor in the country is a resilience asset. It raises the ceiling on how much freight moves by rail and reduces variability that pushes shippers toward more expensive or higher-emission alternatives. Combined with on-dock terminal design of the kind the Montréal Port Authority is building at Contrecœur, it extends competitive intermodal service to a larger share of corridor flows.

    The public

    Freight capacity that would otherwise be unavailable on rail is capacity that can absorb goods movement currently carried by road. Each tonne shifted from truck to rail reduces highway congestion, road wear, and—most consequentially—carbon emissions, given the substantial per-tonne-kilometre advantage of rail over road haulage.

    3.8 · The Contrast

    Why ALTO cannot capture the freight dividend

    ALTO is also a separation scheme—it too gives passenger trains a dedicated line. But the freight dividend is not equally available to it, and the reasons are fundamental.

    First, routing: ALTO’s dedicated line runs away from the existing freight corridor, through new terrain in Eastern Ontario. It doesn’t reorganize the freight corridor; it builds a parallel facility through different ground and leaves the freight network’s configuration, congestion, and clearance constraints essentially as it found them.

    Second, design: ALTO is a single-purpose asset—a passenger-only line engineered for 300 km/h. It cannot carry freight and is not designed to. The only benefit it can capture is the passenger benefit.

    Third, accounting: ALTO’s own business case books no freight benefit at all. The freight dividend does not appear in ALTO’s appraisal because ALTO’s design does not produce it.

    Fourth, cost: ALTO solves the single problem it addresses — passenger throughput — at the maximum per-kilometre cost the corridor admits: a new greenfield high-speed alignment through sensitive terrain. The capital cost analysis in Chapter 4 places HPPR at roughly $39 million per kilometre as specified and about $54 million per kilometre on the de-biased central estimate, some $18.6B to $26.1B for the 479 km spine, against ALTO at approximately $142 million per kilometre on the same reference-class basis.

    On a like-for-like de-biased comparison, ALTO therefore costs roughly two and a half times as much per kilometre to produce one benefit stream — and considerably more in total, once its far longer corridor is counted. HPR’s lower-cost, corridor-aligned build produces two benefits, and leaves CN’s capacity and clearance problems measurably better than it found them.

    The core difference

    ALTO builds one and makes nothing free. HPR builds one and makes one free, at roughly two-fifths of the per-kilometre cost. The difference is not in how well each is executed; it is in whether the concept is aligned with the corridor’s actual economics and the incentives of the parties who own and operate it.

    Key Findings · Chapter 3

    The concept in eight parts

    3.1 — North America runs the opposite railway

    North American freight railways are private, profitable, vertically integrated, and freight-priority. Rail’s freight share is far higher in North America (~40% of US long-distance ton-miles vs ~17% of EU inland tonne-km). A passenger plan modelled on Europe imports passenger-first assumptions into a freight-first corridor.

    3.2 — CN is the incumbent, and it is constrained

    CN’s extraordinary returns came from efficiency on existing track, not construction. Its valuation has stalled; it struggles to add capacity (Milton took a decade from proposal to construction); and its corridor economics improve on uncongested paths and double-stack clearance.

    3.3 — CP is not a party to the conflict

    CPKC runs its own Belleville Subdivision on the Toronto–Montréal axis, parallel to the CN Kingston Sub, and shares no track with VIA. The entanglement, and the freight dividend, are CN’s. CPKC’s parallel line is also a second disturbed right-of-way in the corridor.

    3.4 — Entanglement is the root cause

    Passenger and freight share the Kingston Subdivision with opposite operating characteristics. The corridor’s failure—sub-64% on-time performance, four-hour schedules, low frequency—is one capacity conflict seen from two sides, on track owned by the party whose tonnage comes first.

    3.5 — Separation is the design principle

    Give passenger service its own dedicated path and hand the shared corridor back to freight—resolving the conflict with the North American model, not against it. HPR does this brownfield-led, along Highway 401 and existing rail geometry: a ~479 km Pickering Junction–Dorval spine plus ~200 km of upgrade on the VIA-owned Smiths Falls and Alexandria Subdivisions.

    3.6 — Build one, make one free

    One capital project—HPR—produces two separable assets: HPPR (the dedicated passenger path) and HPFR (the freight capacity liberated on the shared corridor), created at no incremental cost by the geometry of the build.

    3.7 — HPFR lands on a motivated beneficiary

    The liberated freight corridor benefits the host railway (fluidity, operating-ratio gains, double-stack where cleared), shippers (resilience, Contrecœur-style reach), and the public (road freight diverted to rail, with emissions and safety gains). It is carried as a measured quantity: a Chapter 8 benefit-cost stream and Chapter 5 emissions.

    3.8 — ALTO cannot capture it

    ALTO builds a greenfield passenger-only line at ~$142M/km against HPPR’s ~$54M/km de-biased (~$39M/km as specified) — roughly two and a half times the unit cost — and captures one benefit. HPR captures two. ALTO builds one at maximum cost and makes nothing free.

    Download Chapter 3
    The HPR Concept: Untangling the Corridor
    PDF · 3.2 MB · Full technical chapter with figures and tables
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    Coalition for Better Rail  ·  ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  beyondalto.ca  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  The HPR Research Report · Chapter 3
    Independent, non-partisan research on Canada’s proposed Toronto–Québec City high-speed rail corridor. This chapter explains why North America’s freight-first railway model makes the entanglement between passenger and freight the corridor’s defining constraint, and why HPR’s separation principle—rather than ALTO’s European-modelled greenfield approach—aligns with the continent’s actual economics.

  • Canada’s rail exceptionalism

    Canada’s Rail Exceptionalism

    Why Canada’s passenger trains keep pulling over to let freight go by — and why almost no other wealthy country works this way.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Comparative Brief · Published July 2026
    ⚠ New this week: Ottawa’s $1.95-billion train order

    On July 29, 2026, the federal government announced $1.95 billion to buy 45 new hybrid locomotives for VIA Rail, most of them to be assembled in Montréal. It is welcome news for jobs and for an aging fleet — but every dollar of it is about the train, not the track. Transport Canada   CBC

    A new locomotive doesn’t change who owns the rails or who goes first. On the routes this fleet will serve, VIA runs on tracks owned by the freight railways — and its shiny new trains will keep pulling into sidings to wait for freight, just as the last batch of new trains does today.

    The bottom line

    No G7 country has a law that makes freight trains more important than passenger trains. Where a law on the question exists at all, it does the opposite — it puts passengers first. The other big democracies reach the same result another way: a neutral company owns the tracks, or an independent referee decides who goes when, or freight is simply the guest on passenger-owned lines.

    Canada is the only G7 country with none of these protections. VIA Rail owns less than 3% of the track it runs on and travels as a guest on lines owned by the freight railways CN and CPKC, under private contracts, with no law giving passengers priority, no neutral track owner, and no independent referee. Freight priority isn’t written into Canadian law — it is simply what happens when nothing protects passengers. That is what makes Canada the outlier.

    Download
    Canada’s Rail Exceptionalism — Full Brief (PDF)
    The complete comparison of freight-versus-passenger priority across the G7 and other high-income countries, with sources
    Download PDF
    The problem

    Canada’s passenger trains are guests on someone else’s railway

    Most people assume VIA Rail runs on its own tracks. It doesn’t. VIA owns under 3% of the track it uses. CN owns about 83%, and the rest belongs to CPKC and commuter agencies like Metrolinx. So across almost its whole network, VIA is a tenant — and when a VIA passenger train and a CN freight train want the same stretch of track, the freight company that owns and controls that track decides who waits.

    <3%
    of the track it runs on is actually owned by VIA Rail
    CBC News, 2024
    ~83%
    of VIA’s tracks are owned by the freight railway CN
    CBC News, 2024
    57%
    of VIA trains arrived on time in 2022
    CBC News, 2024

    You can see the result on the timetable. In 2022, only about 57% of VIA trains arrived on time. But on the one short stretch VIA actually owns, between Ottawa and Montréal, on-time performance jumps to roughly 90%. Same country, same trains — the difference is who owns the track. That is the whole story of this brief in a single comparison.

    A quick distinction

    Three different things people call “priority”

    Arguments about rail priority get tangled because “priority” can mean three different things. Keeping them separate is the key to an honest comparison.

    1. Priority written into law

    An actual law saying which kind of train goes first. This is rare. Where it exists — in the United States — it favours passengers, not freight.

    2. A neutral referee decides

    A neutral company owns the tracks and an independent regulator hands out timetable slots by published rules. This is how Europe and Japan work. Passenger trains are protected; freight gets fair, guaranteed access — but not the whip hand.

    3. Whoever owns the track wins

    What actually happens minute-to-minute when a dispatcher chooses. On freight-owned track, freight tends to win. Canada has only this third kind — with nothing above it.

    The comparison

    How Canada stacks up against the G7

    0 of 7
    G7 countries that put freight ahead of passengers by law
    it’s a null set
    6 of 7
    protect passengers — by law, a neutral track owner, or a referee
    every G7 member except one
    1
    the number of G7 countries with none of those protections: Canada
    the outlier

    Read down the list. Every other G7 country has at least one thing standing between passengers and the commercial interests of freight — a law, a neutral owner, or an independent referee. Canada has none.

    Passengers first
    United States — Federal law has put passenger trains ahead of freight since 1973. (Freight railroads often ignore it in practice, which is why the U.S. keeps trying to enforce it — but the law is clear.)
    Passengers first
    Japan — The passenger companies own the tracks; the freight operator is the guest and pays to use them. Bullet-train lines carry no freight at all.
    Neutral referee
    United Kingdom — A neutral company owns the track and an independent regulator hands out the slots. Neither passengers nor freight can simply push the other aside.
    Neutral referee
    France — A neutral track owner and an independent regulator allocate capacity under published EU rules; express passenger trains rank at the top.
    Neutral referee
    Germany — Same European model: neutral track owner, independent regulator, no freight-over-passenger rule.
    Neutral referee
    Italy — Same European model again: neutral track owner and independent regulator.
    No protection
    Canada — No law giving passengers priority, no neutral track owner, no independent referee. Freight wins by default.

    Widening the lens beyond the G7 only makes the point sharper. Nearly every wealthy country runs on the neutral, refereed model. Switzerland is the clearest contrast: it builds its entire national timetable around passengers — freight is scheduled around passenger service, not ahead of it. The only rich country that really resembles Canada is Australia, and even there an economic regulator oversees track access, and there is almost no long-distance passenger service on the freight lines. Canada is alone in running a national passenger railway carrying millions of trips a year with none of these safeguards.

    The $1.95-billion question

    Why new trains won’t fix this

    This week’s investment is real and worthwhile. But it buys a better machine; it does nothing about the track — which is where Canada’s problem actually lives.

    What the $1.95 billion buysWhat it leaves untouched
    45 new hybrid locomotives, most assembled in Montréal, plus a new maintenance facility and about 1,200 jobs. Who owns the track. The routes these trains will run on still belong to CN and CPKC.
    A cleaner, more modern fleet to replace aging equipment on long-distance and remote routes. Who goes first. A new locomotive still pulls into the siding to let the freight train pass.
    The promise of better reliability from newer, more capable trains. The real cause of delay. On freight-owned track, punctuality is capped by freight priority — no train upgrade can override it.

    We already know how this ends, because Canada has run the experiment. The last new fleet — the Siemens Venture trains bought for the busy Québec City–Windsor corridor — is today slowed by speed restrictions CN imposes on its own track, a dispute now before the Federal Court. New trains, same track, same problem.

    There’s an irony worth noting: the new locomotives are Swiss-built. Switzerland is exactly the country whose trains run on time — because it built its whole timetable around passengers. Canada is importing the Swiss hardware without the Swiss idea. It is buying the train, not the timetable.

    The real obstacle

    This is a political choice, not a technical one

    None of this is destiny. Every tool Canada is missing already exists and is used routinely by its neighbours — and adopting any one of them would cost a tiny fraction of a single locomotive order. What is missing isn’t money or engineering. It’s political will.

    The fix has been put to Parliament again and again — and set aside every time. Since 2013, at least half a dozen bills have tried to give passengers priority or put VIA Rail on a proper legal footing:

    Defeated 2015
    Bill C-640 (and its earlier version C-614), the VIA Rail Canada Act — Philip Toone. Would have given passenger service preference over freight. Voted down.
    Died 2019
    Bill C-370, VIA Rail Canada Act — Irene Mathyssen. Never debated to a vote; died when Parliament ended.
    Never voted
    Bills C-251 and C-236, VIA Rail Canada Act — Elizabeth May, reintroduced across two Parliaments.
    Never advanced
    Bill C-371, the Rail Passenger Priority Act — Taylor Bachrach, 2023. Would have required freight to give way to passengers, with fines up to $250,000 per violation.

    The pattern is telling. Every one of these bills came from an opposition member; not one was ever taken up as government legislation; and the only one to reach a vote was voted down. The freight railways and their shippers have lobbied against each attempt — one shippers’ group dismissed passenger priority as “the tail wagging the dog” — even as VIA Rail’s own CEO has publicly asked Ottawa for exactly the U.S.-style priority these bills propose. The tools are drafted and the precedent is understood. What’s missing is a government willing to enact them.

    What would actually fix it

    Three tools — any one would help

    Canada doesn’t need to invent anything. It can pick from the same toolkit every comparable country already uses. Each of these is cheaper than a single locomotive order.

    A law that puts passengers first

    Like the United States since 1973 — a statutory right for passenger trains to go ahead of freight, with penalties for ignoring it.

    A neutral track owner

    Like the UK and the EU — so the company running the trains isn’t also the company deciding who waits.

    An independent referee

    A regulator that hands out timetable slots by published rules and can enforce on-time performance.

    The high-speed corridor project (ALTO) is, in part, a workaround for all of this — building brand-new, dedicated passenger track precisely because passengers can’t get priority on freight-owned lines. But dedicated track for one corridor doesn’t fix the national problem. The exceptionalism this brief documents is a policy choice, not a constraint — and closing it is a matter of political will, not engineering.

    Read the full brief

    The complete comparison, with sources

    The full brief works through the G7 country by country, the other high-income comparisons, the corridor evidence, and the decade of failed legislation — with every claim sourced.

    Download Full Brief
    Canada’s Rail Exceptionalism (PDF)
    Comparative analysis for policymakers, MPs, journalists, and anyone following the passenger-rail file
    Download PDF
    Sources

    Key sources

    1.
    Transport Canada, news release, “Passenger Rail Locomotive Assembly Returns to Canada Through a $1.95 Billion Government of Canada Investment,” July 29, 2026. canada.ca
    2.
    CBC News, “Feds announce almost $2B for 45 hybrid battery-diesel Via Rail passenger locomotives,” July 29, 2026. CBC News
    3.
    CBC News, “Work’s chugging along to try to prioritize people over freight on Canada’s rail lines,” December 23, 2023 — source for VIA owning under 3% of its track, CN owning about 83%, and 57% on-time performance in 2022. CBC News
    4.
    The Canadian Press, November 26, 2024 — on VIA’s application to the Canadian Transportation Agency and CN’s freight prioritization as the leading cause of VIA delay, with the Montréal–Toronto scheduled time lengthening to 5 h 33 m.
    5.
    Railway Age, November 2022 — noting that, unlike Amtrak, VIA Rail holds no government-mandated priority over freight.
    6.
    United States: 49 U.S.C. §24308(c), the statutory passenger preference originating in the Amtrak Improvement Act of 1973.
    7.
    European Union: Directive 2012/34/EU establishing a single European railway area (neutral infrastructure managers and independent regulators).
    8.
    Passenger-priority bills in Parliament — Bill C-640 / C-614 (Philip Toone), defeated 2015; Bill C-370 (Irene Mathyssen), 2017; Bills C-251 / C-236 (Elizabeth May); Bill C-371, the Rail Passenger Priority Act (Taylor Bachrach), 2023. parl.ca   openparliament.ca
    9.
    Transport Action Canada, “Taylor Bachrach Proposes Rail Passenger Priority Act,” and coverage in Trains (February 2, 2024), including VIA CEO Mario Péloquin’s call for Amtrak-style priority and freight-sector opposition. transportaction.ca
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  Comparative Brief  ·  July 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor.

  • Introduction: What is HPR

    Coalition for Better Rail · ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · The HPR Research Report

    What is HPR?

    An alternative built around the journey people actually take — not the top speed on the brochure.

    Introduction · The HPR Research Report

    High Performance Rail (HPR) is a plan to modernise passenger and freight rail along a corridor that already has track. Instead of one brand-new high-speed line built from scratch, HPR treats the whole corridor as a single system and asks what the smartest fix is for each part. That means new track where new track earns its place, upgrades to existing lines where they deliver more per dollar, and added freight capacity so passenger and freight trains can each run to their own schedule. The goal is a trip that beats driving door to door, reaches city centres and the towns in between, and gets built in affordable stages.

    Download
    What is HPR? — Introduction (PDF)
    The HPR framework in full: the three-part structure, the 10 Guiding Principles, and the case for a made-in-Canada alternative to greenfield high-speed rail
    Download PDF
    The Framework

    Three parts, one corridor strategy

    HPR is not one thing but a whole-system approach with two working halves. It combines a passenger spine and a freight dimension into one corridor strategy, assessed together and built step by step, so each mode can grow on its own terms instead of being forced onto the other’s infrastructure.

    Three names for three things, used consistently across this report. The corridor is the Toronto–Québec City route Alto proposes. The triangle is the Toronto–Ottawa–Montréal network HPR proposes in its place. The spine is the 479-kilometre Pickering Junction to Dorval element of that triangle, on the Toronto–Montréal axis, which is where the new-build cost concentrates. Where a chapter names one of the three, it means that one.

    HPR — High Performance Rail · the framework

    The whole-system approach. HPR combines the passenger spine and the freight side into one corridor strategy, assessed together and delivered in stages.

    HPPR — High Performance Passenger Rail · the spine

    The physical passenger railway. New-build and grade-separated where the corridor requires it, engineered to run reliably across a 177–240 km/h band, with 240 km/h (150 mph) the alignment’s design maximum, serving downtowns and the communities along the route.

    HPFR — High Performance Freight Rail · the freight dimension

    The capacity that separates freight from passenger obligations. Freed from passenger schedules, freight can run to a more flexible timetable and operate longer trains. Those are the levers that lower a railway’s operating ratio, so each mode can grow without crowding out the other on shared track.

    The 10 Guiding Principles of HPR

    What HPR is built on

    01
    Look at the whole system. Treat the rail network as one system rather than a set of separate projects, and respect the different business models freight and passenger operations run on. Avoid a single project that monopolises the funding and starves the many smaller improvements that would together deliver more.
    02
    Build for communities. Make sure the towns along the route benefit from the railway, not just the big cities at each end. A railway that brings those places in rather than bypassing them meets less local opposition, carries less political risk and, in the end, costs less.
    03
    Separate freight from passengers. Build the capacity to give each its own space, so neither has to run to the other’s schedule.
    04
    Go fast enough, not the fastest possible. Target speeds of 177–240 km/h. That is fast enough to compete with driving or flying door to door, without the cost of fully new, arrow-straight high-speed lines. A 240 km/h maximum is also the more practical option in extreme Canadian heat and cold (±30 °C).
    05
    Make the ride safe, comfortable and useful. Grade separation and modern rolling stock make rail among the safest ways to travel, and generous space lets passengers work, rest or talk on the way. Time on the train is usable time, which driving can never offer.
    06
    Be frequent and on time. Compete on turn-up-and-go frequency and dependable punctuality, with on-time performance above 90% sustained through Canadian winters. Reliability, not peak speed, is what earns a traveller’s trust.
    07
    Reach downtowns and smaller towns. Put stations in city centres and serve the communities along the route, not only the two endpoints.
    08
    Mix new construction with upgrades. Use whichever delivers more value for the money: new track, or improvements to what is already there.
    09
    Share the tracks. Let regional, commuter and intercity trains use the same tracks, with freed freight capacity as a deliberate co-benefit.
    10
    Build it in stages. Invest where the benefits can be demonstrated, phasing improvements so each stage earns its place, instead of concentrating all the cost and risk in one megaproject.
    How HPR Differs

    A North American solution

    The defining difference is what the railway is optimised for. A design that chases 300-plus km/h commits, almost by necessity, to a new greenfield alignment: long straight sections, wide curves, and bypasses that route around the very communities and city centres a passenger service exists to reach. The speed gained on open track is paid back in access time, capital and carbon.

    HPR takes the opposite approach. By accepting typical speeds of 177–240 km/h, it can follow the existing corridor, upgrade what already works, and go straight into downtowns, all while freeing up capacity for freight. The result is competitive door to door at a fraction of the capital exposure, in stages that can be re-scoped as the evidence matures.

    It is also a difference of origin. A greenfield high-speed line is essentially an imported design. The French passenger-rail model was built for a temperate, densely settled country on a network that carries no freight. North American railroading is the opposite: freight-dominated, shared-track, and tested by hard winters and long distances.

    HPR is engineered for those conditions — made in Canada, for Canadian ones. It builds domestic expertise that transfers to later Canadian projects rather than importing it. HPR is best understood not as a slower high-speed railway but as a different answer for a different continent. The question it sets out to answer is this: how do you move the most people and freight, to the most useful places, at prices that compete with driving, for the most defensible investment at the lowest risk?

    Travel Time, Not Speed

    The clock, not the speedometer

    A journey is not a single dash between two stations. It is a chain: getting to the station, waiting for the departure, the run itself, and then getting to the final destination at the far end. Top speed touches only one link in that chain. Once the time at both ends is counted, the run itself is a fraction of the door-to-door total, and shaving it returns less and less. The gap between 240 and 300 km/h saves minutes on the segment that is already the smallest part of the trip.

    Worse, the alignments that allow the highest speeds tend to push stations out of city centres. That adds time at both ends, which can outweigh whatever the faster run saved — so a train that is quicker on paper can be slower in practice. Frequency compounds the point: a train leaving soon beats a faster one you have to wait an hour to board.

    The measure that matters

    Over a corridor drive of some 540 kilometres, the car is the real competitor. Measured the way travellers actually experience the journey, what counts is the reliable door-to-door clock — not the number on the fastest stretch of track.

    The Price Lever

    Pricing for a car-centric market

    In a car-centric country, the railway’s real competitor is not the airplane or the existing train. It is the private car. Against a car someone already owns, a trip is judged on the fairly small extra cost of just driving it. That makes price the most direct lever on whether people switch.

    A line built at megaproject cost has to recover that capital somewhere. Fares set to service debt push budget-conscious travellers straight back into their cars, hollowing out the very ridership the business case assumed. HPR’s lower capital cost is therefore not only a fiscal virtue but a demand strategy: a railway that costs less to build can price to fill trains rather than to service debt.

    Frequency, downtown access and reliable door-to-door times create the conditions for people to switch. Price is what converts them into boardings — and where most trips default to the car, the fare is often the difference between a full train and an empty one.

    What HPR Is Not

    Neither political, nor all at once

    HPR is not a political project. Its route, its staging and its scope follow the evidence — engineering, economics and demographics — not political convenience or partisan preference. Where a claim cannot be grounded in that evidence, it is not made.

    Nor is it everything at once. Stage 1, the scope of the current report, is deliberately limited. It does not detour via Peterborough, it reaches Ottawa over upgraded existing lines rather than costly new-build, and it leaves Québec City to a later stage. Each further stage is added only when the evidence and the need justify it.

    The Pitch

    A case built to be checked

    HPR does not ask to be believed. It asks to be checked. Every figure in its case is meant to be traced to a source, tested against what comparable projects actually cost and carried, and stated with its uncertainty rather than at its best case. Where a promotional business case leads with a single confident number, HPR leads with a range and the reference class behind it. The honest way to forecast a railway is from the record of railways already built, rather than from a proponent’s own projections for the one not yet built.

    The result is a stronger case, not a softer one. Compared with a conventional greenfield high-speed line, HPR offers four things:

    Passengers
    A service that beats driving on door-to-door time, for a fraction of the cost of a from-scratch high-speed line.
    Freight
    Upgrades that help freight operators instead of competing with passenger trains for track space.
    Delivery
    Benefits that arrive in proven stages, each one demonstrated before the next is committed.
    Whole life
    A cost and environmental picture that improves, rather than worsens, once the entire lifespan of the asset is counted.

    None of that needs an optimistic ridership forecast or heroic cost control to stand up. That is the pitch: not the fastest railway that can be drawn on paper, but the one that will actually get built, get used, and pay its way.

    Coalition for Better Rail  ·  ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative  ·  beyondalto.ca  ·  citizenresearch.ca  ·  The HPR Research Report · Introduction
    Independent, non-partisan research on Canada’s proposed Toronto–Québec City corridor. This introduction describes the HPR framework. Later chapters cover corridor geometry, capital cost, ridership, operating economics, environmental impact and benefit–cost analysis.

  • Freight and the Vanishing train

    The Freight Dividend and the Vanishing Train

    Alto’s own freight report builds its economic case on removing passenger trains from the shared Toronto–Montreal corridor — the same line VIA Rail runs through Eastern Ontario.

    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · Research Brief · June 2026
    ⚠ Companion to “VIA Rail on the Kingston Subdivision”

    In April 2026 we set out how Alto would foreseeably erode intercity passenger service on the Kingston Subdivision. Alto’s own June 2026 freight report now supplies the missing piece from the proponent’s side: a business case in which that erosion is not a risk to be managed but a source of value to be captured. Read the April brief →

    The finding in brief

    In June 2026 Alto published a report, High-Speed Rail and Freight Capacity (CPCS in association with HDR), whose central benefit is the capacity freed by lowering the number of passenger trains on the shared CN corridor between Toronto and Montreal — the Kingston Subdivision that carries VIA Rail through Oshawa, Cobourg, Belleville, Kingston, Brockville and Cornwall.

    The benefit grows as passenger service shrinks. In the report’s own words it “would be shared between passenger and freight, depending on the level of passenger rail services that may be maintained on the CN corridor.” The party positioned to decide how much survives is Alto’s own development partner, the Cadence consortium — also slated to operate the corridor’s existing passenger trains. The risk falls squarely on VIA Rail.

    The report is right about one thing: separating passenger and freight traffic relieves both. But Alto achieves that separation by removing the passengers. A dedicated passenger spine along the same corridor achieves the same separation while keeping the lakeshore served — the constructive alternative set out below.

    ↓ Download the full brief (PDF)

    The Freight Report

    What the report claims

    The report’s stated purpose is to show how Alto could “generate economic and strategic benefits for freight rail by lowering passenger traffic on the shared corridor.” It documents that the Toronto–Montreal segment runs on CN-owned track with a passenger-to-freight mix close to 50-50, and that passenger trains — because of higher speeds and precise scheduling — consume more track capacity than freight trains.

    From this it assembles a set of claimed freight benefits: deferred or avoided capital investment in the CN corridor; headroom to “protect for” 55 per cent higher freight volumes over 30 years; induced freight demand and mode shift; new rail-adjacent industrial development; and roughly $90 million a year in avoided societal costs from shifting one daily intermodal train off Highway 401. Every one of these flows from the same source: fewer passenger trains on the shared line.

    The Mechanism

    The benefit is the removal of passenger trains

    The report is explicit that the enabling condition is fewer passenger trains, and it ties the size of the avoided-investment benefit directly to how much passenger service is cut: the benefit “would be shared between passenger and freight, depending on the level of passenger rail services that may be maintained on the CN corridor.” Read plainly, the fewer passenger paths retained on the Kingston Subdivision, the larger the freight benefit Alto can claim.

    The report then treats the retreat of passenger rail as an inducement to development, suggesting that reducing the volume of passenger trains may signal to industry that rail-adjacent parcels have become more desirable. Yet the same report opens with a disclaimer that its introduction is “not assumed to result in the discontinuation of local passenger rail services.” These two positions cannot both hold at full strength: the benefit is defined as the capacity released by removing passenger trains, while the disclaimer promises they will not be removed. The gap is bridged only by soft language — and by recasting intercity trains as “local offerings” that feed the high-speed line.

    Who Benefits, and How

    Who gains from fewer VIA trains

    Freight does gain — that much is the report’s central claim: CN, the freight railway, avoids the spending it would otherwise need to expand its own line. But CN does not decide how much VIA service survives, and it is not the only party that gains. The consortium positioned to make that decision, Cadence, runs no freight and earns nothing from it — its stake is in Alto. So the pressure to thin VIA’s service comes not from freight alone, but from four further interests the report’s framing keeps in the background.

    Alto’s ridership depends on it

    Cadence is paid to fill Alto, whose business case rests on very high ridership: a target of 24 million passengers a year by 2055 — roughly eight times the three million or so the corridor carries today. The only independent modelling of the route (University of Toronto’s Munk School) projects about 9 to 10 million, and a reference-class adjustment for the ~65 per cent overstatement typical of rail forecasts lands near 8 million. As a single concessionaire with no open-access competition, Cadence has every reason to price for yield, not volume — making a cheaper conventional train on the same corridor competition to be minimized, not preserved.

    It makes the case for building Alto look better

    The report’s headline “avoided investment” benefit is explicitly larger the more passenger service is cut, inflating the benefit-cost ratio used to justify the project — the very project that gives the consortium’s contract its reason to exist.

    It lowers the subsidy the government pays

    VIA Rail’s Toronto–Montreal corridor service ran an operating shortfall of about $117 million in 2025 — roughly $50 of public subsidy per passenger, at a corridor cost-recovery ratio near two-thirds (VIA Rail, 2025 Annual Report). Shrinking that service, or folding it into the Alto concession, reduces what the federal funder pays; the party deciding the corridor’s future is also the party writing that cheque.

    It sheds the cost of using CN’s track

    Passenger trains on the Kingston Subdivision run on CN-owned track under access and cost-sharing arrangements — including, as the report notes, payments to CN to maintain track at passenger speeds. Moving intercity trains onto Alto’s dedicated line sheds those payments.

    The gains flow to Cadence, to CN, and to the federal treasury. VIA Rail — and the passengers between Toronto and Montreal — bear the loss.

    The Consequence

    The risk to VIA Rail

    What Alto describes is two passenger railways on one corridor. A dedicated high-speed line, built and operated by Cadence, would carry the fast intercity market. What remains on the Kingston Subdivision — the trains that serve Oshawa through Cornwall — is left as a residual “local” service, running between freight trains on CN-owned track, with no committed frequency and no protected floor.

    Under the project’s public-private structure, even that residual service is not assured to remain with VIA Rail: the existing corridor passenger operations, designated the “Local Services” in the procurement, are slated to pass to the same Cadence consortium as feeders to the high-speed line. And this is not a distant hypothetical. VIA Rail’s corridor on-time performance has already collapsed — from 72 per cent to 30 per cent inside a single year — as passenger trains are squeezed on infrastructure the operator does not own.

    The National Dimension

    The risk reaches the whole network

    The danger does not stop at the lakeshore. The Quebec City–Windsor corridor is not merely VIA Rail’s busiest route — it is the financial engine of the entire national network. More than 90 per cent of VIA’s passengers, and about 80 per cent of its revenue, come from this one corridor (VIA Rail, 2025 Annual Report). That revenue is what helps sustain the long-distance and regional trains connecting the rest of the country — Vancouver and Prince Rupert, the Prairies, Churchill, and the Maritimes.

    Hand the corridor’s ridership and revenue to a private consortium, and VIA is left, in the words of the federal NDP transport critic Taylor Bachrach, with “the crumbs” — a fraction of the revenue it uses to operate rail across Canada. Alto’s own answer is that corridor services will “eventually” be “integrated with Alto services into a single network”; asked what the loss of that revenue would mean for VIA, the proponent did not say. The choice being made on the busiest corridor, in other words, quietly decides the future of passenger trains in places thousands of kilometres away. CBC News reported the warning.

    A Constructive Alternative

    A straighter, quieter line

    The freight report identifies a real prize: separating passenger and freight traffic on the Toronto–Montreal corridor relieves the mixed-traffic conflict that degrades both. The question is how that separation is achieved. Alto achieves it by removing the passengers — routing a 300 km/h greenfield line inland through Peterborough and Ottawa, past the lakeshore communities entirely, and leaving VIA’s corridor service to wither.

    There is a straighter, quieter way to reach the same result. Build a dedicated, lower-speed passenger spine along the existing Toronto–Montreal transportation corridor — the lakeshore route the CN Kingston Subdivision and Highway 401 already follow. Give passengers their own tracks, engineered for reliable service at conventional-to-higher-performance speeds (up to about 200 km/h), and the passenger–freight conflict is resolved the same way — by separation — but without deleting the service the corridor’s communities depend on. The strong Toronto–Montreal market runs fast and reliably on the direct line; Ottawa and Quebec City are reached on upgraded existing track; and Kingston, Cobourg, Belleville, Brockville and Cornwall stay on the intercity network rather than being bypassed. The routing and demand-density case for this spine is set out in our companion brief, A Straighter Line. And because the spine stays in public hands, the fare revenue from the country’s busiest corridor keeps flowing to VIA rather than to a private concession — sustaining, rather than starving, the national network it helps fund.

    Alto as plannedA dedicated passenger spine
    A 300 km/h greenfield line detouring inland via Peterborough and Ottawa, roughly 900 km of all-new track.A direct passenger line along the existing lakeshore corridor, far less new build, largely alongside the rail line and Highway 401 already there.
    Cobourg, Belleville, Kingston, Brockville and Cornwall are bypassed entirely.The lakeshore communities stay on the intercity network, served on the way through.
    Today’s VIA corridor service is demoted to a residual “Local Service,” slated to the private concession, with no protected floor.The corridor service is the spine — upgraded, reliable, and kept in the public interest.
    Freight relief is delivered by removing passenger trains from the shared line.Freight relief is delivered by giving passengers their own dedicated line within the existing corridor.
    Operated by a single private consortium pricing for premium yield, with a $60–90 billion cost baseline.Operated in the public interest at affordable conventional fares, at a fraction of the greenfield cost.
    Corridor fare revenue flows to the private concession, weakening the cross-subsidy that helps fund VIA’s national network.Corridor revenue stays in the public system, where it can keep supporting long-distance and regional service across Canada.
    In plain language

    The freight report is right that passengers and freight should not have to fight over the same tracks. But there are two ways to end that fight: take the passengers away, or give them their own line. Alto takes them away — and prices the loss as a benefit.

    The alternative keeps the trains and separates the traffic: a dedicated passenger spine down the existing Toronto–Montreal corridor, reliable and affordable, serving the lakeshore towns Alto would leave behind. It delivers the genuine freight dividend the report identifies — without the vanishing train.

    Sources

    Primary sources

    1
    High-Speed Rail and Freight Capacity: Potential Freight Benefits of Alto (June 2026). Prepared for Alto by CPCS in association with HDR. Cited pages: 5, 6, 8, 11, 18, 19. Read the report.
    2
    VIA Rail on the Kingston Subdivision: Service Erosion, Funding Collapse, and the National Rail Risk from ALTO HSR (April 2026). ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative. Read the brief.
    3
    VIA Rail Canada, 2025 Annual Report — Toronto–Montreal corridor operating shortfall of roughly $117 million, per-passenger subsidy of about $50, and corridor cost recovery near two-thirds.
    4
    On the ridership targets: this Initiative’s ridership analysis, setting Alto’s stated 24 million (2055) and 43 million (2084) figures against the corridor’s current ridership of roughly three million; the University of Toronto Munk School (Global Economic Policy Lab) independent projection of about 9 to 10 million; and the reference-class forecasting literature (Flyvbjerg) finding rail ridership overstated by an average of 65 per cent.
    5
    On the operating model and the transfer of corridor “Local Services” to the private consortium: Government of Canada, “Canada is getting high-speed rail” (news release, 19 February 2025); Transport Action Canada, “Cadence wins $3.9B High-Speed Rail development contract” (2025).
    6
    On the national-network risk: A. Kurjata, “NDP warns privatizing high-speed rail from Toronto to Quebec could kill passenger trains in rest of Canada,” CBC News (19 February 2025) — corridor revenue as roughly 80 per cent of VIA’s total; MP Taylor Bachrach’s warning on cross-subsidy of national service.
    7
    A Straighter Line (June 2026). ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative — routing and reference-class demand-density analysis for the dedicated passenger spine.
    ALTO HSR Citizen Research Initiative · citizenresearch.ca · Research Brief · June 2026
    Independent, non-partisan research on the proposed Toronto–Quebec City high-speed rail corridor.