Where the line goes, and what it costs
Pick the route first and the speed follows. Pick the speed first and the route picks itself — expensively.
Every rail project has one decision that cannot be undone. Not the trains, not the timetable, not whether the line runs on diesel or electricity — all of those can be changed later. The route is the one that is fixed for a century. This chapter is about that decision: where an HPR line would run, why, and what it would cost.
It also explains the single choice that separates the two proposals. ALTO decided on 300 km/h and then had to find ground straight enough to carry it. HPR starts from what the corridor already offers and lets the speed come out of that. The result is a railway that costs roughly a third as much per kilometre — and arrives about twenty-five minutes later.
Is the corridor still available?
Speed decides how straight a railway has to be, and the relationship is steep. A curve for 200 km/h needs a radius of about 1,900 metres. At 240 km/h it is about 2,700. At 300 km/h it is about 4,250 — nearer 7,000 for a comfortable ride. Anywhere in the 177–240 km/h band, those curves are gentle enough to follow a route that has already been cut through the landscape, easing the bends here and there. At 300 km/h the curves run for kilometres, and no amount of easing fits them alongside Highway 401 or the existing rail corridor. The line has to strike out across open country. That is physics, not preference.
This is why the project’s own history matters. What became ALTO went into the procurement as VIA High Frequency Rail — a plan the government itself described as running at up to 200 km/h on dedicated track along mostly existing rights-of-way. The 300 km/h target that emerged is what closed the existing corridor off.
The Highway 401 widening is the visible threat, but it is only the leading edge. What really closes the corridor is ordinary growth: commercial development at the interchanges, then logistics parks moving east from the GTA, then housing, then the utility corridors — hydro, gas, fibre, water — that lock in behind them.
None of it reverses. A logistics park is not removed; a subdivision is not un-built; a utility corridor is not moved cheaply. Each step is fast and cheap to build and slow and expensive to undo. By late in the century the corridor that is open today is set solid, and a surface railway through it is no longer possible — only an elevated or tunnelled one, at a cost approaching ALTO’s.
We put a number on what that closure would cost: roughly $42.6 billion, in a range of about $28 to $55 billion. It has three parts — farmland on the margin re-valued as developed land when it finally has to be bought ($2.6B); the jump from an at-grade build on open ground to elevated and tunnelled construction through built-up areas ($19.3B); and the value of the benefits lost during the decades of delay ($20.7B). The headline is that the cost of missing the window is about the same order as the cost of building the railway — and it is incurred by waiting, not by building.
Take the speed the ground gives you
Inside the Toronto–Ottawa–Montréal triangle the route has two parts. A spine of roughly 479 kilometres from Pickering Junction to Dorval, built and upgraded as a dedicated passenger route. And the Ottawa legs, about 200 kilometres of upgrades on track the public passenger operator already owns.
In each stretch the line follows whichever existing corridor runs straighter — Highway 401 or the existing rail corridor — sitting beside it rather than on it, separated from road traffic throughout. The two run roughly parallel for most of the way, so the ground the railway follows is already a transport corridor rather than open farmland. No major tunnels, and only a limited number of viaducts.
The reversal at the heart of the chapter
ALTO fixes the speed and lets it dictate the route — which is exactly how the corridor came to be closed off. HPR does it the other way round: it takes the highest speed each stretch of corridor already offers, up to a 240 km/h ceiling, and never buys speed the ground does not give away free.
Where the ground is generous, the trains go fast
The dead-straight run along the St. Lawrence from Brockville to Cornwall, the riverside stretch to Coteau, the inland 401 across the Napanee plain — all support 240 km/h with routine curve easing alone.
Where it isn’t, they go slower
Through the Frontenac Arch, where the line follows the least-bad path the 1850s builders found through the Shield, and on the tight approaches through Durham and into Montréal, trains simply run slower. Buying speed there would mean buying tunnels, viaducts and a new right-of-way.
One consequence matters for the costing: the whole spine is priced at the 200 km/h standard — conventional structures, curves near 1,900 metres. The stretches that can run faster are a bonus in service, not an extra cost to build. The cost model never pays for speed the corridor gives away.
What it would cost, and what we commit against
The spine is priced two ways, and the difference between them is the discipline this whole report is built on.
| Figure | What it means |
|---|---|
| $19.0 billion as specified — about $40M per km | What the 479 km diesel spine costs if everything goes to plan, grade separations included. |
| $26.1 billion de-biased — about $54M per km | What comparable projects have actually cost when things didn’t go to plan. This is the figure to commit against — not because this project is expected to overrun, but because comparable ones reliably have. |
| +$3.1 billion electrification | A separately priced option that can be deferred, rather than a fixed requirement. The line opens on diesel and electrifies when demand warrants. |
Adjusting for the record is not pessimism. The as-specified figure is what the corridor costs if everything goes right; the adjusted figure is what similar projects have actually cost when it didn’t. Committing against the second is the discipline ALTO never applied to itself.
Eastern Ontario’s electricity system is already under active capacity assessment — the system operator is testing whether the existing grid can meet ordinary demand growth over the next two decades before any railway load is added. A 300 km/h electric line is a heavy new customer on exactly that system, and its electric design makes that load mandatory and up front.
A diesel-first railway opens on the traction it carries with it. Electrification — lighter in any case at 200 km/h — follows once the grid has headroom and the ridership justifies it. The railway’s opening is not tied to the grid’s expansion timetable.
Cold climate cuts the same way. Leda clay, karst and freeze–thaw are real hazards, and the international record shows what they can do: China’s Harbin–Dalian line cost about 25% more than its original budget, had sections rebuilt before opening because of frost-heave deformation, and opened roughly a year late. But that is a 300 km/h record. At 200 km/h the tolerances are far more forgiving, and frost heave that would force a speed restriction on a high-speed line is a maintenance item on a slower one. The lower design speed buys a smaller penalty.
Three and a half times the price per kilometre
The chapter’s figures resolve into a single comparison. Measured the same way, the HPPR spine costs about $40 million per kilometre. ALTO costs about $142 million per kilometre. Two railways, the same corridor, the same cities — one priced at roughly three and a half times the other for every kilometre of route.
The gap splits roughly one-third engineering, two-thirds friction. About 35% is engineering complexity: a 300 km/h line across open country with its tunnels, viaducts and fresh cut through difficult ground, against a 200 km/h build that needs no major spine tunnels. The other 65% is corridor friction: the consultation, land-tenure and political burden of a new corridor, against a route that asks far less of the land and the people it crosses. The gap is not the product of one assumption. It is about a third from how the line is engineered and two-thirds from where it is put.
| Railway | Cost per kilometre |
|---|---|
| TGV Paris–Lyon | ~$26M — flat, low-friction early French high-speed line |
| Tokaido Shinkansen | ~$35M — dense, high-utilisation Japanese line |
| HPPR spine | ~$40M — among the most efficiently delivered railways in the international record |
| ALTO | ~$142M — above the international range |
What the speed difference actually buys
Speeds are only interesting for what they add up to. Toronto Union to Montréal’s Gare Centrale, on an express stopping once at Kingston, works out at a little over three and a half hours.
| Service | Toronto–Montréal journey time |
|---|---|
| VIA Rail today | ~5h00 — scheduled service on shared freight track |
| VIA HFR base case, 177 km/h | 3h59–4h19 — the only journey time ever actually simulated for this corridor |
| HPPR express, Kingston stop | ~3h32 — estimated from segment speeds and corridor geometry |
| ALTO, 300 km/h | 3h07 — ALTO’s published figure, a spreadsheet estimate rather than a simulation |
One caution and one conclusion. The caution is that our figure is an estimate of the same kind as ALTO’s — distance divided by speed, with allowances. Neither has been simulated, and we say so.
The conclusion is that the honest gap between the two railways is about twenty-five minutes, and about nineteen against a non-stop run. ALTO buys that quarter of an hour at roughly three and a half times the capital cost per kilometre.
Toronto–Ottawa works out at about 2h55 — the spine as far as Brockville, then the upgraded Ottawa leg — against roughly four and a quarter hours today. And the towns along the route gain proportionally more than the endpoints do, because they start from a slower and less frequent service: Cobourg in under an hour, Belleville in about 1h20, on a regional train calling at every station.
What the corridor becomes a century from now
A rail corridor is not a project. It is an asset that lasts a century, and the decision taken now is the corridor the region lives with long after today’s arguments about cost and timetable are forgotten. The right test of a route is not only what it costs to build this decade, but what kind of corridor it leaves to the people who inherit it.
That is why the questions in this chapter matter most. They are the irreversible ones. The trains, the traction and the timetable can all be changed later. The route cannot.
Chapters 5 through 8 take these figures forward — into the environmental and community comparison, the ridership modelling, the operating economics, and the full cost-benefit and financial analysis.