On the morning of December 10, 1968, a shiny new locomotive left Toronto’s Union Station, pulling a gleaming train packed to its “power dome” with journalists. Just four short years earlier, Japan had rolled out the world’s first 200-kilometre-per-hour bullet train, and now scores of reporters were aboard to witness North America’s technological response: the TurboTrain, designed by Sikorsky Aircraft, built by Montreal Locomotive Works, and proudly operated by Canadian National.An hour later, the TurboTrain slammed into a truck.
“The driver of an empty meat truck near Kingston was used to beating trains across a level crossing and tried to outrun the Turbo,” recalls John Downing, who reported on the maiden journey to Montreal. “We cut the truck in two, like a hot knife through butter.”
The hapless meat man survived. Canada’s efforts to develop modern passenger rail service did not. Four decades later, we remain the sole G8 nation without high-speed rail.
Japan’s legendary bullet trains now carry 410,000 people a day. France’s Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV), launched more than a decade after the Turbo, moves 268,000 passengers daily, at speeds exceeding 300 kilometres per hour. Altogether, high-speed trains dash across almost twenty nations. These include not only powerhouses such as Russia, China, and the United Kingdom, but Finland, Portugal, and Turkey. Many of these countries are spending stimulus funds to expand their networks.
New high-speed rail projects are in the works around the world. Argentina and South Africa are laying track; Iran and Brazil are laying plans; Morocco has landed partners. Saudi Arabia is building a line from Medina to Mecca, and may collaborate with neighbouring states to develop a 1,984-kilometre railway from Kuwait to Oman. There is talk the line could extend to Yemen, which would become the first nation served by high-speed rail but not a functional government.
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Read Monte Paulsen’s companion series at The Tyee, Derailed: How BC’s Chance for High-Speed Rail Jumped the Tracks.Even the Americans are spending billions to extend high-speed rail beyond the Boston–Washington corridor. The stimulus bill passed by Congress in February includes $8 billion for new passenger rail projects. California is likely first in line for that money, with construction slated to begin in 2011 on a statewide high-speed network that promises to whisk passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two and a half hours. Also fighting for a cut of the billions are Texas, with its T-Bone Line connecting Dallas to San Antonio and Houston; Florida, with a bullet train that would fly along the shores of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico; and New York, seeking a link from the Big Apple through Albany to Toronto.
Why are these countries planning and building high-speed rail lines? Because they’re a kind of insurance policy for the twenty-first century. High-speed rail ensures that cities remain connected the next time the price of oil rises, and in the event that $150-a-barrel oil returns for good. Because it is so much more fuel efficient, high-speed rail is far, far greener than flying, and in a century of dwindling oil it’s also far more economically sustainable — a fact Saudi Arabia seems to grasp, but Canada does not.
Canada possesses both the expertise to build high-speed rail systems — Bombardier is a global leader — and the population to support them, along routes such as the Quebec City–Windsor and Calgary–Edmonton corridors. What it lacks is the political will to act. As a result, Canada is failing to leverage the recent wave of infrastructure spending, let alone nourish its legacy as a nation built on the spine of its railroad.
“We’re so far behind the rest of the world,” says railway activist Paul Langan, “it’s like we can’t even see their tail lights anymore.”
The Turbo was capable of speeds approaching those of today’s fastest passenger trains. In December of 1967, a three-car Turbo set the world record for rail travel on a New Jersey test track, reaching 275 kilometres per hour. At that rate, the trip between downtown Toronto and downtown Montreal would have taken two hours — less than the time it takes to fly, once ground travel to and from the airports is factored in.
But CN’s Turbo never travelled at anywhere near that speed, because the company operated it over the same tracks on which it ran its other trains. Its speed was therefore limited by relatively tight turns, and, as its maiden voyage so graphically illustrated, the need to slow down at road crossings. Instead, the train topped out at around 160 kilometres per hour, and the Toronto-Montreal journey took four long hours. Given that the drive can be done in five, the TurboTrain had little chance of commercial success.
France, by comparison, was at the time following Japan’s example. Its TGV lines featured welded rails, wider curves, no road crossings, and continuous fences that prevented trespassing by animals or people, and served as noise barriers in residential areas. Since it launched, the TGV has brought French cities much closer together: the trip from Paris to Lyon — a journey just 70 kilometres shorter than the one between Toronto and Montreal — now takes less than two hours.
Canada’s political and business leaders during the ’70s responded to the unprofitability of rail travel by making matters worse. Rather than investing in separate tracks to allow for the kind of rapid rail that might have attracted new riders, CN, then a Crown corporation, sought to divest itself of all passenger operations. The decline of passenger service became an election issue in 1974, when Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals pledged to create a nationwide carrier similar to Amtrak in the US.
Soon after the Liberals returned to power, CN formed a new division with the bilingual name VIA. In 1976, the Trudeau government, which was hoping to consolidate VIA with the country’s other passenger services, promised to furnish the new carrier with a fleet of fast trains. These were of course never purchased, because it was the tracks, not the trains, that presented the real problem.
