Canada Allocates 3.9 Billion for its First High-Speed Rail Line

After dozens of studies and years of debate, Canada is ready to build its first high-speed rail line, the Toronto-Quebec City High-Speed Rail Network. The announcement was made by Justin Trudeau in his final weeks as Prime Minister, last February, when he declared that the country is ready to implement “the largest infrastructure project ever carried out in Canada” and that it will allocate 3.9 billion Canadian dollars (2.74 billion US dollars) over six years, starting in the 2024-25 fiscal year. Mark Carney, the new Canadian Prime Minister, also confirmed the government’s commitment to the infrastructural project.

The new high-speed railway line will stretch 1,000 km, will be called Alto, and will connect Montréal to Toronto in just three hours instead of the current five and a half. Its route will be strategic, with the two termini in the capitals of Ontario and Quebec, the most populous provinces in the country. There will be seven stations in total: Toronto, Peterborough, Ottawa, Montreal, Laval, Trois-Rivières, and Quebec City.

Exclusively intended for passenger traffic, the new infrastructure will allow high speed trains to travel at a maximum speed of 300 km/h, about double the speed currently reached by existing trains in the country, which is 160 km/h.

The machine to carry out the infrastructure project is now in motion.

The Toronto to Quebec City high-speed rail project is a Canadian public-private partnership (PPP) involving the public company bearing the same name as the line, Alto, and the private consortium Cadence.

“The construction of this project will have a huge impact on our economy,” said Martin Imbleau, CEO of Alto, in an interview with the Toronto Star. “We’re talking about a truly revolutionary project.” The government has estimated that the new infrastructure will create over 51,000 jobs and increase GDP by 1.1% per year during the construction period.

Moreover, the high-speed railway line will offer an important alternative to road traffic, avoiding 90 billion kilometers traveled by vehicles, which equates to approximately 100,000 fewer cars on the roads each year. This will result in a reduction of 39 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions over the entire lifecycle of the project and will improve sustainable transportation.

It is also expected that the new line will reach 43 million trips per year by 2084.

Australia, a country similar to Canada with a modest population spread across a vast territory, has had a similar experience in attempting to develop a project to connect some of its cities with a high-speed rail line.

After years of proposals, the Australian government established an authority to reexamine the idea, allocating 500 million Australian dollars (360 million US dollars) and nearly 80 million specifically for developing a business case for a railway line between Sydney and Newcastle.

It is precisely the global impact of high-speed rail in terms of modernizing transportation and reducing pollution that has driven many countries to continue investing in the expansion of their national railway networks. This is also happening in Italy, where several projects are underway, many of them in the southern part of the country.

The construction of some of the most important new Italian high-speed rail lines involves the Webuild Group, which is currently working on building over 300 km of high-speed/high-capacity railways.

Among these are several sections of the Naples-Bari line and the Palermo-Catania-Messina line, as well as the Salerno-Reggio Calabria line.

In addition, there are high-speed railway lines under construction between Genoa and Milan, between Verona and Padua, and one that will pass through what will be the longest underground railway tunnel in the world once completed—the 64 km Brenner Base Tunnel, 55 km of which run between Innsbruck and Fortezza.