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Metro Vancouver transit: Highway 1 needs trains, not lanes (www.newwestrecord.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not just expensive, downright impossible. The Rockies are volcanic, so boring a level tunnel through the base of the mountains is out of the question. They're also very steep, which necessitates a lot of switchbacks, sharp curves, and even a pair of spiral tunnels at Kicking Horse Pass. We can and do run normal trains through these lines, but the geography severely limits how fast we can move through the terrain.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nothing stops a conventional sleeper train for Vancouver-Calgary though, right? Sounds like sleeper service would be ideal given the circumstances.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

CN already runs those, and from what I've heard they are indeed nice!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Don’t think the Rockies are volcanic. I can’t find any sources to support that.

From Wikipedia

The current Rocky Mountains arose in the Laramide orogeny from between 80 and 55 Ma.[11] For the Canadian Rockies, the mountain building is analogous to pushing a rug on a hardwood floor:[12]: 78 the rug bunches up and forms wrinkles (mountains). In Canada, the terranes and subduction are the foot pushing the rug, the ancestral rocks are the rug, and the Canadian Shield in the middle of the continent is the hardwood floor.[12]: 78

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Volcanoes_of_the_Rocky_Mountains

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_the_Rocky_Mountains#Terranes_and_subduction

There currently aren't any active volcanoes in the Canadian Rockies, but there is still magma towards the base of them that we'd run into if we tried to bore tunnels straight through. In theory, we could bore tunnels at a sharp incline to go over the magma; but that basically eliminates all the benefit vs just building rail lines on the surface like we already have, plus there's the added complexity of trying to make an earthquake-safe tunnel that crosses a fault line.