this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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Yeah, the Liberal Party at a Federal level and the NDP at a provincial level talk big about going green, but then build a pipeline across the provinces and tell private citizens "by an electric vehicle".
How about some plans for high speed rail, instead, assholes!
I realize this is article is primarily about the coast but c'mon, for the most part we're wholly dependant on private industry for inter-city or cross-province ground-based travel, and for awhile we didn't even have that as Greyhound exited the country.
To be fair, HSR across the Rockies sounds extremely expensive and extremely inefficient.
I don't think we're going to be fixing Vancouver's isolation anytime soon.
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.
Nothing stops a conventional sleeper train for Vancouver-Calgary though, right? Sounds like sleeper service would be ideal given the circumstances.
CN already runs those, and from what I've heard they are indeed nice!
Don’t think the Rockies are volcanic. I can’t find any sources to support that.
From Wikipedia
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.