The federal government’s ambitious Toronto–Quebec high-speed rail project has a number of precedents to draw lessons from, many of them successful, but also many of them notoriously over budget and behind schedule. But the bigger question is whether the project will get built at all, given other infrastructure priorities a future government may have.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced last week that the rail network’s trains would travel up to 300 kilometres per hour, doubling the speed of Via Rail’s existing trains to cut travel times between Toronto and Montreal nearly in half.
