The Train Story

Imagine you work in Vancouver and have a meeting in Toronto. Currently, assuming you don't teleconference, your options are:

• Catch an early morning flight, attend a late-afternoon meeting, and fly home that night - a long, long day, most of it spent in airports or on airplanes. And if you can't get flights the same day, an overnight stay in a hotel with the associated time lost and money spent.
• Catch a red-eye to be in time for a bleary-eyed morning meeting, fly home after the meeting, and go to bed early and exhausted. Again, most of your time has been on planes or in airports.

Both options are guaranteed to waste hours of your life while wiping you out - and you stand a decent chance of getting the flu. Both options contribute massive amounts of pollution and greenhouse gases, which we simply cannot do any longer. And, of course, there are the hassles of getting to the airport, airport security, airplane meals, and so forth.

Less Haste, More Speed

Instead of that, how about this:

• Check on board the train any time between 6:00-10:00 p.m., departing at 10:30. Order dinner to your room while you work, relax, watch TV - whatever you want.
• Go to bed and get a great night's sleep as the high-speed express whizzes to your destination, arriving at 6:00 a.m.
• Wake up at 7:00; have a leisurely breakfast in the dining car.
• Return to your room, shower, and depart for your meeting before checkout at 10:00.
• Repeat on the way home.

By taking the train, you save your time for you; get work done before a meeting, read a good book, have a mini-honeymoon. You also save tons of climate-destabilising gases, because the train is electric; you preserve your health and that of our children. There is good food - and a choice of it; scenery if you choose; you can walk around and stretch your legs; use the on-train exercise room; play cards in the lounge; fresh air; no screaming babies to keep you awake; catch the train downtown; no security hassles. In exchange for going just a bit slower, you gain so much time: less haste, more speed, as an engineering colleague used to say.

Why not us?

In Canada, we don't have any high-speed electric trains, but Germany, France, Japan, and China do. So do Spain, Belgium, Italy, Britain, Finland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Taiwan, and South Korea. So will Australia, the United States, and Turkey. The fastest of these are pushing 600 kilometers-per-hour.

When Canada was founded, one of the requirements for confederation was a trans-national rail line to tie the country together, and trains do this far better than airplanes or highways ever will. We need to enable Canadians to travel throughout Canada quickly and easily and pleasantly, and in such a way that we don't pump millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year. High-speed electric trains can do this, and while they're at it, they can carry the mail and parcels.

In fact, we can replace domestic passenger air travel with high-speed trains. Long trips will be slower than by plane; short and medium trips will be the same or faster, and all will be more pleasant and non-polluting. Most business travel will have to move to video-conferencing to reduce carbon emissions, anyway. While we're at it, we can replace all domestic mail and parcel air shipments with train shipping, which will help pay for rebuilding our national train service.

Rebuild the Trans-Canada Railway

High-speed electric trains can be elevated or buried, meaning that people, cars, and animals can pass unhindered. It also means that bad weather doesn't stop the trains. Why would anyone want to fly from Edmonton to Calgary, or Montreal to Toronto, when the train would offer so many advantages?

While we're rebuilding the passenger, mail, and parcel train system, we need to update the freight system. If we treated railroad freight stations like we do ship-based terminals, we would have methods to rapidly unload trains. As we do for ships, we could pluck containers from trains, unloading a 300-car train in no time at all.

Trains, especially electric ones, are vastly cleaner and more efficient than any other method of transport. One freight train can carry as much as 300 transport trucks, with zero emissions if the electricity is generated cleanly.

Part of the energy solution

Guy Dauncey has calculated that covering 5% of Manitoba with solar cells would be enough to provide 100% of Canada's electricity needs - no small feat considering how much electricity we use for energy-intensive resource processing like making aluminum. Nobody in their right mind would want to cover up Manitoba like that, but we could partially cover the Trans-Canada Railway line with solar panels. This protects the trains and tracks from weather and provides more energy than the trains require during the daylight hours - energy that can be sold.

This may sound like a lot of solar panels, but we're currently generating an enormous amount of energy in other, usually very environmentally destructive ways. Let's close the coal mines and generating plants, and open up those hydroelectric dams that are nearing the end of their lifespan. Line the Trans-Canada Railway with solar panels and wind turbines, and sell the excess energy to the United States to help them get off oil.

To those who complain of subsidies, remember that roads are all paid for with taxpayer dollars, as are all the services that support road transport. from snowplows to hospitals for the thousands of accident and pollution victims each year. With railways, we can recover some of that subsidy by charging for mail, parcels, and freight. I believe that passenger travel for Canadians should cost only a user fee; we want Canadians from the Maritimes to visit Calgary, for Vancouverites to go to Quebec City. Let tourists and freight subsidise Canadian passengers.

In my area, the railway on Vancouver Island once had 89 stops - before roads put the railway out-of-business. Roads paid for with taxpayer dollars. There really is no such thing as a free lunch, and if we must subsidise something, choose the train: far more efficient, zero pollution if done properly, and a much safer and more civlised way to travel than the airplane.

Next: The Home Story