My original post wasn't even implying that we need multiple Toronto stops on the one (1) HSR line - I was saying that the one Toronto stop shouldn't be Union.
You are right, but only to the point that many HSR networks serve more than one stop per metropolitan area.
However, these stops are usually offered
in addition (i.e., as a complement, not a substitute!) to a single, central node, in order to help passengers minimize their door-to-door travel times and to facilitate access to/from a wider region:
| Certain (or even all) ... trains | may stop at ... | in addition to the main stop at ... |
|---|
| ICE | Altona, Dammtor and/or Harburg | Hamburg Hauptbahnhof |
| ICE | Spandau or Gesundbrunnen and Ostbahnhof or Südkreuz | Berlin Hauptbahnhof |
| ICE | Pasing and/or Ostbahnhof | München Hauptbahnhof |
| ICE | Brussels-Noord | Brussels-Midi |
| ICE | Basel Badischer Bahnhof | Basel SBB |
| Eurostar (legacy "Thalys") | Schipol Airport | Amsterdam Centraal |
| Railjet | Vienna Airport | Wien Hauptbahnhof |
| FR/Italo | Torino Porta Susa | Torino Porta Nuova |
| FR/Italo | Milano Rogoredo | Milano Centrale |
| FR/Italo | Venezia Mestre | Venezia Santa Lucia |
| FR/Italo | Roma Tiburtina | Roma Termini |
| Snabbtag (legacy "X2000") | Copenhagen Airport | Copenhagen Central Station |
| TGV | Lyon Perrache | Lyon Part-Dieu |
| Shinkansen | Tokyo Uneo | Tokyo Station |
It is therefore important to understand the longstanding trends of passenger rail service and infrastructure design, in particular when it comes to the location of rail stations serving metropolitan centers, which has evolved through three distinct phases:
Phase 1: Multiple terminal stations (1830s to mid-19th century)
During the early railway days, railroad construction was the business of privately funded and competing railroads, which would build separate termini for their separate networks and these termini would be located as close to the city cores as their investors could afford, which was often very fast. Paris Saint-Etienne station was opened in 1837 as terminus of the
first passenger line serving Paris and all the four terminal stations served by the TGV were opened within the following 12 years (Gare Montparnasse in 1840, Gare du Nord in 1846 and Gare de l'Est and Gare du Lyon in 1849).
Phase 2: Consolidation into single terminal stations (mid-19th century to early 20th century)
As the railroads evolved from niche mode for the well-off passengers (and investors) to a mass transportation mode, the duplication of terminal stations become increasingly a constraint on the growth of the railroad network. This led to their consolidation into a single central station, with Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof being amongst the first to open in Europe (in 1888), which was located in front of and replaced three separate terminal stations). For more examples, refer to almost any major metropolitan rail station with the words "Hauptbahnhof" or any variation of "Central" in its name. And for us North Americans, we just need to refer to virtually any of the
147 Union Stations in the United States (the first was opened in 1851) and 12 in Canada.
Phase 3: Transformation into single through stations (since the late 19th century)
Apart from minimizing property acquisition costs during construction, terminal (i.e., dead-end stations) had the advantage that you could turn around trains faster by moving a fresh steam locomotive to the end, while cutting the steam locomotive at the front. With the transition to diesel or electric traction, that benefit turned into a disadvantage. Also, with the number of passengers travelling longer distances continuously rising, the continued presence of multiple terminal stations in many cities created an artificial bottleneck onto the growth of many national rail networks, which led to the transformation of single terminal station into through station to link with other terminal stations and lines in countless cities, like the prominent examples from 3 continents shown below:
| Project | Year opened | Description |
|---|
| Berlin Stadtbahn | 1882 | Created cross-city link between today's Ostbahnhof and all lines facing west |
| Hamburg-Altona link line | 1906 | Linked the new Hauptbahnhof with the western terminus at Altona |
| Washington Union Station | 1908 | Constructed together with a tunnel right under Capitol Hill |
| Warsaw cross-city line | 1933 | Tunnel linking the old terminals of Zachodnia and Wschodnia with the new underground Centralna station |
| Montreal Gare Centrale | 1943 | Replaced the old "Tunnel Terminal" station and was connected with the existing Kingston and Saint-Hyacinthe Subdivisions through a rail viaduct |
| Brussels north-south connection | 1952 | Tunnel linking the terminal "Noord" (North) and "Zuid/Midi" (South) stations. |
| Túnel de la risa (Madrid) | 1967 | Tunnels linking the "Atocha" terminal with lines north and the new "Charmartin" station |
| Oslo Tunnel | 1980 | Tunnel converting Oslo East station into the new Oslo Central Station, while bypassing the old terminus at Oslo West |
| Shinkansen Tunnel underneath Tokyo | 1991 | Tunnel linking Tokyo station with Ueno station, thus creating a transfer point for Shinkansen trains linking the entire country |
| City Tunnel (Malmö) | 2010 | Tunnel underneath the city allowing to serve Central Station without changing directions |
| Wien Hauptbahnhof | 2012 | Merger of the two adjacent terminal stations Ostbahnhof and Südbahnhof into a single through station |
| Sants–Sagrera Tunnel (Barcelona) | 2013 | Tunnel extending beyond the existing terminus at Sants station and bypassing the secondary terminus at Franca station |
| Maramay Tunnel (Istanbul) | 2013 | Tunnel linking the European and Asian parts of the city, thus replacing Sirkeci and Hydarpasa terminals |
| Stuttgart 21 | 2026 (?) | Network of tunnels replacing the existing overground terminal Hauptbahnhof with an underground through station |
It is important to note that those cities which were unlucky enough to oversleep Phase 2 and 3 until it was too costly, often had to resort to extremely expensive and not very effective measures to at least mitigate the handicap of operating separate terminal stations in regards to their HSR services: The UK had to dig 3 tunnels with a combined length of 20 km underneath North London and the River Thames (
HS1 Phase 2) to allow international HSR trains to terminate across or one block away from the respective terminal stations of the East and West Coast Mainlines. Conversely, France built a dedicated HSR line of 90 km length (
LGV Interconnexion Est) to link the HSR lines towards Brussels/London, Strasbourg, Lyon and Bordeaux/Rennes, while bypassing its terminal stations altogether.
Some of these backwaters have different HSR stations in the same city depending on which direction the HSR line is going, which is something so beyond the realm here that we're at least thirty years behind.
Sure, we can of course copy the century-old mistakes countries in Asia and beyond have copied embarrassingly (for them) recently from the Europeans when designing their intercity rail networks and risk spending many more billions a few decades after building additional terminal stations to fix this artificial bottle neck we just created. Or, we just thank the wise people who already fixed this problem for us almost exactly 100 years ago by building a centralized station which was (and still is) accessible from all directions and thus avoids the issues faced by downtown intercity rail stations built during Phase 1 and 2.
This is the choice we are facing with ALTO...
transitmap.net
