I will more than gladly model travel times for your alignments, but I can unfortunately only use assumptions and data other people provide to me, as I have to minimize the risk that my assumptions are misinterpreted as me sharing any internal HFR plans...
There's an old saying..... "Be careful what you ask for" ;-)
As it happens, this past week I've had to put my feet up for a few days, which left me at the keyboard looking for something to fill the time.
Using milepost data from an old CP employee timetable, and using Google Earth to measure distances, I compiled a granular view of the Glen Tay - Kaladar section of the line, broken into tangent and curve segments. That gave me a database to model different timings.
On the basis of raw eyeball measurement, I arbitrarily assigned notional baseline speeds to each segment, with the tightest curves good for 50 mph and the tangent stretches good for up to 95mph. (Sorry - I used Imperial not metric simply to keep things aligned to the historical milepost and speed restriction data). I kept my baseline assumptions about tangent speeds conservative, to try to inject some reality... a train coming out of a 50 mph curve is not going to accelerate to 95 mph in the length of a short tangent section.
This gave me a baseline end-to-end timing for the 46.3 miles of line from Glen Tay to Kaladar of 43.1 minutes.
(For comparison, the best-ever timing of a CP passenger train, using Budd RDC's, was 62 minutes Kaladar to Perth, with one scheduled stop and one flag stop. Winter 1965-66. But CP did not maintain track to 95 mph on tangent, which I assumed....so my speedier baseline is likely good enough for discussion purposes )
Then I went back and made arbitrary assumptions about a hypothetical speed improvement (which could be achieved by track changes, or by tilting, or any other means) which would bring minimum speed on the tightest curves to 75 mph. I retained 95 mph as the top tangent speed, but upgraded speed on short tangent sections recognizing that trains need not slow down as much for curves. This got my timing down to 35.5 minutes.
My spreadsheet with all the data can be accessed at
drive.google.com
I would stress that everything other than the timetable mileages is just my subjective guesswork, and is totally imprecise. I was able to keep the cumulative measurement in the distances to about .14 miles over 46.3 mi, which is as good as one can get using Google.
Pasted below is the very high level result of my model.
The points I would make are
a) the difference between my "Baseline" scenario and my "significantly improved" scenario is probably at least $250M in cost for only 7.6 minutes of time saved. There will have to be a very substantial speed premium gained for each and every possible improvement, or investors may not see enough incentive to bother about trip time. This remains my core reservation about HFR.
b) Bringing the line to a consistent 95mph throughout would reduce timings by another 6.3 minutes - note that geography makes this a totally unlikely end point that would probably cost an oodle in construction and land acquisition.
c) It's clear that without achieving some substantial sections of 95+ running, this line will remain slow (ish...46 in 43 ain't VIA's worst track).
@UrbanSky, I'd love your input - but if this treads a little too closely to things for comfort, I'm sure that others can play with the spreadsheet. Just insert whatever speeds you want to examine.
- Paul
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