Hey, we're back to talking about trains? Awesome.
It was interesting to read the link a few pages back to the Chinese testing a cold-weather train last winter. Certainly the climate of Harbin is equatable to Alberta; if anything, Harbin is colder in the winter and hotter in the summer. The cost for the constuction of that line was about 16 billion, for a 921 km route, but experienced significant overruns because of frost heaving during construction. The winter timetable (3 months a year) currently operates at 200km/h on the winter timetable, and the summer timetable runs at 300km/h.
Anyway, big difference is it's serving a number of cities that are in the 3-5 million population range. It averages 78,000 passengers a day, and right now it's running 14 to 18 trips a day, each way. An end-to-end ticket costs $81 Canadian, and would be higher in summer months. That would be about $6 million a day in ticket revenue if every one of those passengers were getting an end-to-end ticket, but since most probably aren't, it might be $3 million in revenue a day, and nearly 2 billion a year. No idea what the operating costs are, but it'll pay for itself pretty quickly for them.
Ours would, by comparison, be lucky to have a tenth of the ridership, (the 2004 study suggests 1.3 million to 1.6 million, vs. 28 million plus for Harbin-Dailin), and could charge at best double or triple the ticket price. Operating costs would be significantly lower, with only a few pairs of trains vs the 67 that China did for this line, and lower maintenance costs for a far shorter length of track.
I'm not really comparing the two, they're really apples and oranges. But it was interesting to look at the numbers of another cold climate HSR.
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