Transport committee  Not easily, sir. Again, one of our objectives as we move through this process is to try to protect the interests not only of the passenger operator but also of the freight. If the ship is late coming into the port of Montreal and the port of Montreal is late getting it loaded, but that traffic has to get to Chicago or Memphis and beyond, quite frankly we need the flexibility to be able to run that train when it's available to us.

Transport committee  Montreal to Ottawa is along CN to Coteau, Quebec. Then VIA owns most of the route from Coteau to Ottawa.

Transport committee  Yes. It's our former Alexandria subdivision.

Transport committee  The first priority would be safety. It would be how the freight and passenger operations interact with one another, and as you mentioned, the number of grade crossings you would have to deal with, trespass issues, and so on. The second priority would be schedule maintainability.

Transport committee  Sir, we'd definitely consider it. As I mentioned to you when we were speaking, I haven't been up to that part of the country in quite some time, so I am not very familiar with it. I've been through Lac La Biche on the train a grand total of once. But yes, we would definitely consider that and see if something could be worked out that would meet the needs of the community and also, hopefully, keep us more or less whole on the financial side.

Transport committee  There's very limited freight service out there. And it's six passenger trains, I believe, in each direction per day.

Transport committee  Well, we have trackage rights or running rights from them so that we can operate our freight service. By and large, though, yes; at a guess, I'd say 85% of the train traffic out there is passenger train traffic.

Transport committee  Yes, sir.

Transport committee  Yes. There's a lot of activity there. Of course, you're into a number of interlockings and higher degrees of curvature. For those last four to six miles, as you go into Montreal, the zone speed is 40 miles per hour or 45 miles per hour, I believe. There would be a permanent slow order at a lower speed than that.

Transport committee  You couldn't do it all in one season, certainly. It would be some number of years to do that.

Transport committee  Of course, yes.

Transport committee  I would say it would look something similar to what you see on the highways, where they've built collector roads and funnelled traffic to major collector locations, which become overpasses. It would be like on the 401, something in that order of magnitude. No, I couldn't give you a count or a cost to do that.

Transport committee  Yes. The challenge there, sir, is that our railroad--if we use Toronto to Montreal--was built in about 1855, so it severs a lot of land and there are a lot of crossings there that you'd have to pick up.

Transport committee  No doubt I didn't express myself well. The only high-speed rail in any significant way in the U.S. is in the northeast corridor. The majority, by far, of the northeast corridor is dedicated to passenger. There is a section of about 30 miles, from Perryville, Maryland, to Baltimore, that has a considerable amount of freight on it.

Transport committee  Yes.