Transport committee  There are several questions wrapped up in that. I prefer to start with the situation in which things pay for themselves and to try to devise solutions whereby things pay for themselves. A couple of years ago, I had an article in The Toronto Star, which you probably didn't see, ab

Transport committee  Well, yes, it is the case that there are not many examples of passenger rail systems that are operated privately.

Transport committee  These are also questions that I didn't come prepared to answer. But I can tell you about two analyses that I have been part of: one for China, and one for the United States. The United States, which has one electrified city line, has almost zero electrification. We proposed 30% e

Transport committee  I would say that at the moment in Canada the impact of passenger trains on freight movement is negligible. If you were to move it to another line, it would hardly be noticed. That's not entirely true and it's not true for every single kilometre, but over the whole system it's neg

Transport committee  We certainly didn't look at the last one. That's going to be a factor that governments will have to work out. For the first one, almost all of the cost of this, certainly more than three-quarters of it, in my view, is capital cost when you amortize over a reasonable period—30 or

Transport committee  I didn't come prepared to answer that question. In fact, I didn't even know about this charge until yesterday, when I was reading the record of this committee. All I can say is, if what you say is true, Mr. Dhaliwal, that you can invest $500,000 and get $20 million back, I would

Transport committee  Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to that, because governments have a sometimes terrifying way of obscuring costs, especially for capital investments. If you were looking for an example, I think the Paris-Lyons line, if you could get the numbers, is the one you would go to

Transport committee  Yes, I'm inclined to agree. The Deutsche Bahn German railways have tried very hard to run both freight and passenger at relatively high speeds on the same track, and where they have finished up is that basically the passenger runs during the day, and the freight runs at night. It

Transport committee  You have to look at the numbers that are required to provide even a half-decent amount of revenue to cover the costs of this. Just going back to the Calgary-Edmonton corridor, where the numbers seem reasonably clear to me, you have 25,000 people a day, of whom about 23,000 or 24,

Transport committee  That's a complication, and that would have to be in any detailed analysis. That would have to be--

Transport committee  Yes, but the thing is the numbers of fares that would have to be paid to cover the cost. I start with an analysis where things cover their cost. Then subsidy, you might say, is a way of addressing shortfalls in that. The primary shortfall is that you don't have enough passengers

Transport committee  I would also say that Mr. Rowden's point has some merit. It has some merit for other reasons, but even if only for the reason that Alberta is pretty flat, or at least the Calgary-Edmonton route is pretty flat. The most expensive part of building any surface transport facility gen

Transport committee  I don't have that information. It's not available to me.

Transport committee  You say I've introduced them. I would hope that there were two stronger things I've introduced into this discussion. One is that you really have to have a sense of where the price of oil is going before you even begin to think about this. The second is that once you have that sen

Transport committee  I'm suggesting something in the order, ballpark, of $40 million per kilometre. The range I quoted was that of the International Union of Railways, usually known by its initials in French, UIC, which was $17 million to $53 million Canadian per kilometre.