High-speed rail across Europe, not just Italy, is reshaping the transportation grid for the better. A Trenitalia Frecciarossa high-speed train is seen at the Bologna Central Station, in Bologna, Italy on Feb. 2, 2018.Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters
In the great European game of planes, trains and automobiles, the trains are winning – big time. So is the environment, productivity, tourism and urban life. Canada, a global laggard in the train business, should take note.
Italy, where I live, is a case in point. The country is still spending billions on new high-speed rail lines and expanding existing services, handing it one of the best networks in Europe. When I went to the booking site of Italian train operator Trenitalia, a subsidiary of the government’s Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, I counted 54 departures on Saturday alone from Rome to Milan – the same distance as Toronto to Montreal.
Most of the trains covered the 600 kilometres in just over three hours, though a few were quicker, hitting more than 300 kilometres an hour – almost turboprop aircraft speeds. Rival Italo, owned by private investors, offered several dozen departures on the same route, upping the choice for travellers to 80 or 90 trains a day – one every 15 or 20 minutes.
This month, Trenitalia and its French counterpart, SNCF, will resume Milan-to-Paris train service after a 19-month suspension to fix tracks damaged by rockfalls. The route will take about seven hours, city centre to city centre. That’s slower than flying, but not by much when you factor in travel times to and from the airports, security clearances and waiting for checked bags. Starting in 2029, Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane plans to launch a competitive service to the Eurostar on the London-to-Paris route, a project that will cost €1-billion ($1.5-billion).
The big news is the southern Italian expansion of the high-speed network. The €25-billion project will connect Naples to Puglia, in the heel of Italy. The construction is being financed by the European Union’s enormous pandemic recovery fund, which is devoting €200-billion to Italian projects. About 40 per cent of that is going to developments such as infrastructure in the Italian south, which is poor compared with the industrialized north.
The southern rail project includes a 27-kilometre tunnel, one of the longest in Europe, and 16 new stations. It will cut travel time between Naples and Bari, the capital of Puglia (where the G7 summit was held last year), by almost two hours. The project is to be finished in 2028.
High-speed rail across Europe, not just Italy, is reshaping the transportation grid for the better. On short-haul routes, even some medium-haul ones, the speed, frequency, comfort and price of train travel are obliterating airborne competitors.
One of the main reasons Alitalia, Italy’s flag carrier, crashed in 2021 was that it lost the once-lucrative Rome-to-Milan corridor to the Trenitalia and Italo trains. (Never in my 17 years in Italy have I flown between the two cities.) Since the launch of the London-to-Paris Eurostar train three decades ago, the number of flights on that route has fallen by more than half. France in 2023 banned short-haul flights on routes where train alternatives exist, such as Paris-to-Lyon and Paris-to-Bordeaux.
The train surge has been welcome news for anyone concerned about carbon-dioxide emissions, all the more so since high-speed trains in Europe are powered by electricity, not diesel, as Canada’s Via Rail clunkers are. A report by Italy’s Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport said Trenitalia’s Frecciarossa (Red Arrow) high-speed trains between Rome and Milan reduce per-passenger carbon emissions by 72 per cent over planes and 60 per cent over cars.
Which brings us to Canada. Canada is the only G7 country with zero high-speed rail (generally defined as north of 200 kilometres an hour) or higher-speed rail (somewhat slower, though faster than the conventional trains that slouch along at 100 kilometres an hour or so). Since the 1960s, various attempts to launch Toronto-to-Montreal and Calgary-to-Edmonton high-speed services have been made. The only one that got close was the ill-fated UAC TurboTrain, which was scrapped in 1982 after one burned to the tracks in Ontario. They were powered by fuel-slurping turbine engines that made no sense as oil prices soared.
The inability to launch a successful Toronto-to-Montreal high-speed train is a national embarrassment, especially since the route is essentially flat; the Italian and French trains required tunnelling through entire mountain ranges.
There are all sorts of excuses for why high-speed rail is a no-show in Canada. The biggie is that Canada lacks the population density of Europe. True, but fully half of Canada’s population of 40 million lives in the Quebec City-Windsor corridor. The density on that route does justify electric high-speed rail, and Ontario and Quebec are brimming with renewable power.
The other argument is the expense. But what is the cost of building and maintaining highways forever? And the cost to the planet of allowing that route to be dominated by planes, diesel trains and cars? If Ontario and Quebec are serious about reducing their carbon footprints, out with the airlines and in with electric rail.
Canada has yet another plan for high-speed rail, this time between Toronto and Quebec City. The Cadence consortium says its Alto trains (note the Italian name, which means “high”) will cut travel time by half, to three hours, between Toronto and Montreal on dedicated electric lines that would not be cluttered with slow freight trains, as the route is today. The project is expected to cost more than $60-billion.
History says the project, Canada’s biggest infrastructure play, will never get off the ground. But now is the time to realize this dream. Canada is in a tariff battle with the U.S. and wants to build a more independent economy. That means cutting internal trade and transportation barriers, which high-speed rail can help do. It would also eliminate the misery of spending half a day on a diesel jalopy between Canada’s two biggest cities, and wouldn’t that be nice?