MONTREAL — Internal documents of the company developing Canada’s planned high-speed rail route say the planned line between Toronto and Quebec City could see up to 72 trains per day.
A Canadian Press report says the figure comes from draft versions of a 2023 technical briefing, which the news organization obtained through an access-to-information request. A spokesman of the company, renamed Alto when the government announced the high-speed project in February, told the Canadian Press that it still believes that figure to be a “reasonable estimate.”
The spokesman said the goal is to have 20 to 30 trains per day between Montreal and Toronto. Current VIA schedules show six direct weekday trains in each direction between the two cities; VIA says that on average, it runs 39 trains daily on various segments of the Toronto-Quebec City corridor.
The government announced last week that the first portion of the high-speed route would be built between Montreal and Ottawa, and that construction would begin by 2029 — four years earlier than originally projected [see “First segment …,” Trains.com, Dec. 12, 2025].
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Government is the only funding source for high speed rail.
A press release isn’t a railroad.