Can we just stop and think for a minute about how amazingly efficient this is? We calculate efficiency for cars in L/100km, so let’s alter the figure accordingly –

1.08 L per 100 GTK

Now, taking into account that a car weighs usually about 2 tons these days,

2.16L per 100 G(2T)K

No two ton car can dream of this kind of efficiency. However, it isn’t exactly a fair comparison because train cars are heavier than cars. How heavy are they?

Amtrak’s Superliner cars weigh about 67 tons, carry 99 passengers and are excellent. So, that’s about 2/3 of a ton each, and at Via’s fuel consumption figures, about 2/3 of a liter per 100km each.

Via’s LRC coaches weigh – this is actually very difficult to find out. I’ve found a source that says Amtrak’s Acela business coaches weigh about 60 tons, and since those are based on the LRC coaches I can only assume the weights are similar. Since the LRC coaches only carry 68 people this means they are worse than the Superliners – about a ton each, so about 1L/100km each.

Bombardier’s Bi-Level commuter rail cars weigh 60 tons and carry 160 passengers seated, and up to 360 if you included standing room. Ignoring standees, since it is not really possible to do a long distance trip standing up, 60 tons over 160 passengers means you are responsible for about 1/3 ton each, or about 0.3L/100km

On Bombardier’s website I’ve found numerous carriages for inter-city travel that carry many more than 68 people each. It seems that Via should really get some higher density cars so it can lower its fares and its per-person fuel costs. The Renaissance coach cars seem to be going in the wrong direction entirely – they only hold 48 people. I can’t get a weight on those, but I’d be surprised if it were less than 60 tons.

On the other hand, Via is also going in the right direction business-wise:

“In 2008, VIA safely transported 4.6 million passengers – the most since 1989 – and set an all-time record of $299 million in revenue.”

Keeping in mind that Via had many more routes in 1989 – the Canadian and Super Continental were still daily from Vancouver to Toronto and Montreal. There were more routes in the Quebec region as well. However, I’ve heard from riders that things were getting very ragged – paint was peeling, non-essential things were not being fixed, etc…

On the one hand – that’s good. One hundred carriage container train means 200 trucks off the road. On the other hand, you’ve got to wonder how much of those containers are full of pointless garbage. Also, the fact the trains are so long, and they are all highball trains, means that trucks must be used for anything other than long inter-city runs. The days of a boxcar being dropped off on a siding are over.

The trains are slow because freights have priority. Passenger trains pull over and wait for freights to go by rather than the other way around. In the summer this is because the freights are too long to fit on sidings. In the winter, the freights are short enough to fit on the sidings (increased mechanical failures in winter mean the benefit of running longer trains is eclipsed by the cost of dealing with trains which don’t fit on sidings when a problem occurs), but they still get priority.

The Canadian’s original schedule was 67 hours, and the less expensive Dominion was closer to the 89 hours which the Canadian now takes.

The reason the train is slow is because a huge amount of money is made moving freight on rail, so the opportunity cost to running the passenger trains faster is simply too high. While Via is a crown corporation, all the rails are privately owned (and the tracks Via run on are owned by an American firm).

The solution is re-nationalizing the railway, and make rational infrastructure investments in the form of more tracks and more high speed switches. This will pay dividends after peak oil, when shipping things by truck becomes too expensive. Also, since there are only a few thousand locomotives in Canada, replacing the locomotive fleet is much cheaper and easier than replacing the automotive or trucking fleet.

In this case, the solution is simply to heat the fuel cell with electric heaters, and also heat whatever other other parts of the machine require heating. This of course means using more fuel – so transportation in the winter will be more energy intensive than transportation in the summer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_vehicle

That entry suggests that below zero temperatures are a problem for existing fuel cell vehicles.

This information is a bit out of date. Apparently it went into service in the summer, but I can’t find more recent reports on how well its functioned in service.

It doesn’t say how much it cost. But it isn’t like the BMW hydrogen car – that car burns hydrogen in an internal combustion engine.