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The Edmonton to Calgary route is straight, flat, and has a mostly sparsely populated path. I'd hope that high speed rail under those conditions could do signifi

• xyzzyz 6y ago
  > I also looked up Amtrak's speeds and found a report from 2016 saying that over half of their trains had a top speed of 160 km/h or greater. This sentence can be interpreted in multiple ways. Maybe they mean that half of their trains could theoretically ride at 160 kph, but that doesn’t mean that they ever actually reach such speeds on their routes. Or, maybe, that half of their trains reach 160 kph on some fraction of their route, maybe very small one. What I would be more interested in is their average speed according to schedule, weighted by the frequency of trains on a given segment, and same average but for actual ride times, including delays etc.
• jcranmer 6y ago
  Most of Amtrak's routes are likely to be on the NEC, where the top speed is I believe 140 mph (~200 km/h). Outside the NEC, the newest of the diesel fleet can probably reach 100mph (or 160 km/h), but the actual routes are unlikely to support that kind of speed with any amount of routine. Instead, the effective speed limit (again outside NEC) is going to be closer to ~60-70mph.