High-speed rail to Ottawa

Good morning!

Every few months when I was a kid, my mom and I would hop aboard a VIA Rail train and head to Montreal to visit family. I always looked forward to ordering the cheese tray as we rolled past farm fields for two hours before the skyline finally appeared in the distance. We’d step off downtown and take the Metro to Verdun.

If Canada’s proposed high-speed rail network gets built, that same trip could take about an hour.

But while the project promises faster connections between major cities like Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, it’s also raising big questions closer to home. Some rural residents along the proposed corridor are worried about what it could mean for their farms and properties. And in Ottawa, a decades-old debate has resurfaced: should trains return to the downtown core — or stay near the existing Tremblay station?

As it turns out, bringing them back downtown may be far harder than it sounds.

Let’s get to it!

— Charlie Senack, Ottawa Lookout managing editor

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By Charlie Senack 

For nearly 60 years, Ottawa’s main passenger trains have stopped just east of downtown, where they were close enough to reach the city’s core quickly, but deliberately removed from it.

Now, as Canada prepares to build a high-speed rail network linking Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, calls are growing once again to bring trains back to the heart of the capital.

A coalition of business and tourism organizations is urging planners to take a closer look at whether Ottawa’s future high-speed rail station could be located downtown instead of near the city’s existing rail hub on Tremblay Road — reopening a debate planners thought had largely been settled decades ago.

In a joint letter to Alto High-Speed Rail president and CEO Martin Imbleau, leaders from the Ottawa Board of Trade, Ottawa Tourism, and Invest Ottawa argued that the station's location will shape the region for generations.

“High-speed rail deserves to arrive in the heart of Ottawa, the place where Parliament stands, where the Rideau Canal flows, where Canada’s story is told every day to visitors from around the world,” a portion of the letter read.

“A downtown station would not only maximize the economic return of this historic investment; it would affirm something larger and more enduring. Ottawa is not simply a city among cities. It is a place where Canadian values, history, and modern national identity intersect, where the institutions, landmarks, and public spaces that define who we are as a country come together in a single walkable core,” it continued. 

The organizations are asking Alto to conduct a full comparative analysis between a downtown station near the former Union Station site on Rideau Street and the existing VIA Rail terminal at Tremblay Road.

They also pointed to growing civic support behind the idea, including from Mayor Mark Sutcliffe, who “has stated unequivocally that he believes the people of Ottawa will be best served by a station located right downtown and has committed to working actively with Alto toward that outcome,” the letter said.

Rideau-Vanier Coun. Stephanie Plante says the renewed push surprised her, particularly because she believes the technical challenges of building a downtown station have already been studied.

“They talked about how if they brought the train completely downtown as they want to, they would have to expropriate lands around the University of Ottawa, the Rideau Centre, Château Laurier, and parts of the ByWard Market, if I’m remembering correctly, and then the Senate building,” Plante told the Lookout. “And they don’t want to do that, which is fair, because that would delay the project for a long time.”

Instead, she said earlier technical reviews have pointed toward the Tremblay corridor as the most practical location for Ottawa’s future high-speed rail terminal — even if that means the capital’s main intercity station remains outside the downtown core.

The proposed Alto corridor would connect Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Québec City, with electrified trains running on dedicated tracks designed to reduce travel times between the eastern cities significantly. 

Supporters of a downtown station argue the location would strengthen the city’s visitor economy and reinforce Ottawa’s role as a national capital destination.

“A downtown station would create a whole new sense of vibrancy and catalyze the core,” the organizations wrote in their letter.

They also argued the decision carries symbolic weight beyond Ottawa itself.

“Canada has the opportunity to ensure that the first high-speed rail station in the national capital arrives not on the periphery, but at the very heart of the country it represents.”

Until 1966, Ottawa’s main passenger rail station sat beside the Rideau Canal at Union Station — the building that now houses the Senate of Canada.

Its closure was part of a sweeping modernization effort guided by the federal Gréber Plan, which removed rail corridors from the downtown core, eliminated level crossings and reshaped how transportation moved through the capital. Tracks were relocated eastward, and the city’s new passenger station opened near Tremblay Road beside what later became Highway 417.

At the time, planners believed the move would reduce congestion and improve traffic circulation through central neighbourhoods. Today, the same decision is shaping Ottawa’s options again.

High-speed rail infrastructure typically requires long straight platforms, wide safety buffers and significant approach corridors — something Plante said makes a downtown alignment difficult.

“There are these technical requirements where you need a 500-metre buffer for safety reasons, and we don’t have an empty 500 metres downtown,” she said. “There’s also the issue of noise, which is better served, I think, in an industrial area than downtown.”

She also said the Tremblay corridor already functions as the kind of multimodal hub many cities aim to build.

“I would say some of the big train stations that we know — Grand Central Station, Penn Station, the big one that they built in Beijing, and the one in Tokyo — those are not downtown,” she said. “And the reason they had to put it downtown is kind of to create that purpose-built area. So it’s not uncommon for it not to go right into downtown.”

Ottawa’s existing station already connects directly to the east-west LRT line and sits close to Highway 417 — something she says makes it easier for travellers across the region to access.

“If you talk to people who don’t live downtown, they will tell you that Tremblay being just off the 417 is much easier for them to access than to schlep all their stuff downtown,” she said.

“You can’t park your car for several days downtown if that’s what you need to do.”

She said earlier briefings also suggested a downtown alignment could require major expropriations. 

Those concerns mirror broader questions already emerging across eastern Ontario, where rural landowners along possible alignments say uncertainty about the future route is raising questions about farms, properties and transportation corridors that could be affected once plans are finalized.

Five townships in Eastern Ontario have created resolutions opposing the project, particularly because some farms would need to be expropriated to make way for the rail network. 

Alto won’t give a number as to how many properties would be affected, but said in a statement that “tunnels and bridges could be built to accommodate “in some instances.” 

Alta Vista Ward Coun. Marty Carr thinks the matter over a downtown station is much ado about nothing because she thinks it’s highly unlikely that high-speed rail would ever reach the core, anyway. 

Instead, she thinks the most likely location is on a vacant parcel of land at Tremblay Road and St. Laurent Blvd.  

While in support of the location, she says it’s a concern for residents who live in the Eastway Gardens neighbourhood — sometimes known as the alphabet streets — where fear of being forced out of their homes isn’t new. 

“We used to have a full alphabet,” Carr said. “We used to have all the letters of the alphabet starting at A until the VIA station expropriated that neighbourhood way back when for their station,” Carr told the Lookout. 

“It’s my understanding that you would need a length of approximately 500 metres for a high-speed rail station, and there would be sufficient space there to have that. It’s also my understanding that you would need 70 metres in width.”

Carr believes the talk of a downtown station is giving her residents a false sense of hope that they won’t be impacted. She said earlier that clarity from the federal government and project planners would help reduce speculation while route planning continues.

“If they are aware of where the best location is, I think that they need to disclose that,” she said. “That needs to be part of the discussion as opposed to leaving residents feeling confused about what the potential implications could be to their property.”

For Plante, the renewed push to return trains downtown is about balancing ambition with practicality. She also thinks the groups that penned the letter to Alto would be better equipped to devote their attention to other pressing issues in the city’s core. 

Her main focus is building a new interprovincial bridge between Quebec and Kettle Island. 

“We know why the trucks have not come off King Edward. We know that 11 million studies have found that Kettle Island is best served by a new interprovincial bridge. We know there hasn't been a new interprovincial bridge since 1968, when the population of Ottawa was around 300,000 or 400,000,” said Plante. 

“We have to start building connections for interprovincial trade, whether that be with new routes, whether that be with new train systems, whether that be with new commercial lines,” she continued. “The Prime Minister said himself in Davos, that nostalgia is not an effective strategy against the New World Order, and I would agree with him. But if we want to protect ourselves against that and build resiliency against it, we have to build the links that connect us coast to coast. And obviously a new bridge is part of that.” 

Sueling Ching, president and CEO of the Ottawa Board of Trade, responded to Plante, telling CTV in an interview that she doesn’t “see the sixth bridge as being an either-or scenario,” adding that it’s a priority the OBT is also advocating for. 

If built, the new Alto rail would host 72 trains a day along a 1,000-kilometre track, reducing travel between Ottawa and Toronto from five hours to three. The distance from Ottawa to Montreal would be reduced from 2 hours to 1. 

Construction on the first phase would begin in 2029 or 2030. 

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