…Amtrak’s overall train ridership in North Carolina is climbing. For the period of October through June, ridership overall jumped 26 percent, with 65,956 people riding the rails so far this year… (Triangle Business Journal)

China’s first high-speed (HS) rail line, the Beijing-Tianjin Intercity High-Speed Rail, has carried 40.96 million passengers since it began operating two years ago… [and] …is capable of transporting up to 125,000 passengers per day… (Xinhua News Agency)

That’s several orders of magnitude. NC’s roughly 130,000 riders per annum only just beats that Chinese HSR line’s daily capacity (which is roughly 2.5 times more than its average daily ridership). Wow.

That’s probably good. There’s no hurry. Turn left for Toronto, right for Montreal, probably helps the economics. I doubt the US has any particular interest in preferring one destination to another. An HSR which connected the NEC cities to Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal would probably be the US’s preference. Which suggests that right now State and FRA should be working towards interoperability standards with their Canadian counterparts.

The whole thing would be an awfully big detour, regardless – around 33% longer if via Syracuse and then along the St Lawrence (almost 50% further if via Ottawa instead) compared to straighter routes via Albany.

About 20% by my measurement. 460 miles vs. 380. But the 460 miles would be covered quicker than the 380. And be cheaper to build.

Yeah, they were unusual, but it’s my experience that convenient (I’m not checking expedia, since it’ll make me want to go somewhere) flights to Canada are very pricey.

Having a line via Syracuse does make some sense in the long run, providing a north-south route between the two countries’ capitals. But it would likely (at least initially) run from Syracuse to Montreal via Ottawa, assuming the first corridor line was Toronto-Kingston-Ottawa-Montreal. And where would it cross the St Lawrence? Wolfe Island, and so connecting right in to Kingston? Or parallel to I-81? The former is flat farmland but surrounded by wider expanses of water, the latter rather hilly iirc.

The whole thing would be an awfully big detour, regardless – around 33% longer if via Syracuse and then along the St Lawrence (almost 50% further if via Ottawa instead) compared to straighter routes via Albany.

But, if the southern segment of the NEC (New York-Washington) is upgraded to true HSR and new Hudson River tunnels bored, dedicated to HSR, then it might make sense to build a New York-Canada HSR route off the NEC at Harrison, along the old Erie-Lackawanna Main Line RoW (now the NJT Main Line) up to, say, Ramsay, then along the I-86 corridor to Binghamton, then up the I-81 corridor through Syracuse to the St Lawrence valley, cross the St. Lawrence (an opportunity for a signature bridge), and finally run along the St. Lawrence into Montreal with a spur off it into Ottawa. This would incidentally provide Canada with an Ottawa-Montreal HSR line (not as direct as one might like, but certainly workable) which Canada could, at its leisure, extend to Toronto. Syracuse is roughly at the mid-point of the proposed Albany-Buffalo 110 mph line, which would act as a feeder.

Most trains along this line would run between Montreal or Ottawa and New York, but some might bypass New York connecting Washington and Philadelphia with the Canadian cities. Line-haul times between Montreal and New York should be not much above 2.5 hours, Montreal-Washington on the order of four hours.

This would have to be presented as a prestige project, symbolic of US-Canadian cooperation, rather than the HSR project that makes most economic sense, of course.

For markets besides Paris, it’s large enough for general demand – there are daily flights to many European hubs – but as you noted, the trans-Atlantic sector is relatively small, and thus not very significant in the context of Mtl-NYC HSR.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have talked about New York in the context of Montreal-Europe. (For one, it probably declined as a Canada-Europe hub after the Maher Arar scandal.) But Montreal-Europe isn’t a large market. Intercontinental flights are a premium market for the airlines, but they don’t carry that many passengers.