Federal government to expedite Alto, Canada's first high-speed rail project

Construction on one of the most ambitious and expensive transportation infrastructure projects to ever be undertaken in Canadian history is now targeted to begin before the end of this decade.

Embedded within Prime Minister Mark Carney’s 2025 budget for the Government of Canada earlier this month, the federal government highlighted that Alto — the country’s first high-speed rail line project — will see its engineering, regulatory, and permitting work accelerated.

This will enable construction on Alto to begin in four years — as early as 2029 — instead of the original timeline of in eight years, towards the middle of the 2030s, as previously stated in early 2025, when the federal government announced the selection of a private consortium to lead the project and its decision to evolve the project from a high-frequency rail (HFR) standard to a far more superior high-speed rail (HSR) mode.

Alto will operate over a distance of roughly 1,000 km between Toronto and Québec City, with key stops along the route, providing much faster, more frequent, and more reliable passenger rail service than current VIA Rail operations.