FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Alto Consortium Unveils $120 Billion High-Speed Rail Plan to Connect Toronto and Québec City in Under Three Hours
Design-build contract awarded; 1,000-kilometre, 300 km/h corridor to slash inter-city travel times, cut emissions and support 44,000 construction jobs
Montréal, November 24, 2025 — The Cadence consortium today formally announced the start of detailed design work on Alto, Canada’s first privately-operated high-speed rail network, pledging to link downtown Toronto with Québec City by 2035 at speeds up to 300 km/h. The landmark project—valued at CAD 80–120 billion—will drop the current five-hour VIA Rail trip to two hours and 50 minutes non-stop, placing the corridor on par with Europe’s fastest domestic routes and creating a low-carbon alternative to the country’s busiest air shuttles.
“Alto is not a rail upgrade; it is a nation-building leap,” Martin Imbleau, Chief Executive of project delivery company VIA HFR-TGF, told reporters. “By 2035 Canadians will board trains in Toronto at 7 a.m. and be at Québec City’s National Assembly for a 10 a.m. committee meeting—no airport queues, no weather delays, one-tenth the carbon footprint of flying.”
The announcement follows the federal government’s February 19, 2025, decision to award Cadence—composed of CDPQ Infra, SNC-Lavalin, SYSTRA Canada and Keolis—a CAD 3.9 billion engineering and geotechnical contract that will run through 2029. According to independent analysis commissioned by Transport Canada, passenger demand on the 1,000-kilometre corridor will reach 17 million annual trips by 2040, diverting 3.4 million air passengers and removing the equivalent of 2.1 megatonnes of CO₂—equal to taking 455,000 cars off the road—over the first three decades of operation .
Construction will be staged in two phases, starting with Toronto–Peterborough–Ottawa–Montréal in 2029 and extending to Trois-Rivières–Québec City by 2033. Five new stations will anchor the route, each sited within 250 metres of existing metro or light-rail lines to guarantee seamless first-/last-mile access. Trains will run every 20 minutes at peak, powered exclusively by Québec’s and Ontario’s low-carbon grids, giving the service an 85 percent smaller life-cycle emissions profile than regional jets serving the same city pairs.
“We are applying proven European technology—Velaro train-sets identical to those entering service on Spain’s Madrid–Barcelona corridor—combined with Canadian procurement rules that guarantee 60 percent domestic content,” Imbleau said. “The result is a 44,000 direct and 100,000 indirect job-years during construction, plus CAD 19 billion in GDP uplift for Ontario and Québec, according to Deloitte’s latest modelling.”
Alto’s financial model relies on availability payments from the federal government over 30 years, indexed to inflation and performance metrics, while ridership risk remains with the private consortium. Senior debt of CAD 45 billion has received conditional credit letters from CDPQ, OMERS and four chartered banks; an additional CAD 10 billion in green bonds is slated for market launch in Q2-2026. Equity partners will contribute CAD 8 billion, yielding an expected 7.2 percent IRR under base-case traffic forecasts.
About Alto / VIA HFR-TGF Inc.
Alto is the public-facing brand of the Toronto–Québec City High-Speed Rail Network, a privately-operated passenger service being developed by VIA HFR-TGF Inc., a federal Crown corporation. The project is part of Canada’s High-Frequency Rail program and is scheduled to enter commercial service in 2035. For route maps, environmental assessments and procurement opportunities.
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