John Tory’s mayoral election campaign is riding on the provincialLiberal promise to electrify the GO trainsystem in 10 years.

Tory’s SmartTracktransit plan features an even more stringent schedule: 53 kilometres with 22 stops of “surface subway” for $8 billion — in seven years.

It would provide electric trains every 15 minutes on a U-shaped line running through downtown Toronto, connecting Pearson International Airportto the Markham technology hub, including new stops in Liberty Village and Corktown. There would be connections with the Eglinton-Crosstown LRT and the Bloor-Danforth subway.

That’s 10 years ahead of the estimated delivery time for a downtown relief subway line being touted by other candidates, including Olivia Chow.

Tory is convinced that SmartTrack is achievable.

“Seven years gives you a lot of time to get this done. It starts with the will. It starts with the mandate,” he says, citing the urgency of Toronto’s congestion problem and the priority transit has been assigned by voters.

But is that enough to realize SmartTrack?

No expert has publicly confirmed it as a realistic timeline.

Tory’s plan requires the electrification of major stretches of GO track, and there are other significant challenges, ranging from station capacity to potentially tunneling in high-density urban areas, where buildings and neighbours can slow progress.

If the province can electrify all of GO in 10 years, Tory reasons, seven years should be enough time to electrify the tracks his plan needs on the Kitchener and Stouffville corridors.

But there’s reason to think electrification along the GO Kitchener line, where the new airport train will run, will take at least five years as Metrolinx, the provincial agency in charge of GO, navigates the approvals required to get it done.

Metrolinx officials have called the province’s own goal of electrifying GO within a decade a “constrained” and “aggressive” schedule.

“This is going to be very complicated,” the agency’s executive director of electrification recently told the Star. Metrolinx has not found a comparable diesel railway being converted to electric, said Karen Pitre.

But, she said, “Everyone else in the world knows how to do it and we’ll figure it out.”

Pitre did not discuss Tory’s plan. But she said electrifying the tracks might not be the biggest piece of the project.

Delivering 15-minute service means a train would run through every station every seven minutes. You have to have at least two tracks to do that, which means that a track expansion will be required on many GO lines, including Barrie, Richmond Hill and Stouffville, which are primarily single-track corridors. That kind of work can take years. Adding a third track to Lakeshore West from Union Station to Aldershot, about 58 kilometres, took four years.

Pitre said Metrolinx doesn’t yet know which lines would be electrified first. Should the highest ridership lines be first to get the boost to 15-minute service that comes with electric trains? That would be Lakeshore, which, just west of Union Station, runs parallel to the Kitchener line.

Lakeshore already enjoys 30-minute service. Keeping the trains running there while crews work on the tracks would be more complicated.

“Would it be better to look at electrifying a corridor where it’s not as busy, where you can actually build the infrastructure quicker,” she said.

That could be a line like Stouffville, part of Tory’s plan.

The Kitchener line, at least the piece to the airport — part of Tory’s SmartTrack — is likely first up simply because it has a head start. The province has already got an approved environmental assessment (EA) to electrify the UP Express airport train that will run up the Kitchener tracks.

But hydro approvals that would permit Metrolinx to deliver power to the tracks are still pending.

Because it’s the first traction power project of its kind in Ontario, Pitre said she doesn’t know how long those approvals will take. It could be another year or two. Rail electrification construction is likely to take a further three years.

Once that’s done, however, it’s possible Metrolinx could develop a more cookie-cutter approach to the rest of the system, she said.

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Work on other sections of track, possibly those included in SmartTrack, could begin while the first line is in process.

But in at least one section of his plan, Tory would be starting from scratch. SmartTrack includes a 12-kilometre, three-stop spur from the Mount Dennis GO station to the airport corporate centre at Matheson Rd. That piece isn’t on the provincial map yet, although Tory says there’s a provincial transit right-of-way available on the north side of Eglinton between Weston and Renforth Dr.

It gets snarled in development at the Weston end of the tract, but Tory’s campaign says that’s not an issue. A tunnel or elevated section of the line would solve the problem — possibly just a trench such as the one the Yonge subway runs in north of Bloor St.

Tory says he would start the EA process on that spur immediately after the election if he wins and expedite the often meandering bureaucratic process.

“We’re simply going to have to make the bureaucracy and process work better and faster on a top priority and to meet the express needs of the people,” he said.

There are other practical issues, according to Pitre, who calls a capacity shortage at Union Station “the big nut that needs to be cracked,” in order to electrify the entire GO system.

“You can go as fast as you want, but if everything comes to a crashing halt inside the station it doesn’t matter. So we’re looking at all the combinations and permutations of how that might work: Can you offload it to different stations, and how do you connect?” she said.

Union Station is key, because trains would need to pass through it to access the Whitby maintenance facility.

Beyond the issue of putting electric trains on the GO lines, Metrolinx is already confronting the real problems of fare integration. It costs $3 to ride the TTC. It’s about $5 to take the GO train from Union Station to Exhibition.

Tory says he’s talked to lots of people who have told him they would far prefer to ride his SmartTrack trains — for the same price as a TTC ticket — than get on a bus in north Etobicoke or Scarborough and ride to the subway, where they inevitably have to navigate the chokepoint of busy Yonge-Bloor Station.

What about adding stations in tight spaces? Liberty Village is a key stop on Tory’s SmartTrack map, because condo dwellers in that newer neighbourhood need an alternative to the King streetcar.

“They tell you frightening stories of not being able to get in or out or any other way out there. I’ve gone on the streetcar, and one streetcar comes and it’s jammed full, and two more come behind and it’s empty. People describe these nightmares,” said Tory.

True as that might be, it doesn’t change the fact that the railway corridor there is so squeezed by development there isn’t really space for a new station.

None of this is insurmountable with the city and senior governments working together, Tory says.

“I’m going to get round these problems,” he said, “And I’m going to have a mandate to do it.”

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