As I drove by the abandoned Rona home improvement store in my community, I wondered if the sale of Bombardier to Alstom would result in substantial job losses in Canada. In 2016, the American hardware giant Lowe’s bought Quebec-based Rona Inc. The result was the closing of 34 stores.  In 2017, the transportation giants France based multinational Alstom and Germany based multinational Siemens AG wanted to merge to fight off the growing threat of the national Chinese rail company, China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation (CRRC). Bombardier was also trying to merge with Siemens AG. Siemens AG picked Alstom to merge their train divisions with. European competition authorities nixed the idea. Now France-based multinational Alstom has come to an agreement to buy the half-a-century-old train division of Bombardier Transportation for US $6.7 billion. According to the Montreal Gazette newspaper, the deal will see the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec become Alstom’s biggest shareholder ...

Great video with this news story from Channel News/Asia about East Japan Railway and the unbelievable safety record of the Shinkansen. http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/near-flawless-safety/1563202.html

by Johathan Sher - LONDON FREE  PRESS  Pssst Londoners: do you want a glimpse of where high-speed rail might go through the city? Location of tracks, number of trains and cost of a ticket: All are laid out in a report on ambitious plans to cut in half the time it takes to go from London to Toronto. “This looks to be an unusually easy route for a high-speed rail line, about as easy as you can get, in fact, both in terms of construction, and community,” wrote Michael Schabas, a rail consultant with First Class Partnerships, whose team wrote the report for Ontario’s Transportation Ministry. Trains should be stored and maintained in London, possible at the Electro-Motive Diesel plant on Oxford St. that closed in 2012, he wrote. Ontario officials announced last week they were sufficiently convinced to take the first major step by conducting an environmental assessment. The assessment may take six years, but in the meantime, the early report has created a buzz at city hall. “High-sp...