# Challenger Cities EP85: Canada Needs a Railway Architect with Michael Schabas Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/challenger-cities-6959558/challenger-cities-ep85-canada-needs-a-railway-architect-with-michael-schabas Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/challenger-cities-6959558/challenger-cities-ep85-canada-needs-a-railway-architect-with-michael-schabas.md Podcast: [Challenger Cities](https://stenobird.com/podcast/challenger-cities-6959558) Published: 2026-06-08T11:47:00+00:00 Episode link: https://rss.com/podcasts/challengercitytoronto/2893179 Audio file: https://content.rss.com/episodes/278784/2893179/challengercitytoronto/2026_06_06_20_55_56_7aa59ba7-fccf-4ef3-a6bf-05f546f183fa.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/challenger-cities-6959558/episodes/challenger-cities-ep85-canada-needs-a-railway-architect-with-michael-schabas Duration seconds: 4121 ## Resource Canada is, well might be, building a high speed train. At long last after 50 odd years of talking about doing so. But concerningly, there is much negative noise around the project as it seems it might not really be learning the lessons for how successful projects have been delivered elsewhere, and where projects for building fast trains have gone wrong. This podcast is with Michael Schabas, a Canadian, who knows all about how to make these projects successful. It's a really honest and open conversation about how to build HSR, what Canada is missing just now, and how we can hopefully influence Alto to ensure we actually learn from how it's been done elsewhere. If you like the idea of HSR, or even if you actually think it's a bad idea, well you should probably listen to this episode and get a feel for yourself. Michael's work is also available to be found here: https://www.highspeedrailcanada.com/p/all-canadian-hsr-studies.html ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/challenger-cities-6959558/episodes/challenger-cities-ep85-canada-needs-a-railway-architect-with-michael-schabas/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/challenger-cities-6959558/challenger-cities-ep85-canada-needs-a-railway-architect-with-michael-schabas.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.