Montreal Expo Express

From Freepedia

The Montréal Expo Express (in French, l'express Expo) consisted of four stations and a 5.7 km route for a mini-métro system. Built for Montréal's Expo '67 and costing around $18 million, the trains carried 1,000 passengers each and average wait time of five minutes.

The system only operated for 5 years. The cars were sold to the City of Montréal in 1968 and stored from 1972-1979.

Contents

Roster

The system utilized existing railway technology using regular rails and a third electrified rail. The Expo Express ran from April 1967 to October 1972 (the last year Terre-des-Hommes Notre-Dame island was opened to the public) and was then mothballed and stored between the Île-Notre-Dame and Île-Sainte-Hélène stations until the summer of 1979, when they were moved out to the Port of Montreal by building a temporary track where the line to Cité du Havre used to be.

After several abortive schemes to re-use the cars, they were moved from the Port of Montréal to a storage facility in Les Cèdres (Québec) in the late 1980's, and were finally cut-up for scrap in the mid 1990's.

The trains used were modified version of the Hawker-Siddeley H-series used by the Toronto Transit Commission with one fewer door on each side, and streamlined ends.

Expo-Express was the first fully automated rapid-transit system in North-America. Upon realizing that the trains were driverless, many people would prefer to disembark and walk the 4 kilometers from the Place d'Accueuil to the main exhibition island... In order to solve this problems, students were hired and dressed with a nice uniform and made to sit in the driver cabs doing nothing at all...

  • Type: H-series variant 1965 - exact info not available
  • Fleet: 48 cars
  • Configuration: 8 sets of six cars
  • Operator: Ville de Montréal
  • Builder: Hawker-Siddeley Canada Limited, Thunder Bay, Ontario

Rather than adopt traditional steel-wheeled trains for its ultimate system, Montréal instead opted to used a rubber-tyred metro based on technology developed by the Paris Métro, using Canadian Vickers/Bombardier MR63 and MR73 trains. For more information about Montréal's present-day metro system, see Montréal Métro.

The line

The line started at the Place d'Accueuil in Cité du havre

  • Gare Cité du Havre / Place d'Accueil, closed in 1968.
  • Gare Habitat 67 (outbound only), closed in 1968.
  • Gare Île Sainte-Hélène
  • Gare Île Notre Dame
  • Gare L'homme et l'agriculture (inbound only), added in 1968.
  • Gare La Ronde

The line was double-track throughout, except at Place d'Accueuil where it was single track; people exited on one side of the train and boarded on the other.

When the terminus was brought back to Île Sainte-Hélène in 1968, it was single-tracked as well.

The line was dismantled north of Île-Notre-Dame in 1974 for the construction of the Olympic basin; rolling stock was moved between Île-Notre-Dame and Île-Sainte-Hélène and stored there until 1979.

Maintenance facilities were located northwest of La Ronde station.

See also

External links

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