Montreal’s metro system opened 50 years ago today. According to Matthew McLauchlan, Montreal was the 26th city in the world to inaugurate an underground transportation system, but one of the first western locations to include artistic design.
“We’ve made the trip three times and we just can’t believe it.”
The result was a network of stations that differ, one from the other, and include some very beautiful spaces. This, in comparison to Toronto’s system, which went into service in 1954, with each station a replica of the one before, except in the color of tile and the name.
Margaret Atwood, the doyenne of Canadian literature, once described Toronto’s subway as ‘the world’s longest bathroom’.
McLauchlan, the man behind the website metrodemontreal.com, has had a lifelong love-affair with the city’s public transportation system.
Back in the Montreal of 1966, it was Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger, then the Archbishop of Montreal, who blessed the new metro system before passengers boarded the trains for the first time.
First proposed in 1953, construction finally began in May 1962. 5,000 workers were employed across the city in the project that cost $213 million (Cdn).
Hailed as a means to enrich the city it offered a quick and comfortable ride for commuters. “It’s terrific,” one young man told a Radio-Canada reporter on opening day, flanked by two of his friends. “We’ve made the trip three times and we just can’t believe it.”
During Canada’s Centennial celebration of 1967, a ride on Montreal’s metro became a mandatory part of the experience.
The network of stations has been significantly expanded since 1966. Now the Societe Transport de Montreal is continuing with a renovation of 13 more stations, in addition to the current eight, equipping them with elevators to provide better access to the system, for an aging population, people in wheelchairs, and families with strollers.
The STM has a day of festivities planned to celebrate the milestone.
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