TUNNEL OF DREAMS
The train tunnel that passes under Mount Royal has never lived up to the lofty ambitions of its creators. But 100 years later, the REM could change that,
After 100 years, the tunnel is becoming something that is even greater than what they expected.
It was a crazy idea, but one that shaped downtown Montreal and gave birth to the region’s first transit-oriented suburb.
Sunday will mark 100 years since the first passenger train was pulled through the Mount Royal Tunnel. Its construction was a remarkable engineering feat, especially for the time, and, at 4.9 kilometres, it is still one of the world’s longest train tunnels.
The tunnel shaped downtown Montreal, making it possible to build Place Ville Marie and the Queen Elizabeth Hotel; gave birth to the Town of Mount Royal, the country’s first public-transit-oriented suburb; and led to a development boom on the northern part of the island.
However, despite its profound impact, it never lived up to its full potential. Or not so far, but observers believe that is about to change as the centenary of the Mount Royal Tunnel’s very low-key 1918 unveiling coincides with plans to loop it into the new Réseau express métropolitain.
Back in 1912, William Mackenzie and Donald Mann — the president and vice-president of Canadian Northern Railway — had visions of building a trans-Canada railway to rival the already established Grand Trunk and Canadian Pacific railways. There was just one problem, the company needed a terminal in downtown Montreal — then the largest city in the country — and there was a lack of space to lay tracks in the densely populated city centre.
David Hanna, an urban transportation expert and professor at Université du Québec à Montréal, explained that Canadian Northern hatched a secret plan to bore through the mountain, and they bought up the necessary land in just three days to avoid land speculators swooping in and hiking the price.
“They sprang a surprise on Montrealers and especially on CPR and the Grand Trunk by announcing they were going to come from underneath Mount Royal and pop up in the middle of town,” Hanna said.
The entrepreneurs bought some old, decrepit buildings at what is now René-Lévesque Blvd. and McGill-College Ave. to serve as a temporary station and about three square kilometres of farmland north of the tunnel that became Town of Mount Royal. To defray the cost of building the tunnel — estimated at $25 million in 1912, or about $364 million today — the entrepreneurs envisioned a grand real estate project at the south end of the tunnel with a hotel, post office and office buildings, and a residential community in TMR to meet the highest standards of urban design, with all the roads oriented toward the railway tracks.
Hanna said the early part of the century was a boom time for Canada, when anything seemed possible.
“You look back now, and it’s insane to build three railroad lines,” he said, “but at the time, no one thought there would ever be an economic downturn.”
Pierre Barrieau, an urban planning researcher who studied the tunnel, said the cost of duplicating such a project today would be “financially prohibitive,” coming between $1 billion and $2 billion, taking into account today’s construction costs and improved safety standards.
Construction began in 1912, with crews at opposite ends of the mountain and horses and carriages used to haul away the dirt and rock. When the two sides met a year and a half later, they were off by less than an inch in alignment, and only a quarter inch in depth — a remarkable feat at the time.
But the First World War, its coinciding economic depression and labour shortage spelled disaster for Mackenzie and Mann. The railway had overextended itself, and had to be bailed out by the government of the day, which also bought the Grand Trunk Railway to create Canadian National Railways.
The tunnel only opened in 1918, with its mission changed. CN would use its Grand Trunk tracks for trans-Canada service and relegate the Mount Royal tunnel line to regional commuter service. Even the opening of the tunnel was a muted affair, coming at the height of the Spanish flu pandemic, when public gatherings were outlawed, Anthony Clegg explained in his book The Mount Royal Tunnel, Canada’s First Subway.
Despite its altered mission, the Deux-Montagnes Line was a money maker for CN in an era when train travel was the most efficient and affordable means of transportation.
By the 1940s, the line, which still
cost less than 10 cents per ticket, was running 146 trains per day, with a train every two and a half minutes.
“It was hugely profitable,” UQAM’s Hanna said.
However, the tunnel left a blight on the downtown core for decades with an enormous hole at the foot of the mountain. Part of it was filled in when Central Station was built in 1943 to replace Mackenzie and Mann’s “temporary ” station. However, the entrepreneurs’ full vision for downtown was only realized in the 1950s and early 1960s with the construction of CN’s headquarters, Place Ville Marie, the Queen Elizabeth Hotel and Place Bonaventure, finally filling in the hole left by the original tunnel.
“I’m old enough that as a child I remember standing on Dorchester St. Bridge and watching the trains,” Hanna said. “The tunnel mouth is directly under the entrance to the parking garage for Place Ville Marie.”
As cars became ubiquitous, ridership dwindled in the 1960s and 1970s. The service was taken over in 1982 by the city’s transit agency, still with the locomotives that pulled the first passengers through the tunnel in 1918. Those locomotives were finally retired in 1995 when the line was overhauled and the trains replaced by new ones built by Bombardier. One of those original locomotives, No. 6710, is now on display near the DeuxMontagnes Station, while another, No. 6711, is at the Exporail museum in St-Constant.
Today, the Deux-Montagnes Line remains the region’s busiest commuter line, and the tunnel is poised for yet another overhaul, as it will be the thoroughfare for the planned Réseau express métropolitain service to the airport, the West Island, and North Shore, with 550 trains expected to pass through the tunnel daily starting in 2021, running every two and a half minutes.
Despite complaints from TMR residents about the sheer number of trains, Barrieau said the REM’s plan is more true to the original vision of Central Station as the flowthrough point to the tunnel, linking the South Shore and North Shore.
“I honestly believe that (Mackenzie and Mann) would be happy to see that, after 100 years, the tunnel is becoming something that is even greater than what they expected,” Barrieau said. “That piece of tunnel in the next few years is going to become an incredible link and it will be changing fundamentally the way people move in the metropolitan area, in ways even the original builders and planners would never have expected. This tunnel is going to move people like it never has before.”