100 YEARS UNDERGROUND
Yannick warin, engineer at exo, walks along the tracks connecting Central Station (background) with the Mount Royal Tunnel on Sunday. The tunnel celebrated 100 years of operation and is being transformed for the new REM electric train.
Surrounded by jagged limestone, with electric cables on the wall, train tracks underfoot, and under the hue of orange lights, the Mount Royal Tunnel is warmer than you might expect.
About one kilometre north of Central Station, roughly underneath McGill University’s Roddick Gates, two separate tunnels of train tracks merge into one, and you can see a speck of daylight that is the Canora Station in the Town of Mount Royal roughly four kilometres away.
Reporters got a tour of the tunnel on Sunday, as part of activities marking its 100th anniversary.
Jean-Philippe Pelletier, deputy director of work co-ordination for the Réseau express métropolitain, said the limestone deep under the mountain stays at a relatively constant temperature, so even though temperatures were hovering around the freezing mark outside, it was around 15 C or 16 C in the tunnel.
“Even in the dead of winter, you can be in the middle of the tunnel and you won’t need a jacket,” he said.
To get into the tunnel, reporters were taken to a door marked for authorized personnel only, down a metal staircase, and past a small repair shop where Exo commuter trains were parked.
They walked underneath a large sign with flashing yellow lights that read: “Danger 25,000 Volts,” though the electricity was shut off for weekend work crews.
With train platforms for Central Station on the right, the tour turned left, and made its way into a double-vaulted tunnel with a retaining wall separating two train tracks to prevent the softer rock at the south end of the mountain from collapsing.
The tunnel got a major overhaul in the 1990s when the DeuxMontagnes commuter line was upgraded, but its appearance has remained virtually unchanged since it first opened in 1918.
Four years from now, however, the section of the tunnel near the university will be unrecognizable — transformed into the REM’s McGill station.
It is expected to be used by thousands of commuters per day making their way to or from the airport, the South Shore, the West Island or the North Shore.
At the section of the tunnel under McGill College Ave. and Ste-Catherine St., crews will demolish a wall that links to an empty room in the adjacent Place Montreal Trust office building that had been built with the intention to serve as a station for the DeuxMontagnes train line.
Instead of a station, however, the room will now house a new ventilation shaft for the tunnel and the technical systems for the station. Above ground, crews are currently working to divert water pipes and other underground infrastructure to make way for the future station. When that work is completed, crews will dig into the tunnel, build the underground station and cover it up again.
Further north in the tunnel, the technical feat is even more complex to build the Édouard-Montpetit station 70 metres below street level. Dynamite work began on that station this week.
Crews are expected to complete the preliminary stages of station construction in the next two years. The tunnel will be shut starting in 2020 for two years for the main phases of construction and the conversion of the train tracks.