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Surrounded by shredded limestone, electric cables hung on the wall, railroad tracks under the feet and under an orange light, the Mount Royal tunnel is warmer than you'd expect.
About one kilometer north of Central Station, roughly below McGill University's Roddick Gates, two separate tunnels of railroad merge and you can see a ray of sunshine about four kilometers from the train station. from Canora to Mount Royal.
The journalists visited the tunnel Sunday as part of the activities marking its 100th anniversary.
Jean-Philippe Pelletier, Deputy Director of Works Coordination at the Metropolitan Express Network, said the limestone remained deep beneath the mountain at a relatively constant temperature. Even though the temperatures were around the freezing point, they were around 15 or 16 degrees Celsius in the tunnel.
"Even in the middle of winter, you can be in the middle of the tunnel and you do not need a jacket," he said.
To enter the tunnel, the journalists were taken to a door reserved for authorized personnel, a metal staircase and a small repair shop where the Exo commuter trains were parked. They walked under a large sign with flashing yellow lights indicating "Danger 25,000 volts" even though the electricity was off for the weekend work crews. With the train platforms for the central station on the right, the tour turned left and ended in a double-arched tunnel, with a retaining wall separating two railroad tracks to prevent the softer rock located at the entrance. The southern end of the mountain to collapse.
The tunnel underwent a major overhaul in the 1990s when the Deux-Montagnes transit line was modernized, but its appearance has remained virtually unchanged since its inauguration in 1918.
In four years, however, the section of the tunnel near the university will be unrecognizable – it will be transformed into McGill's REM station. It is expected that thousands of commuters use it every day to get to the airport, the south shore, the west of the island or the north shore or come back.
On the section of the tunnel under McGill College Avenue and St. Catherine Street, the teams will demolish a wall that will connect an empty room in the adjacent Montreal Trust Place building, built for the benefit of to serve as a station for the Two Train Line -Mountains. Instead of a station, however, the room will now house a new ventilation port for the tunnel and the technical systems of the station. Above ground, teams are working to divert water pipelines and other underground infrastructure to make room for the future station. Once this work is complete, the teams will dig into the tunnel, build the metro station and cover it again.
Further north in the tunnel, the technical feat is even more complex to build the Edouard-Montpetit station 70 meters below street level. Dynamite work began on this station this week.
The teams are expected to complete the preliminary stages of construction of the station over the next two years. The tunnel will be closed from 2020 for a period of two years for the main phases of construction and conversion of railways.
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