MONTREAL — Officials will announce another delay in opening Montreal’s Réseau Express Métropolitain light-rail system today, according to media reports.
The Montreal Gazette, citing reports from La Presse and Radio-Canada, the French-language arm of the CBC, says the first segment of the system between Montreal’s Central Station and the South Shore municipality of Brossard will not open until spring. It had been slated to open in December.
The CBC reports the delay is bad news for South Shore commuters, as substantial delays are expected when the province shuts down three lanes of the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine tunnel on the Trans-Canada Highway — a route handling 120,000 vehicles daily — for maintenance work for at least three years. The date that closure begins will be announced soon and is expected to last until at late 2025.
This will be the third delay in opening of the initial segment, which was originally slated to begin service in late 2021. The rest of the system, which was originally scheduled to open in phases beginning in fall 2023, is now slated to open all at once in late 2024 [see “Opening of Montreal light rail system delayed,” Trains News Wire, June 21, 2022].
the handling of this project has been absurd since day one of preliminary planning
You couldn’t say better. Quebec corruption at its finest.