Expo Express

The Expo Express was a rapid transit system consisting of five stations and a 5.7-kilometre route. Built for Montreal’s Expo 67 and costing around $18 million, the trains carried 1,000 passengers each and ran approximately every five minutes.

After Expo 67, the cars were sold to the City of Montreal and service ran for four more years on a shortened route. In 1972 the service was abandoned.

Vehicles

Not to be confused with the Minirail monorail which ran within the perimeters of the Expo Site, the Expo Express used standard railway technology, with two running rails and a third electrified rail identical to those of the Toronto subway. It ran from April 1967 to October 1972 (the last year Terre-des-Hommes Notre-Dame island was opened to the public) and was then mothballed and stored on Ile Notre Dame with a few trainsets in a shed adjacent to the LaRonde amusement park until the summer of 1979, when they were moved out to the Port of Montréal by building a temporary track where the line to Cité du Havre used to be.

After several abortive schemes to re-use the cars, they were moved from the Port of Montreal to a storage facility in Les Cèdres (Québec) in the late 1980s, and were finally cut up for scrap in the mid 1990s.

The trains used were a modified version of the Hawker Siddeley H-series used by the Toronto Transit Commission with one fewer door on each side, and streamlined ends.

The Expo Express was the first fully automated rapid transit system in North America,...
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