REM is in “final testing phase”
The REM is said to be in its final testing phase: according to the schedule in this brief TVA piece, the opening of the section between Central Station and Brossard is now planned for fall 2023, but La Presse says from 30 to 45 days.
carswell 16:33 on 2023-06-26 Permalink
First time in a long time I’ve heard that the Central Station to Bois Francs segment would open this year. Today’s REM news release (the first in over six months!) doesn’t mention it,
The only schedule I could find on the REM website (slick from a marketing standpoint, lame from an informational one — it doesn’t even list scheduled opening dates on the station pages) still has the date as end of 2024. Admittedly, the schedule’s not exactly up-to-date, as it says the Brossard-Central Station segment is opening in the spring of 2023.
Posters on Agora Montreal claim TVA/JdeM published an old schedule. Based on what remains to be done at the Édouard-Montpetit and TMR stations, the only ones I’ve seen recently, I’d say they’re right.
The test à blanc (Agora anglos translate this as blank test but that sounds like a gallicism to me — anyone know what this kind of extended trial run with no passengers is actually called?) has to run 10 days with 95% up time before CDPQ Infra can announce the official opening date, which can be no sooner than 30 days after that. So, at the earliest, we’re talking mid-August and quite possibly a week or two later, i.e. right at the start of la rentrée. And don’t forget that the opening will coincide with a major overhaul of South Shore bus routes. Expect chaos.
It would have made much more sense to commission the line in mid-July, so the first few weeks coincided with the construction holiday.
shawn 16:42 on 2023-06-26 Permalink
Right, Édouard-Montpetit is such an undertaking. I wonder if they could open that section before Édouard-Montpetit is actually ready, just run trains past it.
Kevin 18:06 on 2023-06-26 Permalink
Dry run would be the better translation.
And yeah, the 30-day delay is to give bus riders plenty of time to realize that every route on the South Shore will change to feed the REM. Expect the same when the other segments are built.
Camille Desfée 18:17 on 2023-06-26 Permalink
“Test à blanc” means dry run.
Camille Desfée 18:33 on 2023-06-26 Permalink
I was too young when the Laval metro opened, but I do know that the vast majority of buses from the STL and various pre-exo operators just stopped feeding to Henri-Bourassa to feed into the Laval stations instead. Does anyone here remember if the transition was hard then? I’m not sur why expect chaos, it’s not like we’re building a new metro from the ground up like Ottawa (I know, I know O-Train line 1 is a weird case of running low-floor tram vehicles on metro infrastructure, so Anglo use the catch all “light rail” to make sense of this chimera).
Kate 20:37 on 2023-06-26 Permalink
Camille, I was already blogging when the Laval metro opened in 2007, and I went up to look at the new stations on the free opening day (such a geek), but I don’t remember any anguish about changes in the bus routes that no longer crossed the Back River.
That said, I don’t usually follow news specific to Laval so I may have missed things.