Expo Express
The Expo Express (French: l' express Expo) was an overground running speed railway, which was built for the World Exhibition Expo 67 in Montreal.
The 5.7 km long route was part of the Montreal subway and cost around 18 million Canadian dollars. A train could carry up to 1,000 people per hour per direction and headed five stations. After the World's Fair, the train came into the possession of the city of Montreal and the trains ran on a shortened route until it has ceased operations entirely in 1972.
History
In contrast to the Monorail Mini Rail, which operated only within the world exhibition, that used the Expo Express conventional subway art with two rails and for driving a power rail, thus following the same principle as the Toronto subway. The train departed from April 1967 to October 1972. According to the cessation of some trains still were deposited until the summer of 1979 in a roundhouse at amusement park La Ronde. When they began the construction of a temporary line to the peninsula Cité du Havre, they were moved to the Montreal harbor.
Today, there is still the yellow line 4, to the east bank of the St. Lawrence River runs from the Ile de Montreal to Longueuil. There have been several attempts, the original features of the Expo Express train to continue using after they were taken in the late 1980s from the harbor in a warehouse to Les Cedars and there is no use for it had been found, they finally were the mid-1990s scrapped.
Rolling stock and technology
The trains were a modified version of the so-called H- series of the British Hawker Siddeley aircraft company Canada Limited in Thunder Bay, which expanded its business in 1957 in the manufacture of locomotives and electrical equipment. The Toronto subway uses the same rolling stock, but with the difference that the edges of the Expo Express ' are each less fitted with a door and its ends were streamlined in shape.
The Expo Express was the first fully automated transit system in North America. The system used for ATO ( Automatic Train Operation of / automated driving) based on the principle of Tonfrequenzgleisstromkreises, which was established by the U.S. company for command Union Switch & Signal. The fact that the train was able to run fully automatically, was during the world exhibition, however, generally not known. It failed a wide notice, because it was feared that the visitors would not otherwise dare to let yourself be carried by a computer-controlled train. In order not to alarm the passengers, we sat at the head of each train an employee who, however, served only the doors of the train.
The train fleet consisted of a total of 48 cars, which were compiled into six trains with six carriages. Each car had 80 Sitzeund around 90 standing passengers. The Expo Express drove with conventional steel wheels, as opposed to the Montreal subway, the rubber-tired trains began.
Route
The line started at Place d' Accueil at the Cité du Havre peninsula and had the following stations that were partially usable only in one direction:
- Closed Cité du Havre / Place d' Accueil, 1968
- Habitat 67 is closed (in the city ), 1968
- Île Sainte -Hélène
- Île Notre -Dame
- Added L'homme et l'agriculture ( only in the direction Expo ), 1968
- La Ronde
The line led basically two tracks except on a short single track section at Place d' Accueil, where visitors got off to one side of the train and boarded on the other. When the train was taken to the Île Sainte -Hélène the last stop, the Expo Express was also operated single track. North of the Ile Notre -Dame, the line was dismantled for the construction of the Olympic Basin. The equipment for the maintenance of the railway were at the breakpoint La Ronde.