[jhbadger]

As someone who's lived in both Montreal and the Washington DC area (and used Metro for commuting in both), I have to say that a mixture of raised and buried tracks are really the only way to have a practical system if you want it to work beyond the dense downtown area. Many of the more open places in metropolitan Montreal like Lachine don't have any Metro stops due to the expense of digging tunnels to there. In contrast, you can take the Washington Metro from Fairfax, VA and Rockville, MD. both well over twenty miles from downtown DC.

[borne0]

Yes I totally agree with you, I'd love it if the metro was far more expansive than it currently is in Montreal. For me the solution is to expand the metro system to the west island, south shore, etc but forget about burying it and just put it above ground in a tube. Initially it sounds silly but the current rolling stock and tracks aren't up to the task of dealing with Montreal weather, but maintaining one system is (I think) more feasible than our current system (metro, trains, upcoming light rail, etc)

Every now and again I look at the 1960s photos of the implementation of the metro system and the main idea that I take away from it is that something of that scale is pretty much impossible today.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/archivesmontreal/sets/72157664...

[StudentStuff]

Looks like the subway constructed there was done using cut & cover tunnels, which is commonly done today, its only when you get below a certain depth or have preexisting structures that you'd use a tunnel boring machine.

For rail those tend to be fairly reliable, though most rail alignments buy two or three so they can bore from both ends, and have a spare in case it pulls a Bertha (Seattle's recent highway tunneling nightmare).

What is different today is how impacts are considered. Politically savvy communities are able to cause perfectly good rights of way with existing rail to not be used for light rail or commuter rail. Happened over in Bellevue, much to the detriment of the city and its surrounding towns. Microsoft ain't too happy about that one!