CDPQ Infra announced Wednesday evening that a wagon from the future Réseau express métropolitain (REM) crossed the Samuel-De Champlain bridge for the first time, a few months before the planned opening of the South Shore branch.
Posted at 10:41 p.m.
“Hello Montreal. The car has just crossed the Samuel-De Champlain bridge for the very first time,” tweeted the organization, accompanying its tweet with a photo of the green, white and black wagon of the Caisse de depot et placement’s future light train. of Quebec (CDPQ).
You can see inside the train workers with bibs: it is that final phases of tests are currently being carried out by the design and engineering teams, in order to ensure that everything is “optimized” during the commissioning of the South Shore branch, scheduled for this fall.
Eventually, this 10 billion dollar network must connect the city center to the eastern tip and northeast of the island. The majority of the 32 kilometer route is planned on elevated structures.
At the end of June, CDPQ Infra announced that the delivery of 18 REM stations, downtown, in the west of the island and in the northern crown, will have to be postponed again. We will have to wait until the end of 2024, the worksite still being hard hit by the discovery of century-old explosives in the Mount Royal tunnel in July 2020. The opening of the South Shore branch, however, did not not been postponed.
As for the route to connect the airport to the city center, we hope to be able to “confirm the date of commissioning this fall”.
The tunnel that leads to the future station of the Montréal-Trudeau international airport is nevertheless completed. We will now work on the installation of rails and equipment. CDPQ Infra hopes to be able to “save time” on the schedule, already pushed back beyond the end of 2024, by carrying out work simultaneously with Aéroports de Montréal (ADM), which is responsible for the construction of the station.