The Candian Pacific Railroad hates Montrealers

The top story last coupla days was a huge blaze on Regent and Upper Lachine. I peeked over there and it was in fact just a tiny little mishap. Quel bore.








There's a much bigger ongoing story happening right there. When you get to the end of Regent you naturally want to continue north towards Demaisonneuve which is very close. But you're fenced in by the CPR. It's just about 60 feet away to the other side and there's hardly any trains that go by, but you simply can't go through.



Traditionally people would snip holes in the fence and simply walk through that way. Nobody got hurt. It was implicitly accepted. There's no record of anybody getting killed near these tracks. It's safer to walk over a train track than walk across a street. In both directions you can see the train from hundreds of yards away. About five years ago the CPR obtained the power from the province to ticket people who cross. It's crazy but true. Simply going this way could land you a hefty $140 fine.




Luckily there's a tunnel under the tracks one block over at Melrose, just about 50 feet away. Another fence. This guy living on Melrose has somehow managed to fence off the laneway that runs alongside the train track fence.

So rather than cross the 60 feet, you've got to walk 500 feet to Upper Lachine, another 250 feet to Melrose and another 500 feet to enter the tunnel, which has stairs and is difficult for those with bikes, or baby carriages. Finally there's another 250 feet to get back from Melrose to Wilson. Instead of just walking 60 feet, you have to walk 1,200 feet, almost a quarter mile. At an average walking speed of 3 miles an hour, that's an extra five minutes walking to do what you could do in about 15 seconds. People will drive rather than do this. It's a crime against society. I'm amazed that people of Regent haven't complained about this.


(a propos de rien. This triplex along the way, on Melrose was going for $87,000 in 2001 and I had my eye on buying it 'cept my would-be financier claimed that he didn't have the $19,000 it would have cost, citing a bogus story about not having the cash to lend. He ended up losing a ton of cash in the dot com bubble while I would've made $200 k flipping this sucker.)









Finally you get to the tunnel, which was equipped with a cameras and a big screen in case you worried about people lurking down there. It was unveiled with much fanfare a couple of years ago. It has barely worked since.

Melrose Tunnel

On a good day the Melrose tunnel isn't strewn with garbage and stinking of urine. They used to have one like this going Park Avenue at Fletcher's Field, but they wisely got rid of it. It's a pretty demeaning way to get across. The current city councillor Marcel Tremblay was elected on the promise of making more ways to cross the tracks but he doesn't even bother promising that anymore. NDG's politicians had a window of opportunity to fix this problem. Wilson is being extended from Upper Lachine to the tracks. It would have been easy to extend a street over the tracks with a gate to make sure people don't get run over. This suggestion was raised by Peter McQueen at a borough council meeting but Borough Mayor Michael Applebaum said he would refuse to sacrifice two units of "affordable housing" for this.Affordable housing is a totally b.s. term of course, because expensive houses are affordable to the rich, so mansions are also affordable housing. They actually mean, cheap shitty housing. My theory as to why St. Raymond's aka lower NDG suffers such bad administration: residents - largely working class Italians - practice political stoicism. They're always the easiest target, as in such examples as Goose Village and the Decarie Expressway. If you don't keep an eye out for your community, you're a sitting duck and politicians will screw you bad.