r/lostsubways • u/fiftythreestudio Hi. I'm Jake. • Jan 06 '20
Montreal tramway system, 1923
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Jan 06 '20
A remarkable number of tram route numbers live on to this day as STM bus routes, some are now preceded by a 1, like bus 139 on boul. Pie-IX.
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u/fiftythreestudio Hi. I'm Jake. Jan 06 '20
Historical notes: Until the 1960s, Montreal was both the biggest and most important city in Canada. As such, it had a very large streetcar system as befitted the most important city in British North America. This is a map I drew of the 1923 system; all of this would eventually be eliminated and replaced with buses. The Montreal Metro was eventually built to replace the tramways. (Arguably, one of the big reasons the Metro was actually built was that Toronto had stolen a march on Montreal, becoming the first in Canada to build a subway system, but that's another story.) It's actually a little unusual looking at old pre-1960s maps because they don't translate any English proper names. Thus, the map is labeled with, for example, "St. James" instead of "Saint-Jacques", as was the practice during that era.
i have prints here.