I spent a few days in Montréal last week and naturally went and rode on the now year-old REM (Réseau express métropolitain). I was particularly interested in figuring out just what the REM is. Is it a light-rail line, as some of the REM’s own publicity suggests? Or perhaps a new metro system? I ended up thinking that what the REM most resembles is a suburban railroad—but with the kind of service you’d expect on a metro. In other words, the REM is the closest thing in North America to a regional railroad, although it’s definitely a new type of regional railroad. This may take a little explanation.
Defining what a regional railroad is isn’t easy, but let me try. In North America at any rate, it’s a rail rapid-transit system with frequent service that runs to a significant extent on long-existing rail lines.1 Often, it also incorporates new rail lines through the city center or to other useful destinations. An important feature of regional railroads is that their fares are integrated with those of other urban transit lines.
Incorporating a regional railroad into an urban area’s transit system has numerous advantages. It adds frequent transit service to new areas. Because stations are further apart than on traditional urban transit systems, a regional railroad is comparatively fast; it can be a kind of express subway. Because fares are integrated with those on other transit lines, passengers can make free or inexpensive transfers to many more destinations. And, because a regional railroad ideally runs through city centers rather than terminating there, railroads can avoid expensive inner-city storage of rolling stock.
Several large European cities—Paris, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Oslo, Madrid, and Moscow, for example—have established regional railroads under various names: the RER in Paris, the S-Bahn in German-speaking cities, the T-bane in Oslo, the cercanías in Madrid, and the Central Diameters in Moscow.
In the Western Hemisphere, only São Paulo appears to have a “real” regional railroad. São Paulo‘s Metrô and its long-existing suburban lines have maintained separate corporate identities but have been combined into what is in effect one system. Most suburban trains now operate at rapid-transit frequencies, and one can travel on the whole system with one ticket. In some cases, elaborate transfer bridges and tunnels between the two systems have been built (with electronic tickets, physical connections like these have become less necessary).
Several North American urban areas have transit systems that include suburban rail lines, and there has been talk in several places about using these lines to build regional rail systems as defined above, but no urban area has fully implemented such a system. Toronto may come closest. Toronto’s GO rail and bus lines and TTC subway and bus lines (as well as bus routes run by certain regional operators) achieved fare integration in February 2024, but, for the moment, there is no through-running even on GO’s Lakeshore line, where headways outside of rush hour are every thirty minutes. Most other suburban rail lines in Toronto run much less frequently (and none of the rail lines is electrified).2 Philadelphia’s transit system also comes close to having a “real” regional railroad. Its two groups of electrified suburban railways, which once terminated at two separate stations, were connected by new tracks in 1984, and the combined lines are shown on official schematic transit maps. But service is infrequent on all but the central spine of this system, and there is no fare integration. There is fare integration between the new or newish railroad lines in Denver and Salt Lake City and other RTD and UTA lines, and Denver’s Airport line has fifteen-minute headways during the day, but other rail lines in these urban areas run much less frequently, and the railroad services in Denver terminate at Union Station rather than running through the central city. Other North American transit systems are just about all further from the ideal. Suburban railroads almost never run at rapid-transit frequencies (except in a couple of places where several lines come together near their termini), and there is no fare integration with other transit systems or through-running on these lines. Transit operators in several cities—Boston, for example—have discussed instituting regional rail service, but, thus far, only Montréal has actually begun to operate such a system, although, even there, through-running won’t start until next year.3
The 17-km REM segment that opened last year is in some ways atypical, since hardly any of it relies on long-established railroad rights-of-way. It runs between Central Station and suburbs on the south bank of the Saint Lawrence River. Its Central Station alignment has been there since Central Station opened in 1943, but the line works its way down to the Saint Lawrence on a newly-built elevated guideway.
REM train passing through Griffintown, just south of Montréal’s Central Station. A station here is planned.
Most of the line runs down the middle of the A10 autoroute. Only one station—Du Quartier—is located in a heavily built-up district. I’m pretty sure that most passengers arrive at stations by car or bus.
REM train arriving at Du Quartier station. Photo taken from a pedestrian bridge over Autoroute 10.
The southern terminus, Brossard, sits next to an enormous parking lot—and not much else.
The Brossard parking lot early in the morning. The REM’s southern terminal station is in the background.
The initial line has been carrying around 24,000 passengers a day.4 It’s crowded with commuters during rush hour.
Inside a REM train heading to central Montréal during the morning rush hour.
But it tends to run pretty empty at other times.
Inside a reverse-commute REM train at Central Station early in the morning.
New stations—even those above ground—all have platform doors and HVAC systems. The fact that the stations are more or less indoors makes even those that sit in the middle of a freeway reasonably comfortable places to wait (although there isn’t much seating).
Inside the Du Quartier REM station.
The lines that are supposed to open next year will all pass through Montréal’s CBD and the 106-year-old Mount Royal Tunnel and serve several somewhat walkable neighborhoods in the outer city. They will intersect with the Métro in a couple of places and, of course, with numerous bus routes. The western branch planned to have the most service—the northern line to Deux-Montagnes—runs along a right-of-way that was used as a suburban commuter line for several decades. Most places along the route could be classed as “medium-density suburban.” The other two western branches take advantage of old rail rights-of-way only for a short distance. The middle branch will largely run elevated through car country next to a freeway. The southern branch (not scheduled to open until 2027) will end up at Trudeau International Airport. It’s hoped that passenger loads on the new lines will be substantial. We’ll see.
Map of Montréal and vicinity emphasizing REM and Métro rail lines and pedestrian and bicycle facilities. Commuter rail lines, most of which have only prevailing-direction weekday rush-hour service, are not included. The nominal scale of the map is 1:100,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 11-x-17-inch sheet of paper. GIS data are mostly derived from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve edited all the data. REM U/C = REM line under construction. I was unable to find an up-to-date file for the latter. As a result, there may be some small errors in the location of the pending REM routes. As usual, pedestrian and bicycle facilities are sometimes not as clearly distinguished on the ground as they seem to be on the map. The map is clickable and downloadable, but note that this site’s host server does not allow images to be stored at their original resolution, and, if you zoom in too far, the image will be blurred.
The REM’s great innovation—which differentiates it from most other regional railroads—is that it’s driverless.
Since there is no engineer’s cab, the REM has front windows that provide excellent views of the right-of-way.
Like some other driverless transit systems, the REM runs short trains (of two or four cars) at frequent intervals, around every two-and-a-half minutes during rush hour. It can do this easily since additional labor costs from frequent service on a driverless metro are minimal. Money was also saved by the need only for short stations.
There is complete fare integration with other transit systems in Montréal. A single ticket allows one to ride on all of Montréal’s transit lines within the fare zone and time limits stated on the ticket.
In other words, thanks to its frequent suburban service, the REM comes closer than any other North American transit system to being a regional railroad as defined above.
Notably, however, the REM’s builders and operators do not call it a regional railroad. It’s a “light metro” (or “métro leger” in French). Perhaps “light” has a positive connotation in both languages, while “regional railroad” is too technical a term to be widely understood (it wouldn’t be understood by many urban transit specialists in Europe or Asia either).
In the years since Québec’s “Quiet Revolution,” Montréal has been a North American pioneer in several areas of urban development. It was, for example, the first North American city in which aesthetic appeal played a central role in the design of subway stations (1966) and the first city with an extensive network of underground passageways in its CBD (also 1960s). It was also an innovator in downtown pedestrianization (1980s-), and it was the first North American city to construct numerous protected bicycle lanes (early 2010s). The REM, which really is different from any other North American rail system, seems to continue the pioneering tradition.5
I am sure that there are lots of people in the world of transit who have pondered using the REM as a model for other cities. Its ability to run trains frequently without incurring enormous labor costs is a potential game changer. Several suburban rail lines in Boston and Chicago (among other cities) would seem to be good candidates for much more frequent service if labor costs could be kept down—and transfers to other transit services became cheap or free. But there would be substantial starting costs: even short stations turn out to be expensive to build, and electrification and new rolling stick would be needed in most cases. And any new system would require considerable debugging. The REM certainly did.6 It’s easy to imagine that the REM’s role in the development of North American urban transit will (like that of Montréal’s elegant Métro before it) turn out to involve a challenge to other cities that they will find very hard to meet.
- The term “regional railroad” in other parts of the world—and its literal translation into other languages—can have a different meaning. The term as used in North America is, I’ll admit, a bit odd, as it describes something that doesn’t really exist yet, although many people would like it to. It’s strange that no single term has come to be used for regional railroad systems in Europe. Transit websites tend to use phrases such as “S-Bahn like” to describe such systems. ↩
- I’m arbitrarily assuming that service every fifteen minutes is a minimum for rapid transit service. Toronto’s rail line between Pearson Airport and Union Station (2015) does run every fifteen minutes, and there are plans to decrease headways on the GO Lakeshore lines too. Electrification is in the works as well. But Toronto’s GO rail lines demonstrate one of the issues with increasing off-peak frequency on suburban trains. The huge, fully-staffed trains are expensive to run. ↩
- Several post-World-War-II rail transit systems—BART, MARTA, Washington Metro—do go further into the suburbs than older systems did, and they sometimes use railroad rights-of-way to do so, but it’s arguable that they all made a much more complete break from the old railroad lines than the REM does, and classifying them as regional rail systems as I use the term here wouldn’t, I think, be quite right. Saint Louis’s MetroLink in some ways comes closer. It mostly runs in a railroad right-of-way (including an old downtown tunnel and the 1874 Eads Bridge across the Mississippi), and it provides frequent service to a very low-density corridor on its eastern (Illinois) end. But there is absolutely no continuity between any use of its corridor by passenger railroads and its current operation. Of course, any classification of transit systems—as well as most other human artifacts!—is likely to somewhat arbitrary. ↩
- The obvious comparison: Montréal’s Métro in the first quarter of 2024 had an average of more than a million riders a day on weekdays. ↩
- There are many people in Montréal who think that the city’s linguistic distinctiveness gives it privileged access to information about new developments in Europe (or at least in France). I don’t know whether this is true, but it’s certainly arguable that Montréal’s history of urban innovativeness (if that’s a word) can be traced back in part to a desire among some Francophone Québécois in the 1960s to demonstrate that Québec was a sophisticated and pioneering place, rather than the poverty-stricken, priest-ridden province that some Anglophone Canadians once imagined that it was. ↩
- For information on the major software and hardware glitches encountered by the REM over its first year, see, for example: Roxanne Lachapelle, “Bilan mitigé pour la première année du REM,” Le Devoir (31 July 2024). Le Devoir, Québec’s “serious” Francophone newspaper, has covered the planning and building of the REM assiduously. ↩