Submitted by Hayden, who says:
My apologies for the glare in the photo [No problem! I also straightened the image for publication – Cam]. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this 1982 Montreal Metro map. I found it in a preserved MR-63 subway car at Exporail, a railway museum outside Montreal. The map shows the three Metro lines open at the time with white stations, as well as the under-construction Blue Line and Du Collège extension of the Orange Line.
While the font may not win any awards for legibility, I think it fits beautifully with the map’s design aesthetic. There are a few station names that have changed since 1982 — I find the change from Vincent-d’Indy to the current Édouard-Montpetit particularly interesting. Lastly, I’m sure the makers of this map could never have imagined that the “Métro régional projeté” (given only a small mention in the legend) would be realized before the Blue Line to Anjou.
Transit Maps says:
What a fantastically chunky iteration of the Montreal Metro map! Everything is thick and oversized, and it’s just wonderful. The crowning glory is the use of ITC Bauhaus Black as the typeface throughout: it really shouldn’t work at all, and yet it somehow contrasts against and softens the blockiness of the map to balance it out nicely. Legibility is reduced slightly where the white text crosses the yellow Line 4, but it only affects a few stations.
Other nice touches are the line number bullets at the termini of each line: a square that continues in the direction of the line, but rotates the line number to remain horizontal; and the use of black station dots to denote planned future stations. The fact that Line 5 is only in its planning stage at this point in time helps to explain some of the station name changes: Vincent-d’Indy was an early placeholder name, but the station opened as Édouard-Montpetit in 1988.
Later versions of the map, like this one from 2012, made the waterways more geographical in mature, but I think the level of stylization on this version matches the chunky, diagrammatic nature of the route lines much better. It’s interesting to see how many of the elements that make the Montreal map unique – the black background and the rotated rectilinear form especially – have remained constant, which helps maintain a consistency in design language (crazy display typefaces not withstanding!) over the years.
Our final word: Chunky, bold and with a crazy font choice that somehow works: this is just great, and such a product of its time.
Maybe it’s better in real life, or maybe my old eyes are the problem, but I can barely distinguish the blue line against the black background.
It looks fine to me, Steve, but later iterations do seem to have lightened the blue a bit to stand out a bit more from the background.
STCUM system maps of the era reproduced the exact same artwork—even including the gratuitous warning not to interfere with the operation of the doors!
The T-Arrow logo lasted from the municipal takeover (by the City of Montreal) in 1951 into the 2000s when it was replaced by yellow/blue/green double greater-than symbol over the stm logotype. The system was run under a regional government starting in 1970 (Communauté urbaine de Montréal – suburbs had representation … sort of) which lasted until 2002 when the entire island became the City of Montreal (some suburbs rebelled and after a provincial government change, won back their identities and most of their autonomy). So, in English, Montreal Transportation Commission -> Montreal Urban Community Transit Commission (became a corporation in 1985), then the Montreal Transit Corporation (Société de transport de Montréal). So reading the logos, this is a “retro” map.
I should note that a number of stations have updated names in addition to the one mentioned (Berri-UQAM and Guy-Concordia, both renamed to closer associate them with the universities that are adjacent to (or under). McGill and Universite-de-Montréal didn’t need renaming. 🙂
That behind us … Line 2’s NW end was eventually completed and extended one more stop to Cote Vertu. Line 5 was only ever completed to Saint-Michel.
Much later, the NE end of Line 2 was extended 3 stations on to Ile Jesus, which is entirely the City of Laval since the the forced merger of towns and municipal parishes in the 1960s … and who have their own transit system. Fare integration is an on-going struggle, made somewhat simpler by all area transit systems using the same fare media now.
Line 5 work to extend it out to Anjou is finally happening after a ~40 year hiatus. The original proposed extensions (to LaSalle/Lachine in the SW and up to Montréal-Nord instead of Anjou probably won’t ever happen (there are maps of those, too).
The “Metro regionale projetee” and “Trains de banlieu” are way outside the scope of this discussion and their evolution continues today. In 1981-82 the (then) CTCUM did take over two of the suburban commuter rail lines (Dorion and Deux-Montagnes on the map) but they never seemed to want to actually run them. I think they still had too many people on staff who had worked for the Montreal Tramways Co pre-1951, a company that competed vigorously with both Canadian Pacific and Canadian National Railways for on-island commute traffic!
Those commuter lines both got spun off into a new agency who ran those, added another to Saint Jerome in the 1990s and another to Mascouche in the 2000s and took over the line to Saint Hilaire as well (shown as far as Beloeil here). Two of those lines have since been killed by the Réseau express métropolitain which, because it is DBOM by the private sector will be completely perfect in every way and will turn a profit and never require subsidy. According to the brochure. When that system will open is yet to be determined by the builder, Notre Dame de la Construction Perpétuelle.