I lived in Mtl. 2005-6, and have visited a handful of times. During my time there, I lived on the Plateau a short walk from Mont Royal station, and mostly commuted to a grin office block near the Galleries d’Anjou, approximately where the proposed blue line extension will go.
I can make two recommendations:
firstly this beautiful book all about the design and construction of the metro.
Secondly,
this long established and wonderfully detailed website about the metro, which has details about every station and every artwork.
Key to the network’s distinctiveness was the decision early on that every station should - apart from the critical core dimensions of the platforms, tracks and black band of station signage - be designed differently. Some architects did more than one station, but they are all beautiful in their own way. The very truncated blue line is my favourite for station architecture, since it its a time capsule of sometimes crazy eighties high tech. Every station has at least one major fine art commission, with sculptures or murals or stained glass.
Some time in the winter of 2005/6, I set out with a stranger I met on Craigslist (long story) to visit every station on the orange line. Combined with my other travels, I’ve been to every station in the city - except the new northern extension to the orange line.
Fun fact... Canada has a huge film and TV industry, capitalising on cheaper costs than in America. I was watching John a Wick 2 the other day, and not for the first time did I see a Montréal metro station substituting for New York. Many of the older concrete-heavy green line stations have subbed for stations in the Washington Metro as well.
The new trains are pretty awesome too. As you’ve seen, the heavily Francophile city administration committed the system to a French rubber tyre system in the earliest development stage of the network. There were some advantages - the trains could could down and up steeper gradients than steel wheeled trains (at least in the 1960s) which saves a huge amount of energy in accelerating downhill from near-surface stations and decelerating uphill into the next one. It does however use a lot of tyres...
Bombardier and Alstom initially competed for the contract to build the new trains, but there was a falling out during the bidding process, and eventually they ended up collaborating.
