Montreal’s Metro system celebrated its fiftieth birthday this October. And for a limited time its first-generation “MR-63” cars were available to buy for the bargain price of C$C750–1,000 (£445-£593), along with a C$4000 (£2,370) shipping fee. The two-ton, baby-blue cars make up the oldest fleet in North America. They are gradually being decommissioned.

Out of 30 submissions, the Société de transport de Montreal (STM) has picked seven projects that will receive cars. These include a high-rise community centre built from multiple cars stacked on each other; a 13-story building that will encase over one hundred cars; a car plonked in a botanic garden in remote northern Quebec; and an art-installation made of 16 sets of sliding doors. Submissions were evaluated by the STM on criteria that included optics, heritage value, feasibility and sustainability.

“We wanted to do something crazy, but not too “in-your-face” crazy,” said Frédéric Morin-Bordeleau, co-founder of Projet MR-63, one of the lucky finalist projects. “So we thought, let’s get eight metro trains, create a building out of it, make it self-sustaining and generate revenue, and showcase the culture of Montreal.” He expects the sculpture, which will house a café, bar, gallery and community space, to be complete in 2020.

Artist’s impression. Image: Project MR-63.

Morin-Bordeleau acknowledged that his love of the metro carriages, like many Montrealers’, is steeped in nostalgia for the “glorious era” of the sixties, when Montreal hosted Expo ’67, the world fair that marked Canada’s centennial and attracted fifty million visitors to the city.

On top of the metro system, which was hurriedly built to accommodate Expo crowds, remnants of this era include Moshe Safdie’s iconic Habitat 67 complex, the Montreal Biosphere (capped by a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller) and two large man-made islands in the St-Lawrence river, created and reshaped using rubble dug out by the subway construction.

While he was not alive in the sixties, Morin-Bordeleau’s mother was a photographer for Expo ’67 and “would talk about [it] with stars in her eyes,” he said. He sees the project, which he founded with his brother, as an homage to this period. “We want to make Montreal proud and the metro trains were exactly the symbol we needed. It’s a mix between the glory of the past and visions for the future,” he said.

The brothers were initially inspired by the Village Underground arts centre in Shoreditch, London, which rents out studio space in four upcycled tube carriages to artists and designers.

Parts of MR-63 cars will travel internationally in the form of a travelling art installation. Another finalist of the STM’s call for proposals is interactive art piece Thresholds, a corridor of 16 opening and closing subway doors that people can walk through. Created by Montreal artist Michel de Broin, it was exhibited in Montreal’s this summer and he plans on taking it abroad.

While he acknowledged that the “distinctive” doors of the metro were likely to have a particular effect on a Montrealer, he believes the experience of the piece “will work anywhere”. His website describes the experience as “recalling the digestive tract’s ingestion process as the installation breathes and swells”.

MR-63 cars that are not being upcycled are slowly being retired, a process that is anticipated to finish in mid-2018. Montreal-based metal recycling firm American Iron and Metal is recycling the cars at the rate of one a day, with a new car ferried each morning to their headquarters on a specifically-designed trailer.

The invitable metro map. Image: STM.

The question of what to do with old subway cars has been approached in a variety of ways by different cities. In England, tube cars shuttle passengers down the east coast of the Isle of Wight, while a 1967 Victoria Line tube carriage hosts a monthly supper club in Walthamstow.

In 2015, over 2,500 New York subway cars were dropped into the Atlantic to create an artificial underwater reef for fish and crustaceans. Two of Buenos Aires’ iconic 1913 wooden cars have been converted into diesel-electric buses, and Washington architect Arthur Cotton Moore wants to transform his city’s old metro cars into one-bedroom prefab apartments for the homeless.

Back in Montreal, the subway is receiving a new generation of trains – but like their predecessors, the city’s new underground cars will arrive at stations accompanied by the faint smell of burning wood. That’s because designers have opted to continue making the tyre brake pads out of yellow birch sourced from Quebec’s forests. According to the STM, wooden brake pads are quieter than steel or graphite disc pads, and environmentally safer, given that they do not release of carbon dust into the atmosphere. To prevent friction or burning, the wood is saturated in hot peanut oil, left to drip-dry for 30 days, and soaked in salt water.

Montreal commuters have come off lightly with their subway’s trademark fragrance. Washington DC’s subway cars organic brake pads are often blamed for a lingering fishy smell.