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j'peux pas croire que je n'y pas pas penser avant: on creuse des km et des km de nouveaux tunnels de metro en dompant toute la terre par dessus la montagne, jusqu'a ce que le mont-royal atteigne 300m en son plus haut point. win-win.

Très impressionnant!

Faire du vélo dans les tunnels de métro abandonnés de Londres ... why not !? http://www.slate.fr/story/97679/velo-tunnels-metro

How Switzerland camouflaged its ready-to-explode architecture during the Cold War I finally had a chance to read John McPhee's book La Place de la Concorde Suisse, his somewhat off-puttingly titled 1984 look at the Swiss military and its elaborately engineered landscape defenses. To make a long story short, McPhee describes two things: how Switzerland requires military service from every able-bodied male Swiss citizen — a model later emulated and expanded by Israel — and how the Swiss military has, in effect, wired the entire country to blow in the event of foreign invasion. To keep enemy armies out, bridges will be dynamited and, whenever possible, deliberately collapsed onto other roads and bridges below; hills have been weaponized to be activated as valley-sweeping artificial landslides; mountain tunnels will be sealed from within to act as nuclear-proof air raid shelters; and much more. First, a quick look at the system of self-demolition that is literally built into the Swiss national infrastructure: To interrupt the utility of bridges, tunnels, highways, railroads, Switzerland has established three thousand points of demolition. That is the number officially printed. It has been suggested to me that to approximate a true figure a reader ought to multiply by two. Where a highway bridge crosses a railroad, a segment of the bridge is programmed to drop on the railroad. Primacord fuses are built into the bridge. Hidden artillery is in place on either side, set to prevent the enemy from clearing or repairing the damage. Further: Near the German border of Switzerland, every railroad and highway tunnel has been prepared to pinch shut explosively. Nearby mountains have been made so porous that whole divisions can fit inside them. There are weapons and soldiers under barns. There are cannons inside pretty houses. Where Swiss highways happen to run on narrow ground between the edges of lakes and to the bottoms of cliffs, man-made rockslides are ready to slide. The impending self-demolition of the country is "routinely practiced," McPhee writes. "Often, in such assignments, the civilian engineer who created the bridge will, in his capacity as a military officer, be given the task of planning its destruction." But this is where a weirdly fascinating, George Dante-esque artifice begins. After all, McPhee writes, why would Switzerland want anyone to know where the dynamite is wired, where the cannons are hidden, which bridges will blow, or where to find the Army's top secret mountain hideaways and resupply shelters? But if you look closely, you start to see things. Through locked gates you see corridors in the sides of mountains-going on and on into the rock, with alight in the ceiling every five meters and far too many to count... Riding around Switzerland with these matters in mind-seeing little driveways that blank out in mountain walls, cavern entrances like dark spots under mountainside railroads and winding corniches, portals in various forms of lithic disguise-you can find it difficult not to imagine that almost anything is a military deception, masking a hidden installation. Full size Indeed, at one point McPhee jokes that his local guide in Switzerland "tends to treat the army itself as if it were a military secret." McPhee points to small moments of "fake stonework, concealing the artillery behind it," that dot Switzerland's Alpine geology, little doors that will pop open to reveal internal cannons and blast the country's roads to smithereens. Later, passing under a mountain bridge, McPhee notices "small steel doors in one pier" hinting that the bridge "was ready to blow. It had been superceded, however, by an even higher bridge, which leaped through the sky above-a part of the new road to Simplon. In an extreme emergency, the midspan of the new bridge would no doubt drop on the old one." It's a strange kind of national infrastructure, one that is at its most rigorously functional — one that truly fulfills its promises-when in a state of cascading self-imposed collapse. I could easily over-quote my way to the end of my internet service here, but it's a story worth reading. There are, for instance, hidden bomb shelters everywhere in an extraordinary application of dual-use construction. "All over Switzerland," according to McPhee, "in relatively spacious and quiet towns, are sophisticated underground parking garages with automatic machines that offer tickets like tongues and imply a level of commerce that is somewhere else. In a nuclear emergency, huge doors would slide closed with the town's population inside." Full size Describing titanic underground fortresses — "networks of tunnels, caverns, bunkers, and surface installations, each spread through many tens of square miles" — McPhee briefly relates the story of a military reconnaissance mission on which he was able to tag along, involving a hydroelectric power station built inside a mountain, accessible by ladders and stairs; the battalion tasked with climbing down into it thus learns "that if a company of soldiers had to do it they could climb the mountain on the inside." In any case, the book's vision of the Alps as a massively constructed — or, at least, geotechnically augmented and militarily amplified — terrain is quite heady, including the very idea that, in seeking to protect itself from outside invaders, Switzerland is prepared to dynamite, shell, bulldoze, and seal itself into a kind of self-protective oblivion, hiding out in artificially expanded rocky passes and concrete super-basements as all roads and bridges into and out of the country are instantly transformed into landslides and dust. http://gizmodo.com/5919581/how-switzerland-camouflaged-its-ready+to+explode-architecture-during-the-cold-war?tag=design

Tunnels Pourquoi ne remplace-t-on pas les tuiles qui tombent? Dany Doucet Le Journal de Montréal 27/06/2009 11h23 Les tuiles des murs des tunnels Louis-Hippolyte- Lafontaine et Ville-Marie ont beau être de plus en plus nombreuses à tomber par terre et donner une impression de laisser-aller à l’entrée de Montréal, il faudra s’y habituer encore un bon bout de temps. Chose certaine, Transports Québec n’a pas de projet précis pour les remplacer à court terme. Il manque pourtant de plus en plus de tuiles dans ces deux tunnels. Parfois, ce sont des surfaces considérables qui se trouvent dénudées. Cette situation avait d’ailleurs été décriée par le président-directeur général de Tourisme Montréal, Charles Lapointe, en janvier 2007. Dans une sortie publique qu’il n’a plus répétée après avoir froissé l’administration Tremblay, M. Lapointe citait quelques exemples de mauvais entretien néfaste à l’image de Montréal, dont l’esthétisme des tunnels. La situation ne s’est certes pas améliorée depuis, chaque tuile tombée n’ayant pas été remplacée. Un projet d’ici cinq ans «Il est possible qu’on remplace ces tuiles par un autre type de revêtement. On pense que ce sera fait d’ici cinq ans», commente le porte-parole du ministère des Transports, Réal Grégoire. Il n’y a pas moins d’un million de tuiles dans les deux plus grands tunnels de la province. Ces tuiles proviennent d’Italie et elles ont la propriété de réfléchir la chaleur en cas d’incendie. Il en coûterait, semble-t-il, une petite fortune pour les remplacer. Une autre solution Transports Québec cherche donc une autre solution. «On sait qu’il y a ici des produits de remplacement et c’est ce que nous sommes en train d’étudier», dit M. Grégoire. Il existe, par exemple, des revêtements pulvérisés qui ressemblent à des gaines en caoutchouc. Entre-temps, les tuiles qui sont tombées n’ont pas été remplacées depuis longtemps. Certains automobilistes se demandent pourquoi on ne les remplace pas au fur et à mesure. «Ça coûte cher de faire des travaux dans les tunnels, note M. Grégoire. Lorsque nous referons le revêtement, nous rénoverons les murs derrière aussi.» Des travaux importants ont été réalisés ce printemps dans le tunnel L.-H.-Lafontaine, durant quatre week-ends d’affilée. Ces travaux consistaient à remplacer les dalles supérieures des bassins de rétention des eaux situés aux extrémités du tunnel. Si le tunnel n’est pas esthétique, en revanche, sa structure est saine et bien solide, selon les ingénieurs qui l’ont inspectée en long et en large durant ce récent chantier. * Le pont-tunnel Louis-Hippolyte-Lafontaine a été inauguré en 1967. S'étendant sur 6 km, dont 1,5 km à 27 mètres de profondeur, il est le plus long tunnel sous l'eau au Canada.

The most expensive tunnel in the world Jul 29th 2012, 17:28 by N.B. | WASHINGTON, D.C. EARLIER this month, Amtrak, America's government-owned passenger rail corporation, released a plan outlining how it's going to spend $151 billion it doesn't currently have (and has no prospect of receiving anytime soon) to bring true high-speed trains to America's crucial Boston-New York-Washington rail axis. Gulliver has already explained why Amtrak's project is ambitious, expensive, and unlikely. But the more you delve into the details of the plans, the sillier they appear. Take, for example, Amtrak's proposal to bore a 10-mile rail tunnel underneath Philadelphia. As Steve Stofka, a transport blogger, explains, this proposal would require the most expensive type of tunnel imaginable—"It is freaking expensive to bore a ten-mile-long tunnel through an alluvial floodplain under a highly urbanised area—and to maintain it, since it will reside below the water table," Mr Stofka writes. At $10 billion, he notes that the project would be about three times as expensive per mile as the Gotthard Base Tunnel under the Swiss Alps. And all this is for marginal improvements in speed and access. The tracks around and through Philadelphia aren't, generally, big obstacles to high-speed rail—the tunnels in and around Baltimore, Maryland are. It would be much cheaper to replace Baltimore's terrible tunnels than to build a fancy new one under Philadelphia. The Philadelphia tunnel, unfortunately, isn't even the worst part of Amtrak's plan. That honour goes to a $7 billion renovation of Washington's Union Station (pictured), which Slate's Matthew Yglesias rightly calls "insane". Amtrak's cost estimate is many times higher than for similar projects in Europe. And as Mr Yglesias notes, it seems that Amtrak doesn't have its priorities straight: [F]rom the look of Amtrak's proposal in addition to the high unit costs problem, there seems to be an awful lot of emphasis on doing stuff that has no really clear operational benefits. For example, they don't like the fact that right now Union Station's existing platforms have unsightly and inconvenient columns in the middle of them. To get rid of the columns, they need to scrap the 2,000-space parking deck that they're supporting. Then they want to replace the parking deck with a 5,000-space four-level underground garage. That's an awful lot of money to spend on something that has minimal operational value from the standpoint of actually operating a railroad. There's no doubt that America's big east-coast cities could benefit from access to true high-speed rail. But before it gets the funding necessary to make that happen, Amtrak should put forth a credible, smart proposal that puts the needs of passengers and the public first. I have taken Amtrak trains out of Union Station several hundred times. I've never given more than a moment's thought to the "unsightly and inconvenient" columns on the platforms, but I have noticed how trains crawl through the tunnels in Baltimore and move much more slowly, overall, than similar trains in Europe. Renovating Union Station and replacing its parking garage isn't likely to make Amtrak's trains go any faster. Amtrak needs to get a handle on which kind of projects are worth billions of taxpayer dollars—and which aren't. http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2012/07/rail-renovations

Puisque ce sujet a été abordé au meet, voici des renseignements sur la CCUM (Climatisation et Chauffage Urbain de Montréal). La centrale thermique est situé au 120 rue Nazareth. À partir de cet endroit, plusieurs tunnels sont aménagés vers le centre-ville, au nord, et vers de nouveaux dévellopement (McGill Ouest, M9, etc) à l'est. Il est important de noter que ce ne sont pas seulement des conduites mais bien des tunnels complets, à l'intérieur desquels se trouve les conduites. Ceci est nécéssaire puisque la pression à l'intérieur de ces conduites est immense, et que si rupture se produisait, la réparation doit être effectué sur le champ, le chauffage et la climatisation du centre-ville en dépend! Voici d'ailleurs la carte de ces tunnels: Selon le site de la CCUM, on découvre que la centrale thermique à Montréal a été inauguré en 1947, soit bien longtemps avant les projets immenses de notre centre-ville. http://www.ccum.com/html/index.html