[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="501" caption="STM archives: Chasse-neige, construit par la Montreal Street Railway en 1910"][/caption] Editor's note: Last week's snowstorm combined with the recent positive news about the feasibility of boring a transit tunnel under Ottawa's downtown made this story cross-posted from Spacing Montréal about the difficulty of running streetcars/trams in severe weather seem especially timely to me. No doubt surface LRT technology will have improved since the days when trams rattled through Montréal, but still, could it be that a downtown tunnel has an "all-season" advantage not normally factored in by its opponents? Over on Metropolitan News, Andy Riga recently recently put a spotlight on the debate about how tramways would fare the harsh Montreal winters. I've always thought it was a silly question: electric tramways operated in Montreal from the 1892 until 1959. Surely if trams worked over century ago, they would work just as well today, if not better? So I decided to consult Spacing Montreal's favourite specialist on transit-of-bygone-times, who goes by the name of Cdnlococo, to get the lowdown on how tramways survived the Montreal winter. Below, he describes how juggling snow, ice, and electric trams was no easy task (the text has been re-arranged a bit for length and flow): Streetcars DID operate successfully in Montreal for many, many winters, but, that's all that were available, and there were hundreds of employees and much expensive specialized equipment at work 24/7 at great cost!