“It was a scary business. No one else had done such a large brownfield remediation [or as costly, at CDN$500 million] in Canada,” says Pierre St-Cyr, a Montreal urban planning consultant. He was referring to Angus Shops, Montreal, an early 20th century relic of a time when railways tied Canada together.

More than a century’s worth of contaminants had soaked the soil at Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) Angus Shops’ locomotive manufacturing and maintenance facility in downtown Montreal. When CPR closed the sprawling yard in 1992, the soil was far beyond any routine remediation. It was drenched in an environmental mess of heavy metals, petroleum hydrocarbons and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Most of it originated from incomplete coal combustion in steam locomotive engines and fuel leaking from diesel locomotives.

St-Cyr, who was part of CPR’s remediation project team from the beginning, described the abandoned yard as “Canada’s largest scrap yard”—a vast expanse of pitted and discolored soil and water-filled holes, resembling more a World War I battlefield than a railway facility.

The first stage of the remediation process, which began in 1992, was a four-year, 400-borehole undertaking to monitor wells and test pits to pinpoint soil and ground water contamination. An additional 10 years was needed to remove 500,000 square feet of the polluted soil and dump 50,000 truckloads at a secured site at a cost of CDN$11.5 million. ReviSol, the Quebec government’s brownfield remediation agency, contributed CDN$3.68 million toward the cost.

The contamination level exceeded Quebec Ministry of Environment (QME) residential and industrial/ commercial safety standards. It was either padlock the site or remove the poisoned soil and develop a community on the land with clean soil.

“We also had to figure out how to manage the site, with truckloads of contaminated soil hauled away through residential neighborhoods,” St-Cyr recalls.

In addition, there was the noise and disruption of returning truck traffic bearing enough clay and clean topsoil to cover the exposed site.

Adventurous developers who might have considered building residential projects on the urban site were deterred by the potential scale of contamination and associated cost to clean the site, as well as the legal liability and other brownfield cleanup issues. It was such a burdensome prospect that CPR was forced to step in where home builders feared to tread, or perhaps more aptly, stir up the soil.

Several buildings left on the abandoned site were demolished, except for a 1,320-foot-long locomotive manufacturing plant, which was renovated and split into a Loblaws (Canada’s largest grocery chain) and a business incubator. A small fire station was converted into a liquor store.

Ten years after the first truck load of polluted soil rumbled away, the reincarnation of Angus Shops as a mainly residential community with a smaller commercial and industrial component is nearly completed. Marc Lapierre, director of CPR’s special projects and asset rationalization, says about 1,200 single-family houses and low-rise condo apartments will have been built on the site when the project is complete.

Lapierre has moved on to an even larger CPR intermodal project on a Montreal-area brownfield site in the preliminary stages of development. St-Cyr, who recently joined SITQ Quebec, the real estate arm of Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, the province’s largest pension fund manager, says if a redevelopment on the scale of an Angus Shops were attempted again, more attention should be paid to the impact of truck traffic on the environmental well-being of the neighborhood. Perhaps in situ remediation might be considered to avoid traffic pollution.

There is, in fact, a technology campus under development on the industrial portion of the site which could spearhead that kind of research.

Albert Warson is a Toronto-based freelance writer/editor specializing in real estate development-related subjects.