“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. ...

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