Westmount recently renewed a lease with CP Rail for a section of land adjacent to the tracks where the City has erected an experimental prototype sound barrier.

The 30-metre-long test section, made of concrete with a transparent plastic top, has been in place for several years at the foot of Abbott and Lewis avenues below Ste. Catherine Street.

At least $8 million more could eventually be spent on a permanent sound barrier about a mile long, which would extend from Atwater to Lansdowne avenues.

With impending major demolition and reconstruction work due to start soon on the expressway, Director General Duncan Campbell says “an excellent opportunity to extend the barrier to the whole width of Westmount” is presenting itself.

Campbell says the City wrote to Quebec in July, although a response has yet to be received. Last month, Quebec’s Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE) released an impact report on the Turcot project after holding public consultations over the past year.

The BAPE told the provincial Ministry of Transport it should go back to the drawing board and take the concerns of local citizens more seriously. However, since the report’s release, according to Campbell, nothing has been heard from the MTQ on Westmount’s proposal for a full-length sound barrier.

“We’re hoping the government would move ahead with it — in other words they would pay for it,” he says. “Because normally a sound barrier would go in with 50 per cent of the cost borne by the municipality, 50 per cent by the MTQ. But in this case we have no indication that the government is interested in extending the sound barrier or paying for it.

“We would wait to see what opportunities there are to extend the sound barrier, and then we would decide whether the one we have or something similar to that is what we would wish. But we basically re-started the discussion that given the opportunity with the Turcot, wouldn’t it be a great time to re-think the whole issue of the sound barrier along our southern limit?”