Montreal police say a 26-year-old woman is dead after being fatally struck by a train n Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood Tuesday morning.
Authorities say it happened at 9 a.m. on the tracks that run under the Van Horne overpass. She was declared dead at the scene.
A safety perimeter has been set up at the scene. Police say initial information points to this being an accidental death.
Police say it isn’t clear why the woman was on the tracks, but note that this is the site of a popular illegal crossing where another fatal incident occurred in 2022 that called for heightened safety measures and an official pedestrian crossing.
The illegal crossing is a popular shortcut between the Plateau Mont-Royal’s Mile End neighbourhood and the Rosemont borough.
“A couple of hundred people every morning are crossing this passage, so it’s a lot,” Axel Lelaquet, who often uses the crossing, told Global in 2022 after the 31-year-old woman’s death.
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“Just having a simple crossway upwards can basically save a lot of danger,” he said.
A citizens group had been asking Canadian Pacific (CP), now called CPKC, the company which owns the rails, to install a safe passage for pedestrians for more than a decade. At the time, they said that latest accident was a wake-up call for CP.
“People will continue to cut holes in the fence and cross illegally and unsafely because the city and the infrastructure around these train tracks has not adapted to the reality of our neighbourhoods today,” said Mistaya Hemingway, a member of the Collective for Level Crossing.
Efforts to secure the passage have also been made at the federal level. In 2016, the NDP put forward a bill that would give the federal government authority to mandate pedestrian crossings on train tracks, but it didn’t pass.
Global News has reached out to CPKC for comment.
–with files from Gloria Henriquez
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