You may be aware that in February, Metro began retiring the Breda 4000-Series railcars, starting with 4054 and 4055. While most of the retired cars will likely be sold for scrap, not all of them will. When 4089 was retired, it was cut up and converted into vendor kiosks, intended for use at Grosvenor-Strathmore station. Today was the first day of this pop-up market, which will run at least through the end of June, and eventually be incorporated into a new development at Grosvenor station.
So Elyse, Elyse’s father Joe, and I gave it a look. The car is cut up into different sections, with the various sections arranged around the station entrance. Here’s an overview of one side of the setup:
Then there were a few different kiosks set up. One contained a bakery:
Interestingly enough, someone was selling clothes out of the back part of the bakery section.
Then someone was selling clothes and hats in another section:
Another contained a vendor selling flowers and other plants:
Another contained a juice vendor:
One thing interesting about the juice section is that it contained the center doors:
I checked the door release to see what it looked like:
Door release handle for the #10 door. The seal was missing, but surprisingly, so is the release mechanism.
Then another section contained a table and a computer monitor:
Seats from the car were used as benches:
What I would give to have Breda seats in my house, ya know?
And then there was the front section, containing the cab:
The Breda logo on the exterior is still intact.
Meanwhile, they let Elyse and me in the cab. I got photos of Elyse closing the doors, first on the left:
And then on the right:
We also set the ID and destination to make it a proper train to Grosvenor:
And then Elyse put her hand on the master controller and pretended to operate:
Then the rest of it looked like Metro:
Then there was also a sculpture made using the various mechanical parts of the car. It was gone before we arrived, but here it is, taken by a colleague of mine who was there earlier:
Photo: A. Hastings
So all in all, this was fun. Glad to see a retired Metro railcar given new life. I hope that this pop-up market does really well, and I also hope to see more Metro railcars get new life in creative ways after they’re decommissioned before it’s all over.