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There was a study on the TTC subway and they discovered the air quality was 10x worse than above ground and on par with Beijing. The accumulation of dusty linty particles on the walls has a cute name too "tunnel fur". I remember seeing workers going into the tunnels wearing N99 masks after that report was released.

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I always like the (grease?) smell in Montréal Metro stations but never thought about it in terms of particulate matter concentrations.

Unfortunately the only smell I can associate with the Montréal metro is piss

I understood that the Montreal metro trains used wood breaks and peanut oil. Hard to say if that makes the same mess, but the rubber tires surely leave something. Also, the new rames may use different breaking technology.

They initially used different brakes, but they reverted to the good old peanut oil brakes because they had issues of some sort with dust.

I'm struggling to find a source that tells the reason, but here you can see they chose wooden brakes.

https://www.stm.info/sites/all/modules/custom/stm_import/imp...

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