After nearly forty years, the Mark I trains used on the Expo and Millennium lines of Metro Vancouver’s are finally being retired with longer and more comfortable trains. TransLink has been retiring the original trains from time to time either through them being repurposed by other interested parties or scrapping unwanted or worthless trains.

This page here has been updated using information collected via social media or online databases such as CPTDB and OMCZero. TransLink doesn’t really advertise when they say goodbye to a train set so this page will be updated whenever I get wind of another train retirement (feel free to poke me).

If you want to know about the great new trains being introduced to the network, TransLink’s public-facing blog has an article on the Mark V!

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Status

Current State

Some explainers

Why two numbers

All of the Mark I trains are in two-car “married” pairs or sets. This means that these trains are permanently affixed to each other and thus are one whole system basically.

Scrapped vs. Repurposed

Some trains have been sent to recyclers so I have marked them as scrapped. As for trains that have been repurposed, this typically means that someone else has taken them and used them for something else.

Why are they being retired?

The trains don’t meet the needs of the system any longer and have logged many kilometres. In fact, one car I believe is approaching 7 million kilometres, which would put it near a third of the distance to Venus at its shortest.

Knowing when a train will be retired

I have no idea how TransLink decides this, but I was told that if you see a Mark I train at the yard in Burnaby sitting on one of the outermost tracks, it’s potentially never going to be in service again.