Well, actually, it’s been raining steadily all morning, but I’m still reminded of this wonderfully absurd advertisement for Montreal’s Metro system circa 1976, created without any apparent irony during the post-Expo 67, pre-’76 Olympics boom years:

Note the integration of the Metro’s trademark three-note take-off sound (caused, according to Wikipedia, by the trains’ traction motor control equipment, and thus only coincidentally pitched the same as the introduction to Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man”).  Public transit in Montreal these days involves many fewer mustaches, and marginally less song and dance.

In parenthesis, I’ll add another semi-related video below of a decidedly pre-Charter city. I love it mostly for the droopy Anglo tourist chomping a cigar at the beginning, who barrels up to the pair of stiff French police officers bellowing “WHAR’S UNION SQUARE?”. Communication patterns sometimes don’t seem to have changed much during the intervening decades.

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