A transient renewal process based on a sequence of possibly infinite waiting times is defined. The process is studied when the (rescaled) distribution of the waiting times belongs to the subexponential class of distributions. In this case, even conditional on all waiting times observed by time t being finite, the distributions of the forward and backward delays at t are asymptotically degenerate. Also, the conditional moments of the number of events by time t converge to the same finite limits as the unconditional moments.