A Tale From Down Below
Nov. 7th, 2011 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidnMy uncle in Germany is very into trains - he has a large collection of miniatures in cabinets around his house, and used to generously bore us all rigid with his slide projector at least once whenever we visited him. I've never understood how they can possibly be interesting myself, or have any comprehension of how anybody can care in places where I've seen posts like "Here's a photograph of an R1S5T on the southbound line from Brick Arch to Dog and Castle." "No, that's a R1S5T/C, I think you'll find."
But there's one part of it that I think I've suddenly understood - coming from this post, I'm absolutely fascinated by the notion that there are abandoned stations hidden somewhere underground, physically accessible but where no train ever goes and where you could never now get to (without walking down the tracks in the dead of night and risking being killed). It sounds like something from a science fiction novel - little pockets of complicated engineering hiding below the city that were once functional and used by people every day, but that have now been long abandoned and forgotten.
The presence of them is something that only really hits you if the subway has been a regular part of your life. Being familiar with the unchanging, fixed chain of stations that a train must always go through - Park Street, Charles/MGH, Kendall, Central, Harvard, Porter, Davis - it's really strange to imagine that that wasn't always the sequence. Near Harvard Station alone, there are three abandoned stations - there used to be one called Stadium that only got occasional use, but two of them were part of the main line. There used to be a Harvard-Brattle (which I imagine must have partially been absorbed by the underground bus tunnel), and most interesting of all, Harvard-Holyoake is apparently still visible down a tunnel if you're looking carefully when the train leaves the station on its current loud squeaking route. But not knowing that it was there, I never saw it - it's as if it was some sort of ghost hiding just out of view of the normal world.
But there's one part of it that I think I've suddenly understood - coming from this post, I'm absolutely fascinated by the notion that there are abandoned stations hidden somewhere underground, physically accessible but where no train ever goes and where you could never now get to (without walking down the tracks in the dead of night and risking being killed). It sounds like something from a science fiction novel - little pockets of complicated engineering hiding below the city that were once functional and used by people every day, but that have now been long abandoned and forgotten.
The presence of them is something that only really hits you if the subway has been a regular part of your life. Being familiar with the unchanging, fixed chain of stations that a train must always go through - Park Street, Charles/MGH, Kendall, Central, Harvard, Porter, Davis - it's really strange to imagine that that wasn't always the sequence. Near Harvard Station alone, there are three abandoned stations - there used to be one called Stadium that only got occasional use, but two of them were part of the main line. There used to be a Harvard-Brattle (which I imagine must have partially been absorbed by the underground bus tunnel), and most interesting of all, Harvard-Holyoake is apparently still visible down a tunnel if you're looking carefully when the train leaves the station on its current loud squeaking route. But not knowing that it was there, I never saw it - it's as if it was some sort of ghost hiding just out of view of the normal world.
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Date: 2011-11-08 02:47 am (UTC)The nearest I've got to... breaking those boundaries was a cave known to my group of friends in university - if you climbed over the rocks next to the tower of the castle (when I described this previously, someone made a comment to the effect of "I didn't know you went to university in Lord of the Rings") and walked along a sort of rock shelf at low tide, there was a spacious cave under the cliff. As the tide came in, however, the only way up was by climbing up to the pool with the seals in it in the nearby aquarium and then getting over a gate into their grounds, so that you didn't have to sidle along the fence on the cliff's edge like so many Princes of Persia. But when you're a student, you can sort of get away with that sort of thing more.
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Date: 2011-11-08 03:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-08 12:20 pm (UTC)I never thought of myself as a 'kid' then, but students do seem awfully young now that I'm a week away from being 27. How frightening.