A Tale From Down Below

[davidn]

My 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.

Comments

[kibet.livejournal.com]

You know, on my way back fromm Dublin the other day, I was all set up to write as I had a 2.5 hour journey. An 83 year old man sat opposite me and mentioned how this was the new 46 train. He was an avid train enthusiast and talked about how we had been previously been using 45s but they were phasing them out for 46s. I said that I thought that there wasn't a change so how could he tell. He then pointed out the numbers on the trains, so when there was 22 246 on the side it meant a class 22 train, the driving carriage (2) and model 46.

Apparently they have 3 carriage and 6 carriage trains, with carriage numbers 3,4,2 and 1,7,6,5,4,2. I had always thought that they had been like license plates. Also 4 foot 8 and a half is the international standard gait of the tracks. There was also a 7 foot gait and when they brought them in in ireland, they ended up using a 5 foot 3 gait. This means that it is highly unlike to be a tunnel on the existing railway from UK to Ireland. Also that when they were building the first railway line in Australia, they used british and irish engineers. One set started in Perth and the other in Melbourne. When they met in Adelaide (or the middle) then they hit a problem as one had used the 4 foot 8 and a half and the other a 5 foot 3. I have yet to confirm this but makes agood story at least.

So needless to say we talked for the whole journey.

[davidn]

Goodness me. I'm glad you survived.

(Although I have to admit to being curious as to why they number the carriages 3-4-2 and 1-7-6-5-4-2, instead of going in the more traditional numerical order)

[kibet.livejournal.com]

I think 1,2,3 are the end trains. I think the diffference between 1 and 2 is the presence of the dining cart or toilets. And I think not all carriages have toilets so that might what makes the difference between the middle carriages. So if 4 has no toilet then it is just a spacer train.