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

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

I've always loved seeing what places used to look like, and what happens to things over time, and being places that feel public but are effectively private, and for all of these reasons I've always wanted to get into urban exploration... but fears of legality and risk have kept me from ever trying it. It does have a wonderful sort of allure to it, doesn't it? And for some reason, I know what you mean about underground ones being more special - I've always wanted to hide in a subway station until after closing, and then walk down the tracks and visit all the different stations on foot, at my own pace... except that I'd probably either run into homeless people, drug users, or security guards who are looking for either of the previous two. Still, I've always had the idea in mind.

"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."

And that's where my hair stood up.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

"Drug users", wow, I sound like my mother. You know what I mean. :P

[davidn]

I knew that if anyone would appreciate this feeling, it would be you! For me, it's the sense of mystery, of something that used to be part of normal life just being... left there because there's no point in removing it, even though it's never going to be used again. It's fascinating that there's so much that we don't see or don't explore in our daily lives.

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.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

So, wait - you would walk into a cave that would fill up behind you with water, and the only way out was into an animal enclosure at an aquarium, which you would then climb out of and then... walk nonchalantly out the main gate? (Why didn't the seals leave the same way you got in? Or did they, and they just kept coming back for the free scraps?) There's something wonderful about that sort of brazen trespassing you can do when you're a kid, back when you can convince yourself that it's still alright because everyone else does it... that's stirring up a memory for me, but I can't put my finger on what it is.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

I didn't make it past the hyphen before my brain just latched on to this. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DjOL2we8ko&t=0m4s)

[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.

[igorium.livejournal.com]

Midnight meat express, lol

[davidn]

Well, I should say publically that I'm not stupid enough to enter a cave that fills up with water - the high tide, though, would cover the route that we used to get there, and if the water was particularly high, the route around to the other nearby beach as well, making going up to the aquarium the safer and drier option. The seals didn't leave the same way because of the gate and their lack of opposable thumbs.

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.

[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)

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

London has a crazy amount of this, as you'd expect from the world's oldest underground railway. The fact the tube arose as a bunch of competing companies is one of the oddest things about it.

This site (http://underground-history.co.uk/aldwych.php)'s a great source of information on the London underground's closed stations.

[davidn]

I find the best thing about that page is he was considerate enough to explain how the station fitted into the rules of Mornington Crescent! America doesn't have anything like this - I don't know what the term is for an in-joke when it's relevant to an entire country, but... British culture is full of them, something I didn't truly appreciate until looking at it from a distance.

[davidn]

There are some things I'm frankly afraid to Google.

[igorium.livejournal.com]

ROFL
confused the name, it's even scarier to Google actually: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0805570/

[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.

[jenny0.livejournal.com]

Yes! I totally agree. I think it is so fascinating to me because when you're underground, it's all kind of amorphous - sort of like how the Tube map doesn't reflect an actual map of the lines? So there could be this entire hidden station right there and you'd never know it! Perfect setting for scifi/steampunk/horror.

[davidn]

I was amazed enough the first time I sat in the front carriage of a train where the driver had left their curtains open, and you could see out the front of the train and down the tunnel - it seems so strange and different, just being able to see the corners that you don't normally feel, and the stations approaching from a distance rather than being carried suddenly into brief spots of light in a line of darkness.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

*ahem*

H, is for my alma mater Harvard,
C, it stands for Central, next stop on the line,
K, is for the cozy Kendall station
and C, is Charles that overlooks the brine...
P, is Park Street, busy Boston station,
and W, is Washington, you see...
Put them all together they spell:

"HCKC - PW!"

Which is just about what Boston means to me! -Tom Lehrer


I didn't know where you lived, until I saw those station names, and was reminded of this famous song..

[davidn]

I had never heard of it until someone brought it up on the linked post, but it's a nice observation :) I feel rather bad that the pattern's been disturbed, as Washington has since been renamed Downtown Crossing. (And it doesn't really deserve to be a separate station anyway - "Park Street South" would be more accurate, seeing as there are at most fify metres of tunnel between it and the next platform.)

[jenny0.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this whole thing all week. I think the idea of abandoned stations is kind of Romantic (or maybe sublime? It's been a while since first year History of Art) in that I feel an inexplicable yearning that there MUST be new inhabitants with exotic and fantastic backstories. Would love to explore them someday but fear of dark/crackheads will probably preclude that.