Secret Subways and Clandestine Underground Transit

reply to post by flyandi


Ah, but who really trusts Bill Gates? I mean, doesn't he advocate thinning the population? Something I have heard several times, but never really checked into it. The guy does seem like an elitist though. By the way, no one ever said these bunkers have to be all that private. By all means flaunt it in the public eye, then when something goes down lock them all out and wait until the coast is clear.

reply to post by Skyfloating


I think they would simply use helicopters and aircraft to exit a dangerous site rather than the mega millions of pounds/dollars in constructing and maintaining tunnels just to evacuate the elite.

But of course tunnels are always interesting places!

Originally posted by sonnny1
reply to post by Skyfloating

 

Wonder who uses it really?

S&F

Scientologists among others, if the Cruise rumor holds any water.

I would wonder about the overhead on maintaining the infrastructure, particularly of a cross-continental system. It would have to be prohibitive- especially if it's just a fancy mode of transport for the hopelessly rich. Used for transport of, uh, sensitive cargo: that I could almost see, but ground or air are no less viable- from a security standpoint, anyway.

And a lot less costly.

You know, I'm just being extra cautious, because I love this idea, and have for a while: secret subways. I even set a painting in one. Here are a few highly recommended riffs on that theme:

Starting in 1899, the Illinois Telephone and Telegraph Company dug under most of downtown Chicago, creating nearly 62 miles of tunnels, six feet wide by seven and a half feet tall. Their original intention was to house telephone cables, but the company also installed tracks to make getting around easier. Spotting an opportunity, they renamed their business The Chicago Tunnel Company in 1906 and became an underground delivery service instead.

At their peak use, the tunnels buzzed with around 150 small locomotives, hauling 3,300 miniature train cars that delivered 600,000 tons of freight every day. Using special elevators connected to the tunnels, businesses like Marshall Field’s would get new clothing and shoe shipments from the rail, but delivering coal for furnaces was the company’s bread and butter. However, by the late-1940s, most buildings were using natural gas for heat and those still using coal were getting it by truck, which was much cheaper. Business declined until the company went bankrupt, and the tunnels were sealed in 1959. Shortly after, scrap metal thieves cleaned out the tunnels, including steel doors that were meant to close off the passageways that ran under the Chicago River.

Read the full text here: www.mentalfloss.com...
--brought to you by mental_floss!

www.mentalfloss.com...

reply to post by Eidolon23

Scientologists among others, if the Cruise rumor holds any water.

It doesn't. Did you actually read the article?

I'm not trying to defend Tom Cruise or Scientology, hell, I had my own run in with them that could've ended much worse then it did, but please, read the article that the OP used as a source. Which he unfortunately also misread somehow.

I watched a show on the History Channel the other night where it talked about the Waldorf tunnel. It showed video of the tunnel and said after Franklin Delano Roosevelts death a train car showed up one day unexpectedly. It is still sitting there and they are not 100% positive whos car it was but it is completely bulletproof and has doors big enough for a car to drive through.

Roosevelts Train Car

Strict

Originally posted by Sambell
reply to post by Eidolon23

 

Scientologists among others, if the Cruise rumor holds any water.

It doesn't. Did you actually read the article?

I'm not trying to defend Tom Cruise or Scientology, hell, I had my own run in with them that could've ended much worse then it did, but please, read the article that the OP used as a source. Which he unfortunately also misread somehow.

I've run into that story before, and mm-hm- it's totally unsubstantiated.

"If the Cruise rumor holds any water" was supposed to signal a joke.

reply to post by Eidolon23


Oh ok, I didn't understand that. Sorry if I came off as rude or anything.

reply to post by Skyfloating


Always the last to know about the really cool stuff.

There was a thread here about the old mail underground system a few months ago I think. Lots of great photos. That one was mostly abandoned though.

Was in the military, never invited to ride the secret trains.

reply to post by Skyfloating


For those who want to see a lot of what is talked about in this thread :

en.wikipedia.org...

It's a nice Tv Show. The host can be hard to stand sometimes because he is over-reacting to everything. But the images and footage is wonderful. It seems like every major city in the world have a lot of underground stuff!

My favorite one was the one in Paris.

Enjoy!!

To those claiming this is all bunk or there is no tunnel from England to NY. Don't be so sure. While there is no evidence of a tunnel from NY to England it is certainly possible and there is good evidence of other tunnels.'

However to show the real possibility of what they can do how about the English Channel tunnel from England to France? Its 33 miles long and 150 miles below the sea bed in some places... And that is with the technology the public is allowed to know of:

In a ceremony presided over by England's Queen Elizabeth II and French President Francois Mitterand, a rail tunnel under the English Channel was officially opened, connecting Britain and the European mainland for the first time since the Ice Age.

The channel tunnel, or "Chunnel," connects Folkstone, England, with Sangatte, France, 31 miles away. The Chunnel cut travel time between England and France to a swift 35 minutes and eventually between London and Paris to two-and-a-half hours.

As the world's longest undersea tunnel, the Chunnel runs under water for 23 miles, with an average depth of 150 feet below the seabed. Each day, about 30,000 people, 6,000 cars and 3,500 trucks journey through the Chunnel on passenger, shuttle and freight trains.

Millions of tons of earth were moved to build the two rail tunnels--one for northbound and one for southbound traffic--and one service tunnel. Fifteen thousand people were employed at the peak of construction. Ten people were killed during construction.

www.history.com...

reply to post by hawkiye


Nobody claimed it as i'm aware of. (New-York/England)

Just that the article linked in the OP was about something else.

Peace out.

I could write for hours talking about all the facts and trivia concerning the never completed Cincinnati Subway tunnels, but instead, i’ll just post a few pictures taken from various other sites.
The reason I’m posting these pics, and not my own, is because it is IMPOSSIBLE to get into the tunnels and take any myself. You used to be able to sneak in, but all the entrances have now been secured, they REALLY don’t want you in there. There are occasionally tours given of parts of the tunnels, but even on those, no cameras are allowed.

Heard about this before, but never looked into it further.

LINK

I'm really enjoying this thread, thank you. I've always been fascinated by these types of things, interestingly enough there is a secret network of tunnels beneath my city. It's not actually a secret technically but almost no one seems to know about it even after there have been articles written on the subject...like this one...

Secret Tunnels Under Downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma

While this is a wonderful and intriguing thread, I've problems with vast underground tunnel systems.

There's the question of workforce to pull it off, and even then, once done, there's that whole question about maintenance.
Any underground system is going to need pumping stations for water evacuation, as well as a powered fresh air vent/circulation system. These systems need maintenance and at the very very least; inspection on a periodic basis.

The human element in maintenance alone would eventually let slip more than spurious rumor.

Additionally, there's urban explorers.
Take this Brave Young Lady in Russia for instance.
She stomps around in old Soviet era underground bunkers long abandoned and has even snuck into rocket factory.
Take some time to work through her photo journals. Tons of spooky, strange, and very interesting finds are there. If you don't speak/read Russian, just use a Google Translate plug-in on your browser that will translate the whole page.

Point being, there's more than just some jinxy girl in Russia out there exploring the lengths, breadths, and depths of our urban environments. Urban explorers in the U.S. and anywhere else there's suppose to be these tunnels would have certainly gotten at least a whiff of something regarding this allegedly vast tunnel system, especially if there's one that runs under the pond between UK and USA.

Imagine the maintenance duty on that stretch of tube. It'd be a long walk, from mouth to mouth.

Lastly, especially in consideration of a supposed transatlantic tube, there's Plate Tectonics to think about.
The Earth isn't static.
As the Americas drift further away from Europe, that tunnel would need to have an elastic element to keep up with geological crawl.

TL;DR: No worries, you won't believe it anyways!

When I was a teenager in the suburbs of Boston, Ma, we used any excuse we could to have a beer and bonfire party out in the woods. One summer (I want to say the summer of 2002) we decided to throw such a party at "the sand pits" which was an old abandoned gravel yard spread over a couple hundred acres.

At approximately one o'clock in the morning my friends and I drove onto the dirt access road toward the party location. It was dark and there were many intersecting dirt roads along the way and apparently we took a wrong turn. When we were deep into the pits, we turned a corner and about one hundred yards up the road was a guard house with a gate. It was lit up. I wanted to turn back but my friends wanted to take a look. "Nothing good can come from this", I remember thinking. We drove up to the guard house, but nobody was inside and the gate was up. My friends wanted to drive on ahead. Why is there a guard house out here?

Beyond the next corner we came upon a small "village" of tents, dozens upon dozens of them. These were big tents like the military uses, but they were white. Everything was lit up like it was daytime with enormous staging lights. It was an incredible sight! What the hell was going on here in our little town, in the middle of the night?

We preceded to drive into the middle of this tent village. Again, I didn't want to. There was not a single person to be seen. It was surreal. We stopped the car and got out. As soon as we emerged from the vehicle three people came out of a tent, two men and a woman. They all wore hardhats. I was expecting them to be very angry with our trespass and call the police right away. They didn't. They were extremely friendly and greeted us with handshakes. They never even asked us what we were doing there; perhaps they thought the guard let us through. They all looked and acted like they were heavily under the influence of drugs. After our welcoming, if strange exchange, we asked the obvious question.

"What are you working on out here?" They replied that they'd be more than happy to show us. They preceded to walk us over to where one of the huge staging-light setup was located. They showed us a hole or shaft in the ground. It didn't look impressive to me at first, until I got right to the edge of it. The hole itself wasn't huge, maybe 40ft by 40ft, but it was DEEP and was totally lit up all the way to the bottom. Looking down gave me the spins. The three hard-hatted workers said they were building a tunnel down there. Holy smokes!

"Do you want a tour down there?" They asked. "Oh, hell no" I thought. Although they were friendly, the three hard-hatted workers were giving me extremely bad vibes. The whole tent village in the middle of the sandpits at one in the morning situation gave me a bad vibe. Something was not right, obviously. "Sure! We'd love to see the tunnel" my friends replied. I was totally freaked out. However, I agreed to go down as well. I figured I'd rather go down there with my friends than stay up here among the tents, alone. One side of the hole had what I can only describe as am industrial scaffold elevator. We approached the elevator and all got on it. As we descended to the bottom one of the hard hats said we would be descending nearly 500 feet. When the elevator stopped, we stepped off into a smallish, horizontal tunnel. It was large enough to drive an SUV into, but no larger. Again, it was absolutely surreal. The lighting was bright and I felt like I could see for miles. It was like being inside of the "death star" in the movie star wars. There were other hardhats down there. They seemed equally fine or oblivious to the fact that four teenagers were just walking around their tunnel.

We stayed down there for maybe 5 minutes. We got back on the elevator and rode it to the surface. My friends and I thanked the hard-hats "wow, that was really cool, thanks!" and just got back in car and left. We had a party to get to, after all.

And that's it. That's my story and I swear it's true. I'm still not sure what to make of it. It's certainly one of the stranger experiences I've ever had. To this day I don't know what the tunnel's purpose was. We didn't ask and they didn't tell.

Hi everyone, an interesting read. I gotta say that there is definitely more below ground than we are led to believe. My father worked as an electrical engineer for Daniel,Mann,Johnson, and Mendenhal for over 10 years back in the late 70's thru 80's. He had a TS clearance and for about 6 months he was deployed to Tonepah NV where he and the other engineers would get on a bus daily and drive and hour into the desert where he would 'go underground'. He had told me that he was involved in the UG MX missile system which was being built to combat the 'eyes' of the Soviet Satellites. Essentially he told me that there were "miles and miles" of tunnels in which flat bed train cars would have the MX missiles lowered onto them and transported to points that he thought were as many as 20 to 50 miles away. The idea was that the Soviets would zoom over, see it, and then we would lower it down, move it, and raise it up elsewhere. He had told me that there were different levels that some of his buddys worked on that he never got to see. Although I have no 'hard' proof of these things of which I write, I highly doubt that my father lied to me about it. If anything I think that he didn't give me the whole story.

Well I'll admit I don't use the normal subways.... but you're still dreaming.

cool stuff, when i was younger i read of some new york, pennsylvania coal/steel/railroad barons built private rail lines into the city that would either tie into the old lines or be a one and done line that just was for their private cars to have parties on or get into the city quickly. i dont know if they were underground though. a place you might want to look is the building plans from that era, town halls may still have them or public libraries? my friend bought a really old house and they went to town hall to see if they had the plans and they did! almost 120+ years old or something.

reply to post by Skyfloating


I know you say evidence is anecdotal but your first link to Tom Cruise makes it look like you are clutching at straws lets look what the link actually says which is far from what you imply.

The production company has even rented an entire subway train for $10,000 — which covers the cost of the motorman and conductor and about two hours of time — to take Cruise from Harlem to the official Midtown movie premiere on the last leg of his journey.

Your other one re the Waldorf Astoria well much the same as above you imply it's something special when it's the complete opposite!

Although the “station” (it’s really an abandoned loading dock) predates the Waldorf Astoria

The basement subway access area was adapted and used to ferry dignitaries and other notable visitors upstairs in a large adjacent elevator.

Not as grand as you made it out to be.

This was more of a secret subway in London but it was well known!

The London Mail Subway. (no longer in use)

Designed solely for movement of letters and parcels
• Operated 19 hours a day, 286 days a year
• 23 Miles (37 Kilometres) of 2 foot gauge track
• 70 feet (21 meters) below the streets of London
• Fully automated, computer controlled trains
• Carried the Capitals mails for over 75 years
• Once served 9 stations, including 2 mainline stations
• Once carried around 4 million letters every day
• Paddington to Whitechapel, with all stops, in 26 minutes

Most of the others seem based on the usual conspiracy claptrap and wishful thinking after all it took 7 years and £9 Billion to build the channel tunnel digging from both sides and that's only 31.5 miles long with 24 miles under the sea.

So not much chance of a trans Atlantic tunnel ever being built

Do you read your own links because it doesn't look like you did!

Originally posted by Skyfloating

I'm also surprised by how something like this tunnel from NY to London could have remained unknown to the wider public. I would assume that workers sign confidentiality agreements.

Or compartmentalization of information. As a worker you'd build a small stretch of a larger tunnel and never really question what its for. This would be faciliated by companies such as this: Robbins.

It's fantasy

One proposed route for the transatlantic maglev train passes through northeastern Canada before barreling toward the British Isles and continental Europe, briefly kissing terra firma on Greenland and Iceland. Because aboveground sections would be cheaper to build than their underwater counterparts, such a route would be more economical than a direct shot through the Atlantic.

Ah, the costs: Estimates range from $25 million to $50 million per mile. Another hurdle: safety. But Davidson believes a test case might mitigate concerns. “Maybe a tunnel across Lake Ontario would show how it reacts to dynamic conditions and give us a better understanding of the costs,” he muses. “A transatlantic tunnel will be done. We just have to be as interested in it as we are in getting to the Moon.”

You thought this thread might be derailed well you have done a great job yourself in doing that!

Originally posted by Asktheanimals

I have friends in the mining industry who have confirmed as much to me.

I`m glad to hear that. That means, to me personally, it may be worth researching.