Tunnels

Driving is slowly killing us, a freeway expansion uncovers geological treasures, Londoners protest the city’s poor cycling conditions, what dive bar bathrooms can tell us about our neighborhood, and a quick look at San Francisco’s real underground (not BART). All in this week’s urban reads. Can inner-city farms, pocket parks, and urban orchards really save…

You Could Be the Proud Owner of These 19th-Century British Tunnels

Sure, this 2,000 square-foot, no-windows, no-view property is a bit of a fixer-upper. But think of the Halloween parties you could throw down here! This set of 200-year old tunnels beneath the British port city of Plymouth are going up for auction next month for the low-low price of $30,590. The three 60-foot tunnels were…

27 More Things Hiding In New York City’s Secret Tunnels

In honor of the rediscovery of New York City’s long-lost cow tunnels, we asked you to photoshop up some other goodies that might be hiding right beneath our feet. A lot of them involved poop. But surprising as it may be, our winner this week is entirely fecal free. Please say congratulations to Orion who…

The Colossal Railway That’s Quietly Taking Shape 160 Feet Below NYC

Maybe we can’t build the world’s deepest undersea tunnel in seven years like some cities, but New York still has some serious mega-construction chops. Behold: The latest photos from 120 to 160 feet below Grand Central Station, where workers are building the largest public transportation project in the US. https://gizmodo.com/worlds-deepest-undersea-tunnel-weaves-together-two-con-1454513090 The East Side Access Project—which…

NYC’s First Inflatable Tunnel Plug Will Stop Floods, Smoke, and Gas

After Hurricane Sandy decimated the subway system last year, officials pledged to install new devices to help halt the rising tides—including flood gates and, more intriguingly, a device called a “tunnel plug.” https://gizmodo.com/this-giant-tube-stopper-will-plug-flooded-subways-and-c-5897003 During a “Sandy Resilience Tour” last week, the MTA unveiled a working prototype of the plug, which was installed over the summer…

Photoshop Contest: What Else Is Hiding in New York City’s Tunnels?

You may have read about the lost cow tunnels of New York City yesterday. And if you haven’t, you should! It’s a great story—and the subject of this week’s photo challenge. https://gizmodo.com/the-lost-cow-tunnels-of-new-york-city-1455215193 Now that everyone’s caught up, you know that New York City may or may not be home to an elaborate network of underground…

Bon Voyage, Big Bertha! Seattle Digs a Cave For the Future

In coffee shops and bookstores across Seattle this summer, advertisements for concerts and gallery shows shared space with a less common urban invitation: to a party for a really big drill. The drill—specially designed to dig a tunnel underneath downtown Seattle, building new car capacity to replace an aging, earthquake-damaged viaduct that has dominated Seattle’s…

Why the Biggest Obstacle for Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Might Be Tunnels

It all sounds so Jetsonian. A new 600 mph “Hyperloop” method of transportation connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco? That’s the buzz around the internet water cooler as people guess what Elon Musk has in store for the transportation of tomorrow. I say, sign me up! But if we take any lessons from past visions…

There May Be a Brand New, Sprawling Subway System… For Our Giant Nuclear Missiles

In an effort to upgrade its aging nuclear weapons and accompanying silos, the Air Force is exploring the possibility of chauffeuring its missiles around in a massive, underground network of tunnels. Driving Miss Daisy, meet the Apocalypse. Though the idea of nuclear weapons zipping around underfoot may sound mildly horrifying, the mysteriously undefined “trackless” system…

Incredible Images of the Massive New Tunnels Hollowing New York City

There is a 22-foot-long, 200-ton steel monster under Manhattan. Dead, resting deep somewhere under Grand Central Station and Park Avenue, this machine and her twin brother excavated the massive tunnels that you can see here, one of the largest public transportation works of our time. https://gizmodo.com/this-200-ton-earth-worm-is-now-dying-under-new-york-5825349 Here’s an impressive new look at the amazing tunnels…

Driving through the world’s longest road tunnel is a trip through hyperspace

Completed in 2000, Norway’s fifteen-mile-long Lærdal Tunnel cuts through a mountain range near the village of Lærdalsøyri. To ease drivers’ claustrophobia and to prevent the underground monotony from lulling motorists to sleep, the tunnel is punctuated with a series of caverns designed to resemble impending daylight — perhaps that of some distant, blue raspberry sun.…

Mole Man of Hackney’s tunnel-filled home is for sale

Civil engineer William Lyttle was known as the “Mole Man of Hackney” after spending 40 years digging a network tunnels beneath his home. Now Lyttle’s property is up for sale, although with considerably fewer tunnels. Lyttle began his subterranean project in the early 1960s, carving out his own little world beneath his east London home.…

Shadowy scenes from the abandoned Los Angeles subway system

Design writer Alissa Walker recently took a tour of L.A.’s original subway system, one whose tunnels are no longer in operation, though they remain down there bricked off and all but forgotten beneath buildings downtown. Cue horror movie soundtrack here, with hapless apartment dwellers in a newly renovated downtown loft complex finding strange things coming…

Giant “Metal Moles” Are Tunneling through London

Like benevolent, mechanical Tremors worms, a team of eight Tunnel Boring Machines are inching their way across England’s capital city and leaving neatly packed railway tunnels in their wake. Instead of, you know, all that death, mayhem, and Kevin Bacon. London’s been kicking around the idea of a central East-West underground railway route since the…

Turning tunnels into musical instruments

The damp, dingy tunnels below Waterloo station in London are hardly your typical concert hall. But last weekend, as part of the Mindful exhibition, artist Oliver Beer brought a choir down to create ethereal music by turning the space into a giant musical instrument. To make the space resound, the singers needed to tap into…

The sea caverns of Singapore

Singapore has embarked upon the excavation of an underground oil reserve, expanding the city’s industrial port beneath the floor of the Pacific Ocean. It is “no ordinary construction site,” the BBC tells us, but an elaborate project of engineering and infrastructure currently underway “several hundred feet underground, below the seabed in Singapore.” There, workers are…

There’s Going to Be an Underwater Tunnel Connecting Russia to Alaska

Ваше здоровье! Let us toast the Russians and their $65 billion Siberian-Alaskan underwater train tunnel! At 65-miles, the proposed tunnel would be twice as long as the Chunnel between France and England, and could connect New York City with London. Unfortunately for vagabonds, the high speed rail system proposed by the Russians would be used…

Inside Gaddafi’s Secret Underground Labyrinth

Oh, Gaddafi, you eccentric old creeper. Of course you have a gigantic network of tunnels under Tripoli so you can sneak around and do dastardly shit. Yeah, well, all your tunnel are belong to rebels. The Libyan oppostion and a couple TV crews have finally breached Gaddafi’s massive complex of underground tunnels. Nobody is yet…

Over 700 weird twisting passages discovered underground in Bavaria

Churchyards and private farmlands throughout the German state of Bavaria are perforated from below by “more than 700 curious tunnel networks” whose “purpose remains a mystery.” As Der Spiegel reports, “The tunnel entrances are sometimes located in the kitchens of old farmhouses, near churches and cemeteries or in the middle of a forest. The atmosphere…

Take a documentary tour of London’s dark and dank underground tunnels

We’ve seen the urban spelunkers at Silent UK plumb the depths of London’s abandoned mail train. Now they’ve created Crack the Surface, the first in a series of short films detailing their explorations of London’s underground, an experience one spelunker compares to a real-life roleplaying game. https://gizmodo.com/londons-abandoned-underground-and-notoriously-hard-to-5795199