DC's abandoned pre-Metro subway tunnels

[Danny]

Very interesting photo tour! Thanks for sharing. I´ve liked it.

In Madrid there´s an old subway station, Chamberí, at line 1, which has been recovered and actually works as a museum of metro. It preserves the old ceramic ads in the walls. It´s located between two metro stations, Bilbao and Iglesia, and you can see trains when they go through the station (there´re crystal sceens to avoid accidents). This station was opened in 1919 and closed in 1966. The visit is free.

I´ll try someday to show pictures about this metro museum.

Congrats and greetings from Madrid, Spain!

[Inkoumori]

Oddly enough, this was where I worked in the late 90's (pink arrow)- awesome view from the top floor conference room! I must have walked past that locked stair a thousand times and never gave it a thought.

[Nantais]

Cool pics. Reminds me of Fallout 3.

[bobdreamz]

I had no idea these tunnels existed! Very interesting thread and pics!

[Austinlee]

Badass. Thanks for the tour!

[ChiTownCity]

So why was it shut down instead of being upgraded into a full subway?

[Cirrus]

Because like most American cities, all of Washington's trolleys were shut down and replaced with diesel buses.

Metro came later, and couldn't use that station because Metro needs a much larger space.

[jodelli]

Cool tour.

Here's one still in use in Toronto by TTC streetcars. The tunnel starts on Queen's Quay just west of Bay and ends up alongside the subway tubes at Union Station where a brief walkway connects the two systems. No transfer necessary.

[DTW]

What a cool space I hope they find new use for it.

[Phil McAvity]

If I may digress for a moment, I remember riding that trolley on my one visit to TO years ago and how odd it seemed to get off a modern subway and then onto this antique trolley, although i'm sure Toronto isn't the only city that has such a thing.

I agree with Fflint, it's surprising they can't reuse the old Washington Trolley in some other transit capacity since that's why it was designed.

[LosAngelesSportsFan]

very cool tour. i like hidden gems like this. whats interesting is that how clean it still is! if these were in LA, they would have been tagged to death

[llamaorama]

I knew those grates just had to be old subway entrances when I saw them visiting the city. But I figured it had to belong to the metro, like maybe they were for a station that was closed because of maintenance or 9/11 security or something.

Could it be reused for buses?

[Cirrus]

It's not very useful for transit now. The tunnels were built so that the only vehicle access to them would be from Connecticut Avenue. This presents two problems:

• Metro goes under Connecticut, so it handles most of that traffic. There are some bus routes on Connecticut, including 1 with pretty high ridership, but they're mostly used for neighborhood-shuttle type trips that are so short that it would be inconvenient for riders to have to go into a subway.
• The other bus routes that come in or near Dupont Circle use other streets. Most notably Massachusetts Avenue and P Street. It might be worth it to hub all the buses from Mass, P, and Connecticut into a single station in order to facilitate transfers and efficiently provide services, but doing so would require a bunch of new tunneling to provide exits off Mass and P into the loop. Not only would that be very expensive, it would also make Mass and P more like highways, which would be such a bad side effect that it would more than negate any benefit.

So yeah. Using it for buses isn't on the table.

There was a proposal to use part of it as a bike station, which I think is a good idea, but that would only use a tiny portion of the square footage.