The New York City subway system is officially two hundred and seventy-eight miles long. If you could lay all the various lengths of track end to end and travel along them at an average speed with stops every three minutes, it would take more than eighteen hours to complete the journey. Four million riders a day descend into the dark tunnels under the city and are whisked from the Battery to Queens, the Bronx to Midtown. Standing or sitting in the cars, reading, talking, or just staring out of the grimy windows into the blackness beyond, almost none of them notice the old tunnels.

Sidings, discontinued lines, expansion projects that ran out of funds – the old tunnels, as they’re called by the transit workers who know about them, may actually double the official tally of mileage.  Urban legends abound among the linemen and maintenance crews of forgotten stations, walled-up chapels, underground rivers, even natural caverns littered with pre-Columbian debris, their walls incised with stick figures and complicated pictograms all smeared and obscured by greasy soot from torches and tallow lamps.

No matter who may have lived down here in the darkness in days gone by, a thriving population has moved in during modern times. The homeless, seeking shelter from the sky have lived in the tunnels since the turn of the twentieth century. Beneath them and around them are other denizens not so easily cataloged.

The Transit Police, men and women responsible for safety and discipline on the subway system have a wealth of tales and sworn eye-witness accounts that speak of the weird and disturbing world beneath our feet.
This message was last edited by the GM at 16:36, Thu 29 July 2021.