The Cobble Hill Tunnel is an abandoned Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) tunnel beneath Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, New York City, running through the neighborhoods of Downtown Brooklyn and Cobble Hill. When open, it ran for about 2,517 feet (767 m) between Columbia Street and Boerum Place. It is the oldest railway tunnel beneath a city street in North America that was fully devoted to rail. It is also deemed the oldest subway tunnel in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records.
The Post Office Railway is a 2 ft narrow gauge, driverless underground railway in London that was built by the Post Office with assistance from the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, to transport mail between sorting offices. Inspired by the Chicago Tunnel Company, it opened in 1927 and operated for 76 years until it closed in 2003. A museum within the former railway was opened in September 2017.
The Kingsway tramway subway is a cut-and-cover tunnel in central London, built by the London County Council, and the only one of its kind in Britain. The decision in 1898 to clear slum districts in the Holborn area provided an opportunity to use the new streets for a tramway connecting the lines in the north and south. Following the pattern of tramways in New York and Boston, it was decided to build this as an underground connection.
A storm drain, storm sewer, surface water drain/sewer, or stormwater drain is infrastructure designed to drain excess rain and ground water from impervious surfaces such as paved streets, car parks, parking lots, footpaths, sidewalks, and roofs. Storm drains vary in design from small residential dry wells to large municipal systems.
The Cave Clan is a primarily Australian group dedicated to urban exploration.
In the United States, the term mole people is sometimes used to describe homeless people living under large cities in abandoned subway, railroad, flood, sewage tunnels, and heating shafts.
The Cloaca Maxima was one of the world's earliest sewage systems. Its name is related to that of Cloacina, a Roman goddess. Built during either the Roman Kingdom or early Roman Republic, it was constructed in Ancient Rome in order to drain local marshes and remove waste from the city. It carried effluent to the River Tiber, which ran beside the city. The sewer started at the Forum Augustum and ended at the Ponte Rotto and Ponte Palatino. It began as an open air canal, but it developed into a much larger sewer over the course of time. Agrippa renovated and reconstructed much of the sewer. This would not be the only development in the sewers. By the first century CE all eleven Roman aqueducts were connected to the sewer. After the Roman Empire fell the sewer still was used. By the 19th century, it became a tourist attraction. Some parts of the sewer are still used today. Whilst still being used, it was highly valued as a sacred symbol of Roman culture, and Roman engineering.
Elevator surfing, also known as lift surfing, is an activity involving riding on top of elevators, rather than inside them. More experienced surfers may attempt riskier maneuvers such as jumping between moving elevators, or riding the elevator's counterweight. Elevator surfing is typically considered a form of urban exploration, more aligned with investigative experiences like rooftopping and tunnel hacking rather than adrenaline-inducing urban sports like train surfing. While elevator surfing was most prominent as a subculture in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1990s, it made a comeback in the late 2010s, with partakers often posting footage of their adventures on YouTube and similar platforms.
Roof and tunnel hacking is the unauthorized exploration of roof and utility tunnel spaces. The term carries a strong collegiate connotation, stemming from its use at MIT and at the U.S. Naval Academy, where the practice has a long history. It is a form of urban exploration.
The Park Avenue Tunnel, also called the Murray Hill Tunnel, is a 1,600-foot-long (488 m) tunnel that passes under seven blocks of Park Avenue in Murray Hill, in the New York City borough of Manhattan. Traffic used to travel northbound from 33rd Street toward the Park Avenue Viaduct. The tunnel is under the jurisdiction of the New York City Department of Transportation. It is designed to carry one lane of northbound car traffic from East 33rd Street to East 40th Street. From 40th Street north, traffic must follow the Park Avenue Viaduct around Grand Central Terminal to 46th Street. The vertical clearance is 8 ft 11 in (2.72 m).
Mine exploration is a hobby in which people visit abandoned mines, quarries, and sometimes operational mines. Enthusiasts usually engage in such activities for the purpose of exploration and documentation, sometimes through the use of surveying and photography. In this respect, mine exploration might be considered a type of amateur industrial archaeology. In many ways, however, it is closer to caving, with many participants actively interested in exploring both mines and caves. Mine exploration typically requires equipment such as helmets, head lamps, Wellington boots, and climbing gear.
Joseph Konopka, better known by his self-invented alias Dr. Ch@os, is an American citizen who served 16 years of a 20-year prison sentence for arson, vandalism, and possessing chemical weapons. In 2003 in Illinois, he pleaded guilty to chemical weapons possession for storing cyanide in a disused Chicago subway storage room and was sentenced to 13 years.
Rapid transit or mass rapid transit (MRT), also known as heavy rail or metro, is a type of high-capacity public transport that is generally built in urban areas. A rapid transit system that primarily or traditionally runs below the surface may be called a subway, tube, or underground. Unlike buses or trams, rapid transit systems are railways, usually electric, that operate on an exclusive right-of-way, which cannot be accessed by pedestrians or other vehicles. They are often grade-separated in tunnels or on elevated railways.
Modern ruins are the remains of architecture constructed in the recent past, generally in the most recent century, or since the 19th century. The term is most frequently used by people performing urban exploration of man-made architecture that is abandoned or no longer accessible to the general public, such as structures abandoned through the process of urban decay. Enough documentation on these sites may have been lost over time that this unscientific exploration resembles archaeology of ancient ruins in the methods used to collect information.
Urban Explorer is a 2011 German horror film directed by Andy Fetscher and starring Nathalie Kelley, Nick Eversman, Klaus Stiglmeier, Max Riemelt, Brenda Koo, and Catherine De Léan. The film is about urban exploration in subterranean Berlin.
Bradley Garrett is an American researcher of social geography and cultural geography, writer, and photographer based in Big Bear Lake, California. He describes his research interests as being at the intersections of cultural geography, archaeology and visual methods and writes that his research is about "finding the hidden in the world". He is the author of five books including Bunker: Building for the End Times, a contemporary account of doomsday prepping practices, and Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City, an ethnographic account of the activities of the London Consolidation Crew (LCC), a group of urban explorers Garrett calls "place hackers". He has written for several newspapers and magazines, including The Atlantic, Vox, GQ, the Daily Beast, and The Guardian.
Rooftopping, sometimes called roofing, refers to the unsecured ascent of rooftops, cranes, antennas, bell towers, smokestacks, or other tall structures, usually illegally.
Steve Duncan is an urban explorer based in New York City. He has extensively explored the New York City sewer system and other tunnels in the New York City area such as the New York City Subway System and Amtrak tunnels that run through the city. Steve has also explored sewers and underground infrastructure around the world. He has explored sewers and tunnels beneath Paris, London, Milan, Rome, Naples, Stockholm, Berlin, Moscow, Montreal, Toronto, Chicago and Los Angeles. He also hosted a television show on The Discovery Channel in 2005. The show aired for five episodes and has since occasionally been aired in syndication.
Underground construction refers to the construction of underground tunnels, shafts, chambers, and passageways, it is also sometimes used to describe the portion of traditional construction that takes place below grade.
Subterranean New York City relates to the area beneath the surface level of New York City; the natural features, man-made structures, spaces, objects, and cultural creation and experience. Like other subterranea, the underground world of New York City has been the basis of TV series, documentaries, artwork, and books.
