Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Subways

Episode Date: May 25, 2026

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why subways are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode. Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5 Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinsifpod

Subways. Known for being trains. By most for being big underground trains. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why subways are secretly incredibly fascinating. There, folks, hey there, Cipelopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name's Alex Schmidt.

I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie! Hey. Hello. Katie. What is your relationship to or opinion of subways? Eat fresh. Wait, what?

But the actual public transportation subway, I like very much. I'm a big fan of public transportation. I currently don't have a car because in order to drive here, I need, like, I can't just use my U.S. license. I'd need to take the test in Italian. and right now I still get like confused between like meatball and squid and things like that. So, you know, it's like when the driver's test is going to be like, and who has the right of way? A meatball or a squid? I'm going to be like, oh, geez, oh gosh, I don't know.

So the answer is whatever your stomach's telling you. Right, exactly. So I don't have a car, don't drive, and it's great. I love not driving. And I really like taking public transportation when it works. Like, it makes a huge difference when it's actually functional and arrives more or less on time. And it's not, you know, completely flooded. Actually, when I visited Alex in New York, it was a little rainy and we took the subway.

and it just started raining inside the subway because the water drainage wasn't great. I roll out the welcome mat, you know? Yeah. I'm like, please enjoy the greatest that this city I will move out of has to offer. And, but I've used the subways in, so like New York, Boston, Milan, here in Turin. And, yeah, I would say the best subways. I've used have been in Milan.

They are very frequent. They run almost every few minutes. Oh, no, I've also used them in London. The underground. The London Underground. And, yeah, still, still Milan was better. This week's bonus shows about Boston system,

and then we'll have whole takeaways about London and New York. Yeah. So it's good that I think both of us have, I've only barely been on Boston system, but the other two have been on. Well, Stens is interesting. It's okay. It's just that I would always have to wait kind of.

It was awkward because you're a college student, you want to, like, go out and be able to just use it at any time and get hither and thither. But it only ran at certain times, and sometimes you have to wait. And it's a little confusing. But overall, quite good. Yeah. And I just love making that part of visiting a city. Yeah. You don't have to live a place with a subway even necessarily.

I feel like they're one of the most widely experienced parts of city life. Yeah. They'll just like try it one time or see it in pop culture. Yeah. Oh, I've also used the DC area subway. Yeah. And listeners, please bear with us if we don't mention your favorite system because I love this topic and it's so global. There's so many of them.

And thank you to listeners for picking it. Listener, Kelly M. has done a long-running and joyful campaign for this to be a topic. And I'm thrilled folks picked it. Also, thank you to Anwen for support. And then also, if people are subway fans, they come up a bit in the escalators episode, the DC Metro and the St. Petersburg, Russia subway system. But this one will cover as many systems as we can, as fast as we can.

So I actually went to the Transportation Museum in London, and I learned, like, a little bit about subways. I mean, probably more specifically about the London underground system. But yeah, it's wild how they feel really recent, but they actually started making them a while ago, which is crazy. Yeah, and our numbers kind of frame that timeline, yeah, because this really starts earlier in the 1800s than you would think. And on every episode, we leave a really quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called Blood Sugar, baby. Stats magic, stats magic, stats magic, SIF numbers, KT. Stats magic, stats magic, stats magic.

Yeah, that name was submitted by Trent B over email. Thank you, Trent. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make them a silly and wacky as possible. Submit yours through Discord or to sift potagimil.com. And I think a lot of listeners might have been in the oldest subway tunnel in the world. Because it's in London. The earliest year is 1863. That's when London opened the world's first subway tunnel. According to the BBC, that was an underground rail line between Paddington Station and Farringdon Street Station. They had slightly different names at the time, but that's two giant above-ground train stations. They built one underground train between them. Right. And Paddington is named after the wee bear. Yeah. He really feels like

the founder of London to me. Even though he's explicitly a refugee in the story. But anyway. Right, right. And that track was about six kilometers long, not a huge distance, but a lot of people have probably been on an active train in it. Because according to the London Transport Museum, that was its own rail business, that one line.

But in a way we won't really get into pretty much every city in the world has gone from a few different private subway lines to organizing that and to one. public system if it wasn't started that way. And so that tunnel that was originally a business called the Metropolitan Railway gave its name to the Metropolitan Line on the London Underground. That tunnel is also part of the Circle Line on the Hammersmith and City Line. So a lot of people who've just been to London at one point have been in the oldest subway tunnel in the world.

Yeah. Very active. It's very cool. I highly recommend, I mean, definitely listen to this podcast, but then also a companion if you are able to go to the Transportation Museum in London. It's very cool. It's very interesting. I'm glad more cities should do that kind of thing. Like New York has something like it, but not a lot of others do. I feel that public transportation when it's done well adds a lot of interesting character to a city. It makes me sad when it is not taking care of and then

it gets a bad reputation just because it's not really maintained. Yeah, especially our London takeaway. We'll really get into that because also this 1863 train, you can keep that year in your head 1863 because it's not quite the oldest underground travel tunnel in the history of London or the world. That'll be the takeaway foreshadowing. Ooh. Spooky. The next number here is the second time a city ever built a subway line. and it is also still continuously running.

The number is 1869. 1869 is when a French engineer proposed an underground rail connection in a presentation to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. He's French, but he didn't try to set this up in Paris. According to Atlas Obscure, an engineer named Eugène-Hon-Hen-Ré-Gavand visited Istanbul in 1867, And he was shocked that one of the main neighborhoods in Istanbul called Bayolu is extremely steep, like from the water all the way up to the top of it where there's a tower and some other nice neighborhoods. So people throughout that neighborhood would do giant hill tracks daily all of the time. Their calves must have been amazing.

Yeah. And so last year I got to visit Istanbul and we stayed in Bayolulu. and then I rode the still running result of all this. Because Gavand went to the Ottoman Sultan, he was named Abdulaziz. And Gavann said, you should build a finicular for this terrible, steep neighborhood. Finicula, finicular, finicular, sorry. That song is actually dedicated to a finicular. I hope you realize that's not even a joke.

No. Yeah. The song that goes, da, da, da, da, da. It's about finicular. It was sung at the dedication to a finicular, and it's basically like, it goes up, it goes down. It's a finicular. Oh, we should think about that.

I don't even really know the name of that song. Finiculi, finicular. Exacular. Oh. Wait, it's for a finicular on Mount Vesuvius? Yes. That's, hmm. This is some Italian nonsense.

This is great. Yeah. What a bad place for. for a finicular. Listen, sometimes you got to like, you know, get up there.

Right. You got to go see the thing that destroyed Pompey. How else are you going to roast your paninis? So, shockingly less nuts proposal.

This French engineer said, hey, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, you need a finicular in Beulu in Istanbul, but also Bayolu is so densely, built up already, build it all underground. And so it'll go up and downhill inside an underground tunnel. That's fun. And the Sultan approved the project. It was also delayed apparently by the Franco-Prussian

war in 1870. This French engineer had to go help, you know. But then he came back, worked on it, and in 1875, Istanbul became the second city in the world with a subway. And then I wrote it shortly after its 150th anniversary in 2025. Wow. It's just still going. And it is mainly distinct from modern subways because it does not connect to any other rail underground. You can walk to some aboveground streetcars, but that's it. And it's, I would imagine it gains a lot of elevation more quickly than most subways.

That too. They're almost never this finicular shape. But it's truly straight uphill. And apparently that neighborhood, was partly built because non-Muslim people gathered there rather than other neighborhoods where they weren't quite as welcome. So it's a really hilly spot for a major city's giant neighborhood to be. And yeah, so I love that this French engineer was so mad about a neighborhood in Istanbul. He built a subway there before ever trying to do it in his home country. And Paris has one of the

largest subway systems today, but they didn't open that until 1900 as part of a World's Fair. So it's a really unique other early subway in Istanbul there in the 1870s. It is pretty interesting that a lot of these improvements happen because of, say, like, a world's fair or maybe the Olympics or something. Because I think that there is a big renovation in turn for the Olympics in terms of public transportation where it's like, oh, God, we're going to be embarrassed in front of the world. So we better have a way for people to get around. Exactly. a lot of these systems have started or grown because of that, yeah. And we'll talk about a particularly wild one in the first takeaway. In terms of old, old subway lines, Paris is a relatively early adopter

because other than London and Istanbul, none of them really start until the 1890s. Budapest opened a line in 1896. That's the first networked subway in continental Europe, then Glasgow, Scotland that same year. and then the fifth city ever to build a subway is our bonus show, Boston, Massachusetts. Open their first line in 1897. It was the first subway outside of Europe. Wow. That's so Bostonian of them. It turns out it really is.

It's a real transit city, even compared to New York or another place in the U.S. They call it the tea because of the tea that they threw in the harbor. Because of Tom Brady, local he. hero. Yeah. T as in Tom Brady. Yeah, and New York didn't have its first true subway line until 2004. Philadelphia added its first bit of underground rail in 1907. And then a lot of the rest of the world systems are even newer than that. Chicago's first real underground line was 1943, most of its above ground. D.C.'s system didn't get going until 1976, San Francisco, even Moscow opened its first subway line in 1935, and then the sort of Soviet block and communist world proceeded to build a lot of lavish stations as like a socialist principle of honoring the working person.

But they didn't have any of that until less than 100 years ago. Right. So yeah, it really started mostly with London and then spread out. Yeah, London's such a leader in all this, yeah. Yeah, and then a few other cities, especially Boston and New York. also help prototype it all. Yeah. And then the other number here is 1971. That is when the city of Beijing opened its first subway line. And then since then, it's hard to get exact figures, but if you try to do a list of all the biggest subway systems in the world now,

it's cities in China. Right. They've just built gigantic systems. Yeah, just very fast, huge systems. Meanwhile, in California, how's our high-speed rail going? Yeah, I have never really been on much trains in L.A. I think I tried a subway system like one or two times, and it was okay. And it's so underused, they do not totally charge you to get on it.

It's just an open gate when I did it. Yeah, the public transportation in Los Angeles is pretty disappointing. For such a huge city, you'd think it'd be really well connected with public transportation, and it's not. Yeah, it really isn't. No. And the other one that really is a contrast between the U.S. and China to me is one of the most amazing parts of the system in Shanghai, which is probably the second most subway track of any city and the first most ridership, if the estimates are right.

And then Beijing's the other number one and two. The number here for Shanghai is 460 kilometers per hour, a speed of 460 KPH. that's the top speed of the world's fastest train. Wow. This is an above ground link, but it's a maglev in Shanghai, magnetically levitating train. And according to CNN, it usually runs around 300 KPH because when it began operations in the year 2001 at its top speed, there were massive wind and noise problems for the surrounding community. Right.

Maybe they should have put it underground, I don't know. But that maglev goes directly between the middle of Shanghai and a major airport with extremely convenient subway connections. So it's another way subways get better and better is that you can do that. And because I think we talked before about the like Kingfisher design or is that on, sorry, that might have been on my own podcast. I don't remember. But I thought it was on this one. They started designing trains to have like a conical snout like a kingfisher beak because that would help prevent. the sort of sonic boom that would happen when it would go through like a tunnel and push the air in front of it.

That's amazing. It's not this one. I'm so excited to hear this. Yeah. That's so cool. Yeah, a lot of the most amazing subways in the world are currently happening in East Asia, but also any country can ramp up their system anytime. And there's also just a lot of like constant proposal of wild subway projects in the worlds. one of the most amazing ones is the number is February 2020.

That is when the organizers announced the end of a planned New York City park that would be inside an abandoned former subway station. So an underground park. And they bailed on the plan before the COVID pandemic was going. It was just not that feasible in general. Why not? It turns out they estimated they needed $83 million. And they had started this with a few Kickstarter campaigns that raised like, you know, six figures. But then they could not proceed to get enough demand for the $83 million budget.

It seems like mostly because people decided they didn't want to go underground to hang out. It's just kind of upsetting. So this is a huge blow to the mole people community. It's so mole people, yeah. Yeah. It's very mole people coded. I'd be down to jam in an underground park, though. That sounds cool. It could be fun. And the reason New York people thought this would work is several years earlier around 2009, New York City opened a public park on former elevated train lines.

And a lot of people have probably been on it. It's named the High Line. And it's a hit with tourists. I think you and you and Brenda took us there. Yeah, I figured after that subway flood, I needed to switch it up. Not a spooky guys anymore. No, but yeah, it's great. It's really, so like, not everybody's been to New York, but it's a common tourist thing if you go. And also just nice if you're in, especially Chelsea. I used to work in Chelsea at one point.

I would just go on the high line because I liked it. Yeah. But that, because that was so popular, people said, if the high line works, what if we make the low line? And the low line would have been inside abandoned tunnels near Delancey Street and lower. Manhattan, like a former tunnel to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. What was the concept for the vegetation there, like a fungal sort of cave environment? I wish the mock-ups had like artificial sunlight on regular plants. But if they really leaned into the like mole people, dwarves, troglodyte thing.

Yeah, they should have done like enchanted caverns. Yeah, that would have ruled. That would have ruled bioluminescent fungi. Yeah. Come on, guys. But they, so, yeah, so they were not able to go through with making this thing happen. And in general, it seems like subway tunnels are uniquely beloved by cities for just that purpose. Like, across city history, if there's been a subway tunnel dug, people will really try to keep using it.

Like, there's a lot of abandoned tunnels around Lower Manhattan that are now used for turning around trains or helping just keep systems going, even if better, new or. tunnels or for the actual transport. But people don't really hang out in them. Allegedly, there are a few unhoused people who have squatted in them for decades, but that's not very common. And also graffiti artists sometimes use them as canvases, but that's much rarer than like all the above ground options for graffiti. Right, right.

Because, you know, it's dark. And usually if you do graffiti art, you want people to see your graffiti art. Yeah, exactly. The wild number there is 2010. Apparently in 2010, New York artists unveiled an illegal art show called Underbelly, where more than a hundred of them put up new graffiti in one tunnel. But they only did a secret one-night event to show the art. The news was only able to cover it after it was all over because the artist didn't want to be arrested. When you do that stunt, it's just kind of for you and your fellow artist. It's not for anybody. Right. I mean, it's kind of wild that it's like illegal to do graffiti art in like underground tunnels. Like, I mean, you know. Yeah, especially if they're like abandoned.

It's like cave art. Whatever. Yeah. Come on. Yeah. We love continuing to max out the subway tunnels we've got because they're so hard to build. And we only use them for transit through and don't like to hang out in them. It's kind of an interesting relationship.

Digging is hard. It's so hard. hard. Yeah. And the one other way people do make a point of spending time in subway tunnels is air raid shelters in emergencies. The big number there is 2022. That is when residents of Kiev began sheltering in the subway system of Kiev due to Russian bombardment. There's like the famous hallowed history example of the World War II Blitz in London. The Ukrainian version seems to get less media attention, I think partly because there's like pro-Russian or Republican media that doesn't care about that war so much. Yeah. I mean, I think with the World Wars, it was like the whole

world being involved. Everyone mostly had a stake in it, whereas I think it's a little easier to kind of tune out wars when you're not directly kind of paying for the consequences of them. That's true. Yeah, yeah, it's not a World War in its way. So yeah, yeah, a lot of people that don't have to think about it. And then our last number for the section this week, it relates to the experience I brought Katie and brought through in New York. The number is one fifth of entrances. That's an estimate of how much of the New York City subway system is currently vulnerable to flooding in extreme rain. About a fifth of all the entrances of the system. Yeah, no, it's wild. There's like literal waterfalls happening inside the system. I mean, we were fine. It was okay. So for instance, like if

you wanted to use the elevator, you're out of luck there. It was just completely flooded. So if you're disabled, I guess tough luck, try a canoe next time. Yeah, it seemed, I don't know, bad like that maybe should be taken care of. Yeah, and there's kind of a general trope in a lot of especially dystopian fiction where just New York City is more of a Venice in the future. And the first part that floods is the subway system and it's never usable again. We're not really approaching that right now, but according to the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit that looks at how New York City is set up, the city could build more green spaces, build better storm water drainage, basically a lot of above ground solutions because any subway system is vulnerable to flooding, not just New York. There's

groundwater seepage, it's under the ground. It takes a lot of infrastructure to keep water out of these. Yeah, I mean, on the other hand, you could lit it flood and then have submarine subways. I looked up, the sandwiches seem to be named after submarines and not subways, because they're shaped like subway trains, you know, but submarine sandwiches are named after submarine vehicles. But why is there a subway sandwiches that sells sub sandwiches? They've really flipped it, yeah. I think they decided to be the first ones naming it after New York City trains. Well, they've made some terrible decisions.

I won't say anything else on that topic, but they have. But yeah, I'm going to link to KXJZ Public Radio, Sacramento, for more about world subway systems flooding. In an extremely rare case, the Guangzhou-China subway system had a flash flood that had some casualties. But basically all over the world's hundreds of millions of dollars are going into making subways more climate resilience. It happened for the metro here in Turin. I think actually just before we moved here, there's some really heavy rains. And there's like video of just sort of a bunch of water coming down. the stairwell like a waterfall into the subway.

Even though the city is slightly tilted towards the river, try to prevent flooding, but occasionally it does still flood. That makes sense, yeah. And they're almost built to do that. Like they, you know, the surfaces in it are able to slough off water and it's just at such a low elevation compared to the ground that it's kind of unavoidable. Yeah. So when you see, for example, in 2025 New York system had three significant floods. So everyone posted if they were in a station and wild water was coming down. But, you know, be safe. And it's both a problem and normal. Right, right.

It doesn't mean everything's ruined and New York City is becoming a, I don't know, snake pliskin prison island or something. It's okay. It's part of it. That'd be cool, though. I mean, like, I know it's dystopper. but Venice, New York would be cool. Yeah, one of Kurt Vonnegut's novels called Slapstick. He just writes it in the Venice, New York that people have imagined. But he's not the only one. Everybody's just kind of had the idea that, hey, this is a low-lying island. And, you know, what if the water gets a little bit higher?

Yeah. It's fun. You're in a gondola and someone tries to give you a CD and you're running away, like, furiously paddling in your gondola trying to get away from the guy and his gondola with the CDs trying to give you. And then there's like an Elmo and another gondola trying to get you to take a picture with him. Right, because instead of Times Square, it's Times Reservoir or something. Right.

But it's all those guys, Comedy Flyers. Right, right. There's sort of like Al Roker has mutated into a salamander-like water creature. The salamander. Yeah. Huh? Sal Roker, right? What?

Al is in it. Jesus Christ. Should have done alligator croaker. Oh, I don't know. Because he's a frog too. Yeah, good. No, no, not good. We need to be punished.

Well, moving on to something much more you effectively done. We have amazing takeaways here about the world of subways, and we're starting with takeaway number one. Two of the greatest design ideas in history are the London subway map and the Mexico City subway icons. Hmm. I have coasters that have the London subway underground maps on them. Very pretty. Yeah, I've had stuff with it on it for sure. And yeah, we'll talk about both of these things. And London will more talk about just how iconic it is, because I think it's relatively famous and has basically influenced every listener's subway map, whatever's closest to them. Right. It's one of the single most popular and influential design ideas ever. Yeah.

Yeah, because it makes it easy to sort of see the follow where your train is going to go without needlessly confusing you with geography. Yes, which is so nice. And, key sources here for London. I have digital stuff from that London Transport Museum. I wish I had gone when I've been there. Also reporting from The Guardian and then further sources from geek vibes. Agency and some other reporting on Mexico for that takeaway's part there. The London subway map is from 1931. And it was by an engineer named Harry Beck. His key insight was to separate the layout of the map from London's actual geography. So you made it just a simple and relatively geometric set of parts on the map as if it's circuitry.

And this feels commonplace now just because it has influenced every system map on Earth. But it was totally revolutionary and it's less than 100 years old. Yeah, because like the more straightforward way of doing it is you take a map of the city and you draw where the subways actually go on the map. and that's what you do. But that maybe is not, it's not, you're underground, so it's not super helpful to have above ground landmarks. Exactly. And like if you look up early, early subway maps in other places, especially the first things in New York when it was separate companies like Interboro Rapid Transit, it's usually a lot more blobby of a map because they draw exactly how the tunnels work in a way. No user needs to know.

It looks really silly and like almost like a hear-be dragons kind of map if you're a modern person. Yeah, I mean, you're not walking the tunnels, hopefully. It's not a good idea. It would actually be way more useful for walking the tunnels. It's almost encouraging this graffiti art and old people life and stuff. Right. So I wonder like how popular is Harry Beck and his situation. And the peak of it might be recent because in 2024, the London. for the London Transport Museum helped produce a stage play in London, which is a big theater city. It's very competitive. But it's a stage play about the life of map designer Harry Beck. And apparently it was so popular, it's run extended into 2025.

Like, this is, like, no one is famous for making maps. He's on the level of, I don't know, Amergo Vespucci or something in terms of like a famed map maker, just because he figured out how all subway maps should work. Right. And Amerigo Fis-Spochee was the guy who made the map of the Americas. Yeah, he kind of put his name on him and was apparently an awful, awful guy. I thought about making a siff about him and then as I started to sketch it out, he's just purely awful. There's not really anything redeeming to talk about. The Spoogee. So forget about him. But yeah. So that, That I think is very well known, especially to like American, Canadian, British listeners. The other totally innovative graphic design idea from Subways is in Mexico City and achieves a totally different need and thing.

Mexico City is one of the systems that was sparked by a world event like an Olympics. The 1968 summer games in Mexico City was a push for Mexico City to say, hey, let's have subway transit. that unfortunately the system couldn't be open until 1969. It wasn't quite ready, but it's had a huge lasting impact on the city and design because a U.S. graphic designer named Lance Wyman helped Mexico City build a system where every station has an individual visual icon. Every single station has a different picture to represent it in the entire system. So that's dozens and dozens of icons.

What, like, are these just sort of geometric shapes or are they pictures of things? They're pictures of things, yeah. Yeah, like each one has something representative like just a pot or a fruit. And Wyman is from the U.S., but also made a point of using design styles from before the Colombian exchange, especially from Mayan glyphs on various decorations for things. And then also sometimes it's just a very representative picture. like if the station's named for a famous person, it's sort of a caricature of them. But then like Chapultepec, the symbol is a cricket.

There's another one that's a boat. There's a station called Magtazuma that looks like that historical figures headdress. There's a Quatamac station where it's an eagle's head. Each one is a totally distinct visual icon. Every station has one. I'm looking at these. These are cool. One that's confusing to me is there's a kangaroo.

Yeah, and that's a station I think called Oceania. So it's named after, you know, Australia where kangaroos are from. Wow. There's a shrimp as well. Yeah. And like each of these is so memorable and also easy to look at in the moments. And the really brilliant reason for these station icons is that especially in the 1960s, Mexico City, the majority of the population was not very literate.

Right. even for someone who reads and writes fluently, a subway system can be pretty confusing initially. Especially in New York, I feel like there's a learning curve and then people forget and think it's easy. But so Wyman was dealing with a primarily not very literate population plus the potential Olympic influx of people who don't even use the Latin alphabet, let alone just use Spanish or something. And so he made every station a specific icon in a way that lets anyone just, if they know which picture they're at and which picture they need to get to, they can work it out without language. And they have different color combinations, different sort of, yeah, I think it's really nice. Like at a glance, it helps you orient yourself.

And I think that we're kind of more primed to associate images and stuff with locations rather than words potentially. So, yeah, no, really helpful. That's why we like landmarks. Yes. And as brilliant as Harry Beck's map is, it kind of flattens everything out. Every station is just a little circle. It's not anything, right? And so Lance Wyman figured out a way to go totally the other direction

and also used, like, the coolest 1960s line art of his time, plus this, like, historic and evocative form of art from native people before the Spanish came. And it's just like this absolutely perfect way to do a map that transcends people's skills. You know, it's awesome. Yeah. Super accessible. Yeah. And that system is still there.

It's still ties Mexico City together. It's the biggest metropolis in North America. So I think especially American, British, Canadian listeners have probably never encountered it. But it's on the level of London's achievement. Right. Yeah. No, that's awesome. And yeah, so we'll link the pictures and stuff.

It's very, very fun to experience. And like, imagine your city that way, too. Like, it immediately made me think my nearest subway stops that I lived at. What would the pictures be? It's fun. The ant is very cute. They're so cute. And bugs are not necessarily cute, but the artist.

How dare you, first of all. I knew I would start a fight. Great. You and what army? Me and my bug army. Oh, she has so many ants. Oh, geez. We were just teaching baby Schmidt about a scenario where the ants go marching one by one, actually.

So I'm very familiar. Yeah, you do need to teach the next generation about the incoming bug wars. Yeah. We did nursery rhymes and then the movie Starship Troopers. That's what we did, yeah. Right. And folks, that's a takeaway and subway numbers and stats. crisscrossing the world. We're going to take a quick break and then get extremely weird about

London and New York City. I love getting weird about London and New York City. Old York and New York. We're back and we have a last two takeaways about the weirdest London thing and the weirdest New York thing in subway history. Starting with takeaway number two. London built the world's first subway train after previously putting a tunnel under the Thames River full of goods and banquets and prostitutes. Hey, goods and banquets and prostitutes. When I think about digging under the Thames, that's what I fill it with, banquets.

Now I want to pronounce Thames differently all of the episode and anger the British. The Thames, the Tammies. Thames, Tims, to hang. I'm pronouncing it to hames. And yeah, yeah, we said in the numbers, the first subway line in the world was in London 1863. But many years earlier than that, they started building a subway tunnel for just pedestrians to go under their little river there in London, the Thames River. And it got really weird, really fast.

It's interesting because there, I think I've experienced some, there have been like underground. walkways. Where have I used those? They've been in some cities where it's like there's a major road and you can actually use like a little underground walkway. Sometimes they're also, like there is one also here in turn associated with one of the train stations. You can just use it as a walkway as well to get across a major road. Yeah. So that, you know, makes sense. I wouldn't put a banquet in it because then you can't walk through it. Yeah, and the banquet was a promotional stunt to help build the tunnel. It's like a first chunk of it before any of the rest of it was dug.

They held an extraordinary elaborate banquet that people made like oil paintings of to entertain rich donors in a spooky underground way. And were they like, you've got, there's some caviar just beyond this bedrock. If you use your little spoons, maybe you'll get to it. Oh. Right, just the stuff rich people like, like, there's also snuff and a prized racehorse. And oppression of the underclasses. Yeah, like, as London was inventing subways, apparently there were cartoons imagining a sci-fi future where there's a subway directly to Bengal. Like, the British can go exploit India through a subway.

It's really wild how excited they got about it. Right. That's not a joke. Yeah. I mean, there is the channel, but I think that's about as far as they got. Channel is amazing, yeah. Yeah, there's probably a whole separate siff about like just underground rail between countries and stuff, like the giant tunnel in Switzerland and things. But that's like just cities.

It's so wild. Yeah. And yeah, this London tunnel is one of the most bonkers engineering and social experiments in all history. Key sources here are a feature for J-Store Daily by writer Matthew Will's feature for Smithsonian Magazine by writer Mike Dash and reporting for the Guardian by writer Maeve Kennedy. Because London builds a subway train between its big train stations in 1863. 20 years earlier, they open a pedestrian tunnel under the Thames. And then that ends up becoming one of their next train tunnels after it really stops being

usable as a pedestrian tunnel due to crime and prostitution and disorder. I see. I mean, like, were people like kind of when they were told to take their crime underground, did they just nod furiously and then literally go underground? Sort of. It's really the way Jack the Ripper's world is presented, sort of vibe. Yeah. Apparently it only costs a penny to enter the tunnel if you wanted to walk under the Thames as a way to get across the city of London. And across the history of subway construction, there's a consistent wish to get under rivers.

Because ferries are slow, can't hold a lot of people. Bridges are expensive and can limit boat traffic. If you can tunnel all the way under a river, you get a fast means of transport that feels invisible and seamless, just like out of the way of everything else. They consider a zip line. Oh, if only, yeah. Oh, it's so fun. Tim Robinson, just crisscrossing London. Oh, yeah.

I feel like you're just here in London for the zip line. What? Trying to do a British. A British Tim Robinson. I guess a British version of Tim Robinson would be named Tim Robinson, huh? It's a very British name to me. But yeah, and so Londoners wished to be able to do this. And also the Thames is relatively small.

It just took places like New York longer to do under river subways because those are bigger bodies of water. Right. I'll also link about Istanbul trying to build a subway under the Bosphorus and running into too many historic shipwrecks that they needed to like do archaeology on. That's apparently a thing too, like in Italy when there's a lot of construction, especially in Rome. Like when I review construction, it's like, oh, the Roman Empire.

Such a funny problem they always have. Yeah. And so London said, let's tunnel under the Thames any way we can. And also we're the British Empire. We're going to invent everything. Way back in the 1820s, they start to try to dig this. In 1827, they hold that fundraiser banquet in the very first section. And an engineer named Richard Trevethic is leading the initial projects,

but runs into the main problem of the soil being to, to kind of soft and clayish and wet. And so there's just constant cave-ins and problems as they get really under the river. Right. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's a river. So what? It's extremely the normal problem, yeah. Yeah.

And then from there, he ends up getting help after more than a decade of trying from a famous father-son duo of British engineers. Their names are Mark Brunel and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. and especially the sun becomes more famous for huge train lines later. But in 1843, they're able to finish this tunnel under the Thames, partly by inventing multiple entire kinds of machines for the digging. And the biggest one is called a tunneling shield, which is still in use a lot today. Tunneling shield. The idea was from the anatomy of a parasite.

It's a parasite called a shipworm. Yeah. I know about those. And it's a wood-boring mollusk that the British knew about because it kept eating Royal Navy ships. And Brunel said, what if I basically build a giant mechanical shipworm? It is apparently also considered delicious. Oh, they don't look that way. Wow.

No, they don't, but they can be eaten. Okay. British shit on that. Solved the problem. Protect the Navy. Yeah. Like sort of living spaghetti. Oh, no.

But I want to eat spaghetti. Oh, no. Yeah. But yeah, this inspiration from the shipworm Brunel builds a giant tubular mechanical machine with sort of a grid of iron frames on the front and then plank supporting the sides. So it can dig a tunnel forward while preventing what's behind it from collapsing. And then like guys run in to support what you just dug behind the machine. So that and a few other devices were the key thing to make this.

project happen. And it was still incredibly dangerous. Like at one point, part of the tunnel caved in and rescue teams had to use a diving bell to get to the bottom of the river and plug the hole and prevent more guys from drowning. It was a horrible, very difficult project, just this little tunnel under a little river. Yeah, it doesn't sound the safest thing, like dirt and river, and you're under all of that sounds bad. It does. And it's like amazing. that the finish tunnel was so stable. Because, like, when they built it, then it worked on the problem was social. 1843, they finish it.

Soon they have tens of millions of people going through, including the reigning British monarchs, Victoria and Albert, walk through this tunnel under the river in the first year. People haul goods through it. People go as tourists. J-Store Daily talks about basically every class of London are being excited about it, because either it's like practical for low-class working people or a way to feel like you're slumming if you're super rich and then just like an in-between interesting thing if you're middle-class. Tunnels, you know, who doesn't like a tunnel? That's what everyone in London said, especially because it was totally due.

Yeah. We're like, no one's ever tunneled under a river pretty much. This is further evidence that at our heart of hearts, we're all just mole people. We crave the minds. Yeah. Yeah. We yearn for the darkness. And the thing is, within two years of the tunnel opening, the London police were flooded by reports of robberies inside of the tunnel.

And then soon the tunnel developed a reputation as a brothel because, like, it's dark corners and after hours situation was known as a space to meet prostitutes in London. Mm-hmm. And then also, as people just spent more and more time in it, like unhoused people or ill people would die in it. The authorities had to get the bodies out in the morning. So within 20 years of opening the, it was just called the Thames Tunnel, but within 20 years of opening it as this sparkling, amazing pedestrian lane, the operators sold it off to the new transit companies starting to make subways. Right, right. They said people can't walk through this anymore. It's chaos.

I like that it's sort of, you know, you see signs of social problems like, huh, people dying in the tunnel because they don't have anywhere to live. And it's like, well, guess we can't have a tunnel. Exactly. It's very like put spikes on the public bench so nobody sleeps. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So then in 1869, it became one of the next first lines of what was becoming an eventual London. underground London subway system. In 1869, a train ran through it instead of people. So it created a weird, amazing thing where this weird pedestrian tunnel under a river accidentally advances subway technology really fast. Because all they needed to do was run a train through it. So almost immediately after we started having subways, we had subways underwater.

Right. Yeah. I mean, I know how easy it is to put train tracks down because I had a train set. You just put them down and you put the train on it. Yeah. Even Gromit can do it while he's being pursued. Just keep putting the tracks in front of yourself. Yeah.

Exactly. That's like the trick to being able to like go anywhere you want is you sit on a little train and then you put the train tracks down in front of you as the train is going and then, you know, go anywhere. Exactly. So yeah, and then London from there pretty much invents a large city system. Apparently the other other technological advance. they needed is like harrowing to imagine now. In 1890, London ran their first subway trains powered by electricity and wiring.

Before that, these underground subway trains in London were steam trains, which generated steam by doing things like burning coal. Yeah. So the tunnel's full of horrible fumes. Yeah. And a very hellish kind of energy, you know, like vibe. Yeah. I guess literally energy, but you know. Yeah.

Just sort of like every time you try to get to work, it's like trying to visit the Ballerog. Yes. Like 1800s London was such a coated in black evil vibe all the time to me. Yeah. This was part of it. Just the sky's raining black suit. Like, I see why all the rich people had country houses, you know? Yeah.

Great. Plagues and fires and this stuff. Yeah. Just read some Dickens and you'll get it. Yeah, yeah, totally. And then moving on to the other weird city with our last takeaway. Takeaway number three. The publisher of Scientific American magazine secretly built the first ever U.S. subway system

by putting New Yorkers in a gigantic version of a pneumatic mail tube. So like the Futurama thing. Pretty much. And I also saw some sources comparing this to Elon Musk's Hyperloop claim and concepts. Among many dumb things about the Hyperloop, it's not really totally new tech. So sort of, it's kind of old. Right. The dumb thing about the Hyperloop is it ended up just being basically an underground car tunnel, which...

Yeah, that too. When they actually did it. Yeah. And also, it's like for one car wide. and so if ever there was a big accident in there, I don't know how an ambulance is supposed to get to you. So, you know, cool idea all around. Yeah, you'll end up needing the London Authority's morning clean-out sort of move, I think.

Right, right, right. So. Like get one of those big shipworm type things to just grab cars out of there. That would be better, yeah. Because oddly with both London and New York, there's like a first time when they had a normal-ish. subway train. And then before that, something incredibly weird and bad. And in New York, their regular subway starts 1904, but way back in 1870, a private individual builds a secret tunnel under Manhattan that is an operating pneumatic tube between two places. That's fun. So is the idea just like

you stand there as a person and it like sucks you up? It was really meant to be luxurious. Like the passenger car was apparently safe because people were in it and it didn't get squished, but it was luxuriously upholstered. It's like the vibe of those 1800s trains out west where a rich person's on it, sipping tea and having porters, you know. It's a pneumatic tube. Is it like, are there wheels involved? Like, how does this work? You're basically shooting a can. You're shooting a can. Yeah, it's just sort of sliding on rails. There's very small wheels. But the primary way of it works is by having the sides of the can as close to the walls of the tunnel as possible. It's a very tight fit. And if people have seen banking or postal systems, like my bank when I was a kid,

they would shoot a tube back and forth with the little bit of envelopes or money in it. Right. So what I'm looking at is basically kind of like a butthole. And there's like a cylinder inside of it with a little man on it. And there is kind of like tracks all around. And yeah, there's like tiny, tiny wheels to go on the tracks. And I guess so like it's pneumatic meaning like all it's like there's a vacuum. They suck all the air out so that it just gets sucked out. Yeah, it's all air pressure.

Yeah. So the gaps have to be real fine and tight between the passengers. car on the tube. How does one not suffocate? Praying? It seems bad. Basically, there needs to already be oxygen in the tube and it's a short ride. Right. Got it. Okay. I mean, sure. And then they open the doors again when you get out and you don't run out of air in the meantime. One of the guys looks very foppish in this drawing. He's got a top hat and he's looking on

the pneumatic transit as if someone has just spat in the eyes of God. So, you know, cool. Yeah, and all this, it ran for three years. Like it was not the dominant technology, but it worked and it was a thing people really did. And again, this was built secretly and without public involvements. It was just one guy's projects. Our sources about it are digital resources from public broadcasting. from the American Society of Civil Engineers

and then the Lemelson Center at MIT. They have a biography of this guy. His name is Alfred Eli Beach. Alfred Beach. This is another image. It's inside the car. This is a large and elegantly finished apartment commencing is what it says in this...

Yeah. In this illustration. And yeah, it is... It's luxuriously furnished, as they say. Lots of legroom. guy in a top hat? They call it an apartment. It really is like an entire room being like blasted each direction in a tunnel.

That sounds great. Why didn't we stick with this? It's such impractical technology. And that London takeaway, they basically use the two main kinds of trains in their subway, either a horrible feeling cold train or the wired electrical trains we have now. But you can use pneumatic pumps to use massive amounts of air practice. to fire stuff through a tube. It's just not nearly as efficient. But New York explored that, thanks to one guy being bent on it. Alfred Eli Beach was born to publishing wealth. His dad

had bought the New York Sun newspaper and got money to do that by making a fortune off of patents and investments in the early steamship business. So then Alfred also got into both inventing and publishing. He tried to file as many patents as possible in his life. and at the young age of 20, he used family money to purchase Scientific American. Ah, okay. At the time, it was a pretty tiny magazine, apparently. It was everything from science to poetry to religious and moral instruction. And then he was good at his job.

He turned it into the premier U.S. publication about research and tech. But yeah, so Beach is the publisher of Scientific American living in Manhattan. And starting around the late 1840s, he starts getting frustrated about his commute. Manhattan is noisy and crowded and full of horse poop. And he says, how do I have a more pleasant trip between my residents at office? Be nice. Yeah. And then in 1865, Beach personally designs and patents a pneumatic male tube system.

And then immediately he says, what if I make this giants and put people in it? Yeah. I mean, that's what we've all thought about. Every one of us. When we ever see those pneumatic tube systems, we all want to get in there. And weirdly one other World City tried this. The previous year, 1864, London set up a very temporary small pneumatic tube train under the grounds of the Crystal Palace exhibition hall. But it was never meant to run long and they shut it down after a few months.

Meanwhile in New York, Alfred Beach secretly builds an entire working pneumatic tube train under part of Manhattan. How do you like suck? How do you do that? How do you suck the air out for a system that big? Giant pumps and machines. Oh. And then a bunch of power and energy to do it. I feel like the answer is always giant pumps to like,

to any question. Like what should I wear to the club? Giant pumps. How do I suck the air out of a tunnel? Giant pumps. What rebax are best for dunking in the 1990s? Giant pumps. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it took huge amounts of energy just to move this train 300 feet. That's the entire length of the system. So it's not like amazing transit. It's not super energy efficient. And according to all my sources, this was never going to be the dominant tech. The way we do it in real life was always going to be the way we do it.

We kind of now sort of do a version of that with Maglev where aren't part of the tunnels like vacuum vacuumed out? Yeah, yeah, like it's not quite what's driving the train, but it makes it run faster. Right, exactly. There's something good there. Cool. Yeah, and the tech, like, was functional. Beach built this eight-foot-wide tunnel, partly by inventing a whole new tunneling machines.

And with his new machines, he was able to dig 300 feet of tunnel without telling anybody, partly because New York leaders like William Boss Tweed made a lot of their personal money from above ground streetcar companies and so Beach thought they would block any attempt to build a subway because that competes and waters down the streetcar company business. I mean, he might even right about that. He was probably right, especially because Boss Tweed was super corrupt. So Beach basically reveals the existence of his tunnel

by opening the Beach pneumatic tube subway in 1870, he says, I dug a tunnel and you can ride in it under Manhattan. And one end of it is right below City Hall, basically. So come on down. Better to dig for forgiveness than ask permission. That's what he said. And his kind of reasonable hope was that people would love the surprise tunnel so much that then they would demand more of them. That's not a bad plan.

No. But the public was only modestly accepted. And then there was a massive U.S. financial panic in 1873. So that made funding anything more impossible and Beach shut his system down after three years. Yeah. Oh. Well, that's too bad. Because I like the idea of like, surprise, I built you a tunnel.

Yeah. You know? Surprise subway. Great. Yeah. And then MIT says beaches tube, even though it was a fully running public business for three years, it was basically forgotten by the city. and it was rediscovered by accident when tunnel workers were digging subway lines in 1912

and accidentally like basically fell into part of the old tunnel for Beaches system he's still just like living in one of his cylindrical apartments they're so nice and sure you run out of air but yeah it's fine yeah yeah so the profound interest in digging under London And then New York helped lead to a lot of the rest of the systems in the world. And our bonus is about Boston promoting this in a much more normal way. Good job, Boston. But who needs air when you have ambiance?

Yeah, I'll make sure to put some of these pictures in the Instagram Carousel. It's really some fanciness. It's the style of Trader Joe's art of 1800s people. But they're really having a nice time. Yeah. You know, they're just, they're chilling in their, in their tube. Everybody wants to be a guy in a top hat, chilling in a tube. As if they are letter mail or banking stuff.

Yeah. A, folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, two of the greatest design ideas in history are the London's subway map and the Mexico City subway station icons. Takeaway number two, one of the first subway tunnels in London was originally a pedestrian tunnel under the Thames full of goods and banquets and prostitutes.

Takeaway number three, the publisher of Scientific American magazine secretly built the first U.S. version of a subway tunnel, which was a gigantic pneumatic mail tube full of New Yorkers. And then a really loaded numbers and stats section this week, especially because we're trying to briefly sketch the entire global subway system situation. Also, how much or little people spend time in subway tunnels, which is really only for specific purposes, and how much any of these systems could flood in the present or future. Also, I remain thrilled to learn the real fact that that sort of stereotypically Neapolitan song really is about a funicular. I had no idea. I don't think I'd listen to the lyrics. So on with the show. Those are the takeaways.

Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. As promised, this week's bonus topic is Boston's, Subway, specifically the shockingly normal and responsible way, 1890s Boston built America's first subway.

Visit sifpod.fod.fund for that bonus show for a library of more than 24 dozen others secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFunbon bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun. Key sources this week include some really amazing digital resources from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

They do this kind of work, they would know. Also, the Regional Plan Association nonprofit in New York, the London Transport Museum in that city, and then wonderful researched long-form writing about the history of subways from J-Store Daily, The Guardian, PBS, Smithsonian Magazine, KXJZ Public Radio, Sacramento, which is also known as Cap Radio, and more. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using this to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie-Lenape people and the Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategoke people, and others. Obviously, the entire New York City system is built in Lenape Hoking. And then Katie taped this in the country of Italy.

I want to acknowledge that in my location and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people in life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 277. That's about toilet paper. I really loved the story that I think was the bonus.

for that one about Operation Tamarisk. That is a Cold War spy operation centering on toilet paper or the lack thereof. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. I don't know if I've said lately that that's still on hiatus for a bit. But, you know, there's plenty of archives for it. Please check it out.

Our theme music is Unbroken Unshavened by the Budo's band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for editing this episode. episode, special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks, go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that?

Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Of artists-owned shows. Supported. Directly. By you.