"Pnevmotransit" - underground tunnel for pneumatic trains

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Have you ever wondered why there was a need to build a subway around the world almost two hundred years ago? After all, there were no traffic jams on the surface, and Henry Ford had not even launched his first conveyor yet? No one then could have believed that the car would be available to everyone, and the metro had already been built. Or, perhaps, no one built it, but just dug it out?

One of the interesting facts proving that the metro was not built, but dug up is the history of the construction of the first pneumatic metro. Here's what the official sources have to say about this.

In 1868, the Pneumotransit company, headed by the inventor Alfred Beecham, began to build an underground tunnel for pneumatic trains.

To build the tunnel, he rents the basement of a clothing store in New York, and the work is carried out at night, since there was no official permission from the authorities. They convince everyone that a small pneumatic tube tunnel is being built. For the construction, they used the so-called Alfred Beach tunnel shield, which was built by the inventor himself.

And two years later, the first visitors entered the underground station

The tunnel was built in a very short time, in just 2 years, during which time they drilled 100 meters underground, covered it all with bricks, built an underground station with good finishing, installed a 50-ton compressor and began to transport people.

But the timing is too short, even by modern standards. Elon Musk would have envied such a speed of construction. Despite the fact that most of the work was done at night.

The station was illuminated by oxygen-hydrogen gas lamps, wood trim, a piano, the length of the tunnel is 95 meters, during the first year of operation, the metro transported 400 thousand people, then Alfred still gets permission to build such a metro all over the city, but the stock market falls, the store is on fire, but the metro is safely forgotten.

They remembered about him only after 40 years, and then not for long. Then the workers of the Broadway subway accidentally stumbled upon this tunnel, there was a tunnel shield, rusty rails and a trailer.

What's wrong in the official version:

How could you forget during this time about such a grandiose project and even lose all the drawings and the plan of the tunnels?

How the tunnel shield got into the basement of the store, that the basement should be with a run-in for a steam locomotive, most likely the store was built on a finished antediluvian tunnel.

They discovered a unique building of the last century, why didn't they make a museum - this is the first American subway, the trailers would be renovated, it would be beautiful and profitable, why they tried to forget so quickly, the shield eventually disappeared, the trailers too.

In England, the builder of the first metro, Brunel, is not forgotten, and his first sketches are very reminiscent of the American subway, he made them even before the American subway and the American could not see them either, since they were never published. How they conceived the same thing at the same time.

What could be the explanation? In America, they could find a real tunnel with equipment, with a compressor, with trailers, they cleared out old tunnels, this version explains all the oddities:

and short construction time

and the desire of the authorities to forget about the project.

But the oldest Canadian tunnel, which is used as a sewer, also resembles the first forgotten subway.

And in London, such a sewer was built in the 19th century and was also built as the first subway in New York.

And here are photos from 1904, the opening of the subway in New York.

A huge tunnel and a miserable trolley are striking here, 50 years before that Alfred Beach used almost modern cars, but in 1904 they build miserable carts.

And here is the metro plan, a very complex modern project.

And in the second photo we see how this project was implemented, the modern plan and the ancient masonry. Again, complex technological things go hand in hand with some kind of backward technologies.

The photographs of the Paris metro show how the old is being dug up and adapted for the new. Again the same tunnels.

There is a feeling that the old tunnels were cleaned up. For actual penetration, the shield should be the diameter of the outer brickwork, not the inner one.

In Moscow, from 1933 to 1935, a whole line was built, and now for several years one station is being built, moreover, of a shallow occurrence, at many old stations there are arched vaults like in old buildings. The first stations are as beautiful as palaces.

What happened to the planet, the subway, statues, pyramids, churches-receivers of atmospheric electricity, but there is no memory.