The vast, skull-encrusted necropolis beneath the street of Paris is a popular tourist attraction, but most of it lies closed to the public. This site has some fantastic diagrams created by urban spelunkers.
12 of the worlds most fascinating tunnel networks
This year the MIT class ring, the Brass Rat, hides a hackers’ diagram of a subterranean campus wide tunnel network.
Networks of secret passages and tunnels have been built on a giant scale, from components of the Maginot line to the Viet Cong Cu Chi Network. Others perform a peacetime function, such as the half mile tunnel network H.G. Dyar built under his Washington home, as a hobby, the passageways under Disney’s Magic Kingdom or the unbelievable 5000 year old Lizard People tunnel network under Los Angeles that the L.A. Times published a diagram of during the depression.
Here is a collection of our favorite tunnel network diagrams, drawings or models.
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Unlike other major subway systems such as New York or Paris, the London Underground is largely tunneled rather than laid in a covered trench. <p /><p />Station interchanges require complex underground networks of tunnels such as this one at Picadilly Circus.
The Maginot Line was a vast collection of defenses along the Franco-German and Italian border. It was constructed by the French to prevent a German invasion, but the breach of its Belgian counterpart in 2 days rendered it a giant folly.
As a hobby, to relieve the stress of his day job as an authority on moths and butterflies at the Smithsonian, Dyar built a quarter of a mile long network of tunnels beneath his house.
The Large Hadron Collider sits in a tunnel used for the previous major CERN experiment, beneath the countryside around Geneva.<p /><p />It is vast (17 miles round) and deep (150-500 feet) and its passengers (sub atomic particles) will travel around its length 40,000 times a second.
During the great depression, the LA times ran an article about someone who claimed to have found a network of ancient tunnels under LA, using X-rays.<p /><p />These tunnels were said to lead to gold and were created 5000 years ago by Lizard People.
Tunnels under Jerusalem form an integral part of the citys history. From its original capture by the Israelites from the Jebusites via the Gihon springs water shaft to Hezekiahs tunnel which helped protect against the Assyrians in 700 BC.
Despite the very real dangers, the portrayal of Tunnel Harry in the movie The Great Escape gives the impression of fun Public Schoolboy (in the UK sense) pranks at prisoner of war camps rather than the grim reality of incarceration.
To preserve the illusion of fantasy, Disney characters must not be seen rushing around or getting prepared. A subterranean network of passages preserves the seamless illusion like the servants passages of a stately home.
This rather odd looking display case shows an interactive model of a section of the Cu Chi Tunnel Network.<p /><p />This vast, countrywide network was built by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam war and was centered around the Cu Chi district in Saigon. It formed the base of operations for the Tet offensive.
The 2009 MIT class ring has a hidden hackers map that shows how to cross the entire campus underground.
The border between North and South Korea is the most heavily protected in the world, yet up to 17 infiltration tunnels under the DMZ, dug by the North for incursions into the South, have been found from 1974 to 1990.
