Ancient Tubes Finally Buried At Ground Zero

Before the NYC Subway system, there was the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad, which today we now call the PATH train, and consider it a sort of lame-ass frumpy second cousin to the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, J, L, M, N, Q, R, S, V, W and Z subway lines.

But it was the PATH that came first, and it was one of the engineering marvels of the age. The builders had to conquer the Hudson River, from Manhattan to New Jersey. They did it by building a cast-iron tunnel in sections, dropping the sections on to the riverbed and joining them into two long tubes. The water in the tubes was then pumped out. They were and are strong enough to withstand the pressure of the river water above and around them.

Above, one of the tubes, or tunnels. They were partially exposed by the World Trade Center catastrophe, because one of the PATH trains brought commuters from New Jersey into a station in the basement of the towers (several of the regular NYC subways also stopped under the WTC). An associated story in the New York Times...