////
This city’s underground railway system was built in the seventies. It cost a lot of time and money. It cost looking into the public archives will tell you as much, but people tend to care more about the time and the money.
It had been a long time in the making, the first underground railway plans dating back from the late nineteen-twenties, but it'd be forty years until they actually decide on plans and start building it.
Add twelve years of digging, hollowing out, burrowing, building... and eventually, in (in late May of 1985, after completing the last station which had given the workers most trouble), the biggest construction project in the history of the city at the time is complete.
It's easy to think of a giant buried structure as something that has always been there. In the dark you don't see the cracks in the concrete, only the perfect curved shape of the tunnel overhead.
It's easy to forget made it.
the entrails, the human touch.
900,000 cubic metres of earth excavated. 300,000 cubic metres of concrete poured in.
Seems like no one really knows exactly how many people in total worked under the city to dig and connect all these tunnels together. Being a contractor will do that to you. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, you just have to get it done. Lot of hard work for little acknowledgement.
All you can do is tell stories of when you worked under the city to dig and connect all these tunnels together.
You've heard this one
You're contracted to go underground...
