"
America's
abandoned subway" -- The
Cincinnati subway was started around the turn of the
20th century as a project to solve 2 problems: 1) Make use of the remains of the
Miami-Erie canal. 2) Give the city of Cincinnati a
transit system that would serve her
population's
needs over the next
century.
The Miami-Erie canal was in declining use in the early 1900s due to the increasing national importance of the
railroad and its inability to handle
bigger and faster ships. So plans were made to drain its water and lay subway
tracks down instead. The plan was to use 8 miles the
canal, covered, as the main portion of a subway that would ultimately
loop around and pass through the
city center, to meet up with itself again.
Construction was begun on the canal portion, but due to projections of insufficient usage, the plan was reduced in scope, to one which would have a spur splitting off the end of the canal, and only run to
downtown Cincinnati, rather than loop all the way around. Come 1917, the
USA got involved in
World War I and halted all government bonds, which the city had been relying on to fund construction. So construction halted, until after the war.
Construction was resumed, but
corruption slowed progress and
the Great Depression hit before work was started on anything beyond the canal section. Construction was halted again, and by the time the Depression was over, as well as
World War II,
automobiles were the predominant mode of transportation. This, combined with the cost of the project (steadily growing over the past 40 years), finally forced a complete
shutdown of
tunnel construction.
So, as there was still no link to the city center, and no spur at the far end of the canal, the Cincinnati subway ended up being a subway from
nowhere important to nowhere important. While the canal section was complete, including tracks and
stations, nothing else was.
Its fate was cemented when, after the
Eisenhower Interstate system was initiated, the
I-75 was built over significant portions of the intended
route. And later, in the early 1970's, a major
water main was run through most of the existing tunnel, rendering it unusable for trains, or much else.
To this day, all eight miles of the Cincinnati subway remains
shut off and abandoned (although in perfect shape), a relic of
turn of the century hopes and
optimism, with not a single train ever having
known its tracks.