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Photographer Oleg Gordienko captured images of an amazing train tunnel in Ukraine. As you can see from his portfolio at the link, he’s used it as a romantic backdrop for wedding pictures.
Link -via My Modern Met
Who knew? A tunnel dug underneath the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea is open for tours, even though you cannot access the ground above it! This is just one of several odd and interesting corridors you can read about in a list at Atlas Obscura. Others are in Vietnam, Brooklyn, Liverpool, and Australia. Link
After 14 years of work, Switzerland has finished drilling through 57 kilometers of rock to create the world’s longest railway tunnel. It’ll be years before it’s ready for trains, but the hole itself is complete:
The tunnel is just over 4 km longer than the Seikan rail tunnel in Japan, which at 53.9 km had previously been the longest rail tunnel in the world.
Completion of the Gotthard Base Tunnel will cut the travel time between Zurich and Milan in Italy by 60 minutes to two-and-a-half hours and provide an easier and more economic route for heavy freight trains.
The tunnel — which is in fact composed of two single-track tunnels — cost $10.6 billion (£6.6 billion).
Since the first preparations for the tunnel were laid in 1996, over 2,500 workers have taken part in its building according to AlpTransit Gotthard, the company constructing the tunnel. It is due to be operational by the end of 2017.
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Popular Mechanics tracked down the stories of the longest, deepest, most expensive, and weirdest tunnels ever built. They all have interesting stories behind them, and some have innovative features, such as the 15-mile-long Laerdal Tunnel in Norway.
Driving through a windowless tunnel for 20 minutes can get a bit monotonous, so a team of psychologists and engineers focused on retaining driver concentration. “The psychological reaction of a person in a tunnel is very important … it makes the difference between people accepting the facility or simply just avoiding it,” says Youssef Hashash, a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois, who has worked on 10 different tunnel projects. “Given the length of this tunnel, you need a carefully designed environment and lighting system.” Some solutions used in the Laerdal tunnel include bright blue lights and subtle curves that keep drivers engaged. Most important, though, is the fact that the tunnel is divided into several different sections, breaking up the drive and creating the impression that commuters are traveling through a handful of smaller tunnels.
Link -via Unique Daily
Perhaps of all hidden architectures, nothing amazes us more than secret tunnels.
Some, like the Lizard People’s tunnel under Los Angeles, promised great treasures, if only you’re brave enough to burrow deeply. Others, like the booby-trapped Viet Cong Cu Chi Network, have only death and misadventure for those foolish enough to venture in.
Oobject has a nifty feature of 12 of the most interesting tunnels in the world:
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.
From the Upcoming 
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Need a cool hideout or a secret lair for all your evil plans? A mile long tunnel under central London is up for sale right now for only $7.4 million. This Cold War relic is perfectly suited for all super villians in need of a good “underground” hideout, especially since it comes with a bar, two canteens and a billards room.
Link Via BoingBoing
