The Subway That Never Carried a Passenger - Cincinnati's Abandoned Subway

Under a boulevard in Cincinnati there are subway stations that never saw a passenger - and the city kept paying for them until 1966. Two miles of tunnel, built inside a dead canal, sealed in 1928, and never used by a single train. The Miami and Erie Canal once cut across the north side of downtown Cincinnati - the reason the neighborhood beyond it is still called Over-the-Rhine. When the railroads killed the canal, the city saw a ready-made right-of-way and planned a 16-mile rapid transit loop, with the subway section built in the old canal bed. Voters approved a $6 million bond in 1916 and the plan itself the next spring. Then came the First World War, and construction costs doubled. The city started digging anyway in January 1920, and by early 1923 two miles of twin-tube tunnel were finished, with stations at Race Street, Liberty Street, Linn Street and Brighton. By the mid-1920s the money was gone: no rails, no power, no trains. A reform city government dissolved the transit board, Central Parkway opened on top of the tunnels in October 1928, and the stock market crash a year later ended any hope of finishing it. After that, every idea for the tunnels failed: streetcars that were too long for the curves, a road for cars, freight cars that wouldn't fit, a light-rail plan that voters rejected. Only a 1957 water main and a Cold War fallout shelter ever went in. The bonds were finally paid off in 1966, at a total cost of $13,019,982.45. Every map, cross-section, diagram and timeline in this video was built for it from scratch. All photographs are public domain or Creative Commons. City map data (c) OpenStreetMap contributors. No AI-generated imagery is used. Music: "Lightless Dawn" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... If you live in Cincinnati, or you walked those tunnels before the tours stopped in 2015, tell me in the comments what it was like. 00:00 A subway that never carried a passenger 01:33 Built inside a dead canal 03:01 The 16-mile loop and the $6 million bond 04:18 The war doubles the cost 04:49 Digging the tunnel, 1920-1923 06:30 Politics, Central Parkway and a sealed subway 08:09 Every vehicle was the wrong size 10:20 Why the city kept paying until 1966 #CincinnatiSubway #AbandonedSubway #Cincinnati #CentralParkway #OverTheRhine #MiamiAndErieCanal #UrbanHistory