Super-Secret Subway Station

Although I'm generally extremely annoyed by ANY disruption of service on the TTC (let's face it, it's a crappy public transit system), this weekend's service disruption was well worthwhile. Why, do you ask? It's because this past weekend, Bay station was closed due to tunnel repairs. Fortunately, this didn't mean that east was cut off from west on the Bloor-Danforth line. Instead, this meant a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the mythical "Lower Bay" station in Yorkville.

If you don't already know, back in the day (i.e. up until the late 1960s), there used to be 2 stations at Bay station, much like at Bloor-Yonge, St. George, and Spadina. The Lower Bay station was a bit odd because it also linked up to the Yonge line. From my understanding, you could take trains on the Yonge line itself that were bound for the Bloor-Danforth line, much like in Europe, you can catch trains from multiple lines on the same subway platform. I guess this proved to be too confusing for Torontonians, and the station was decommissioned in 1967. Some brave souls have ventured into the super-secret Lower Bay station and have lived to tell about it. The station is still used for training exercises, movie shoots (e.g. one of the Matrix films), and train re-routing.

So, to make a long story short, due to tunnel construction in the regular Bay station, the Bloor-Danforth trains were re-routed through the super-secret tunnels and in through Lower Bay station in order to minimize service disruption. Yesterday we were sitting in this very much abandoned-looking station for quite a while, so I had a chance to take a picture of the station. As you can see from the picture, it looks like a pretty run-down version of the regular Bay station.