Urban Exploration: Downtown Railroad
Yesterday the weather was perfect. It was sunny but not too warm, a great day of zooming around the city with a bicycle. After I left work I cycled to Ruoholahti to the Oxygene diving store to get the diving light I had decided to buy on impulse, while cursing my current flashlight on the diving boat last Wednesday. It’s high time Susi and I will have some proper underwater lighting.
When I got out of the shop and stopped to admire the weather, just the idea of going home and indoors felt positively unpleasant. Luckily I remembered a small scale urban exploration project that I had been thinking about for quite a while.
In the western part of Helsinki downtown there is a deep trench, which used to have a railroad on the bottom of it only a few weeks back. It started on the seashore and connected to the main railway system literally across the street from the House of Parliament. A couple of weeks back they ripped up the railroad tracks, but the trench with the bridges is still there.
The railroad trench is hardly a unique find, since tens of thousands of people cross it daily. For most of the people it’s kind of unspace: something you see, wonder about for a moment and then forget. For three months or so I crossed the tracks twice per day when on my way to work or home, but now I finally got around to checking it out.
Not every UE trip has to be about a massive ruin far away, quite often just seeing your everyday urban surroundings from another point of view is at least as enlightening and interesting as a ruined factory or an abandoned house – often even more so.
(Check out more photos in the Flickr photoset!)
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[…] enough to find a place where people mostly don’t stray into: something people walk past, over or around without really seeing it, some beautiful unspace. Or, maybe, just go and find something […]