Buried beneath Queen subway station is a monument to transit dreams long shuffled to the bottom of the city’s ongoing laundry list of projects.

Queen Lower, as it is known, is the shell of an underground streetcar terminal. It was built at the same time as the Yonge subway line but has never seen a transit vehicle pass its platform.

Even with talk of a new relief subway line to take some of the crowds off Yonge, it seems unlikely the old station will be pressed into service.

Packaged as part of a transit referendum in 1946, a partially buried, separated streetcar line was supposed to extend from Trinity-Bellwoods Park in the west to beyond Broadview Ave. in the east, dipping underground as it passed through the core.

It was slated to be built after the Yonge line. But things had changed by the time the subway opened in 1954.

The federal government failed to carry through on a promised subsidy and traffic patterns had altered significantly in Toronto.

More people were travelling east-west around the Bloor-Danforth corridor.

It made more sense to build Toronto’s next subway line north of Queen St., said James Bow, a transit enthusiast and founder of the Toronto Transit website.

“Most of the development was concentrated in and around (downtown) Toronto. Queen was indisputably the main east-west thoroughfare,” said Bow. “But after the war, when the subway was built, the city sprawled out into the east, west, and northern sectors ... The people who were buying houses in Scarborough, who were commuting downtown, weren’t taking the Queen streetcar. They were getting on to the Bloor-Danforth line.”

So the plan to run a Queen car separated from traffic on its own right-of-way, including an underground stretch downtown, was shelved and the Bloor-Danforth subway opened in 1966.

Queen Lower remains part of the TTC’s infrastructure. It is laced with conduits and houses elevator shafts for the functioning subway station that sits above it. Reclaiming it for anything else would present a massive engineering challenge, said TTC spokesman Brad Ross.

“The shell, as it stands, would not be useable as part of a station. There’s a lot more work that would need to be done,” he said.

Ross and TTC CEO Andy Byford toured the station for a YouTube video last month.

Another challenge to using the station is that a portion of it now forms a pedestrian passageway from the northbound to southbound sides of the tracks.

“TTC erected walls to make that more accessible many, many years ago, so that you can transfer between north and south, and south and north,” said Ross. “You’re actually walking through what was once Queen Lower,” he said.

To this day, the abandoned streetcar station’s very existence makes it alluring to transit watchers, said Steve Munro, transit advocate and blogger. But it’s unlikely that it would be ideally placed for a much-discussed downtown relief line, which is increasingly referred to simply as the relief line.

“It’s got this wonderful attraction for people to draw lines through it, because it’s there. The problem is that, since it was built, the centre of downtown has moved further south,” Munro said.

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The TTC, Metrolinx and City of Toronto are all evaluating options for a relief line that would connect the core with the eastern side of the Bloor-Danforth line, and in future could be extended even farther north, north to Eglinton Ave., and west to join the Bloor-Danforth line through the High Park area.

The relief line, which has increasingly become a priority for the TTC, is expected to intersect with the Yonge line somewhere between Dundas and Union stations. Munro says he doesn’t expect the idea of a Queen line to be resurrected any time soon.

“The Queen line has been on the map for a very long time, but when it was first drawn on the map there were farms at Bayview and Eglinton, so the city’s changed quite a bit,” Munro said .