Sydney sits on top of a second, parallel city: a network of underground railway tunnels, some used, others abandoned. Ann Jones put on a headlamp, descended into a disused section of railway and explored the city's subterranean history.

This article was originally published in November 2014. It has been republished to celebrate the luck of the 12 people who will get to see part of the tunnels during the Sydney Open festival.

There is a whole other town beneath Sydney's skin. It's an earthbound, stone and concrete-lined world of subterranean tunnels.

Legend has it, I’ve never personally seen it, a white albino eel lives in this water.

One of the grandest is an unfinished rail tunnel with a huge pitch-black lake at one end and a set of bomb shelters and an RAAF operations bunker at the other.

This tunnel flows right through St James Station in the centre of Sydney's CBD.

The station is beautifully constructed and elegantly proportioned, tiled in cream with green borders. Designed by architect George McRae and featuring many of its original fittings, if you squint you can imagine people in the 1930s moving across the platform.

Between the two platforms there is an extra wide space which was intended to house another two for an east-west line that was never completed.

The mothballed platforms are exactly like the ones outside, with white and green tiles, elegant arches and frames ready for advertising posters. It's lifeless and empty, though; here and there tiles have been jimmied off the wall and used to replace broken ones in the public area.

There are no rails. Instead, a set of stairs leads down to where the train would run, if it could, and head off into the dark tunnel.

Excavation work for St James and Museum, the first underground stations to be built in Australia, started in 1922. The tunnels in this immediate vicinity were mainly constructed with the 'cut and cover' technique, which involved digging a huge trench through Hyde Park, forming the tunnels out of concrete and then covering it right back up again.

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Whatsapp Tony Eid and Sam Sharma inspect a tunnel intersection.

In 1926, the station unlocked the centre of the city to commerce and major department stores sprang up a stone's throw from the entrance.

That same year engineer Norman Weekes won a public competition to design Hyde Park on top of the disturbed earth. Today, the huge fig trees that line his boulevards send their whisper-thin roots down through earth and concrete.

They penetrate the tunnels and grow slowly, becoming as thick as arms. They dangle from the roof before turning a right angle when they hit the floor like abandoned door snakes.

Continuing east down the abandoned tunnel, there are various intersections with the city loop. Trains whizz past, creating a piston effect by pushing air through the tunnel system, spinning huge old fans as tall as adults which are interspersed between the tunnels.

The design of an adequate rail system for the city was debated for many years before St James was built. In fact, it was a third royal commission into the topic that recommended a loop railway with six underground stations roughly where they are today.

St James was part of a grand plan for an underground electric railway proposed in 1915 by JJC Bradfield, the chief engineer for Metropolitan Railway Construction, and the man who designed the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

He envisioned an integrated system, of which these incomplete tunnels would have been a part.

'By and large, it was his design that was the backbone of what we're launching off for the future. We still run and move a million people a day on the back of that,' says Tony Eid, director of operations for Sydney Trains, as he walks through the tunnel pointing out design features.

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Whatsapp 'St James Lake' is one kilometre long and up to six metres deep in parts.

Some of the abandoned tunnels and platforms are used by Sydney Trains for storage of maintenance materials. The Harbour Bridge lines, for example, are only closed twice a year, so having everything on hand is imperative.

We walk past huge piles of gravel sorted into sizes, sleepers ready for installation and rails ready to be laid, and all the while the tunnel becoming darker and darker.

We move past an old signal box, long since abandoned and stripped, and rail sidings that used to represent the ends of the Bankstown, Illawarra and East Hills lines.

The tunnel continues even after that full train-length of space, becoming gradually more cave-like, with rough hewn walls which start to resemble rocky cliff scrambles.

Then we hit a vertical wall of rock.

'This is where they stopped, and they never did break through,' says Eid.

'You can see the lines coming down the walls, they were actually drilling and putting dynamite and exploding that sandstone,' he says.

It's almost as if the workers just walked away for lunch and didn't come back—drill holes sit waiting for dynamite and there are still wooden beams holding the roof up.

'Somebody made a call back then that this is it, we're not using this line, let's just not put any more time or energy into it,' says Eid.

'It's not the end of the road, it's just the end of the road here.'

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Whatsapp The torch beams are set on dynamite holes, drilled and ready for packing in the unfinished sections of tunnel.

The sandstone barrier in our path is only about four meters metres thick, and we scramble up and over it, brushing our heads close to stalactite formations as we go.

The tunnel opens out before us, turning into something completely different.

We are on a spit of land that slopes down to the shores of a placid lake.

It is stagnant and pitch black. City circle line trains roar past, audible through a manhole in the wall.

The shoreline of 'St James Lake' is muddy and there are small boulders scattered amongst the debris left by generations of rail workers and vandals on sightseeing tours.

Torchlight reveals that the tunnel stretches for about 40 metres before curving to the left and disappearing.

Eid says the lake is at least five metres deep in parts and stretches for over a kilometre. The tunnel is 10 metres wide and, I'm told, used to house a mushroom farm.

It's certainly moist enough, with the sandstone bedrock holding the water calm in its embrace, allowing silt and muck from the city above settle to the bottom, covering the remains of tunnel construction.

'Legend has it, I've never personally seen it, a white albino eel lives in this water,' says Eid, moving his torch across the water in anticipation.

'The army would practice in here for war games, they'd come in here and stay for days and practice in these tunnels.'

The tunnels have had other military uses; at the other end, back through the station and another abandoned platform are a series of heavy-duty bunkers.

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Whatsapp One of the retro-fitted bunker walls from WWII within an unused rail tunnel.

Used as air raid shelters during WWII, the tunnel is sectioned off with weaving paths made of steel-reinforced concrete between the bunkers.

At some point after the war, it was decided that the bunker infrastructure should be demolished, but Tony Eid laughs at how far along they got.

'Look how thick the steel is inside that wall! Look how thick the wall is of solid concrete! Nothing was going to get through that,' he says.

'I probably suggest that they started pulling it apart and thought, "This is too big, leave it, abort the mission," and that's exactly what they done.'

Further along still, the floor starts to slope upwards to the roof, the atmosphere is heavy with moisture and there is no airflow. There are water droplets on the walls and roof which look effervescent as the torch beams move over them.

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Whatsapp Cave Clan graffitti shares the same wall as that of WWII soldiers who worked in the bunkers. Roots from the figs in Hyde park can also be seen.

In reality they're still, though. Apart from us, the only movement in the deep cavern is the imperceptible growth of fig roots creeping through space and eating up history.

The walls are covered in graffiti, some from present day vandals, some written in grey lead by the WWII servicemen and women.

The deepest of the shelters is an RAAF war bunker that was in use until 1943. What allowed them to deface the walls of their workspace, Eid cannot say. However, the historical graffiti occurs where the rubble of the tunnel floor rises up to meet the roof, so perhaps this was a hideaway section, out of the boss's gaze.

'Read this: "I love you my dearest darling Robyn Foreman," and you just can't make out the date,' says Eid, reading some of the marks which sit next to Cave Clan scribbles and modern graffiti, including some marks from railway staff.

Back towards the platforms, a giant steel bell sits partially submerged, the remains of an ABC Radio Arts piece from the 1990s.

Shaped like an arrow head, it's a metre tall and sits three inches deep in water covered in white mould or silt. The fluid looks solid, though of course it's not.

Hitting the bell with the handle of his torch, Eid talks about how Sydney Trains is the custodian of many unseen heritage protected spaces, including the bell, the graffiti and the lake.

'We're very fortunate, and we do not take this lightly, we know we're the custodians of this type of arrangement and we protect it: the history of Sydney—underneath Sydney. It's a place that not a lot of people get an opportunity to see.'

Head outside and venture Off Track for a show about the great outdoors. Listen to the environment discussed by the people who live in and love it.



