Walking an abandoned metro line beneath the capital of Armenia

@ElentirENG ES 10·13·2023 · 22:44 0

In several cities around the world, underground urban railway projects were started but were never completed.

The beautiful ghost station of the New York Subway that was designed by a Spaniard
A tour of the Cincinnati Subway: an entire subway network abandoned since 1928

One of those cities is Yerevan, the capital of the Republic of Armenia, a small country located between Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Iran. Currently, the city has almost 1.1 million inhabitants. In the 1960s, when Yerevan was the capital of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic (part of the USSR), construction of a metro network was planned to facilitate urban transportation in the growing city. , which by then already had around one million inhabitants.

The Yerevan metro was inaugurated on March 7, 1981, with a single underground line that completed the surface urban railway lines. This line originally consisted of four stations and was extended years later. After the independence of Armenia in September 1991, construction of a second metro line began, but the economic problems that the new country suffered ended up paralyzing the works. Finally, this second line was abandoned halfway through construction.

A few weeks ago, the channel Abandoned World Wanderers published a video descending into this abandoned metro line:

You can see some screenshots from the video here. Here we see one of the abandoned tunnels, made of formworked concrete.

Old mine carts. They were left in the tunnels when work stopped and the line was abandoned.

A section of the tunnel shows wooden beams to reinforce the ceiling. The wood is in very poor condition, partly due to water leaks. At this rate the roof will end up collapsing.

A section of the abandoned subway with two lines of tracks. Judging by the size of the tracks, they were possibly for mine cars, since they do not have sleepers.