Earlier this year, I interviewed a retired steelworker named Tom Wells, who had taken hundreds of color photographs of Chicago’s freight train tunnels in the late ’80s and early ’90s. At their peak, the tunnels encompassed sixty miles of track, forty feet below the sidewalk, extending from Superior Street south to 16th. Inside, small train cars—built and controlled by the Chicago Tunnel Company—carried coal, ash, mail, home goods, and newsprint from warehouses to ferry terminals along the river, making stops at buildings connected to the underground tracks by elevator shafts. The tunnels closed in 1954, by that time more of a curiosity than a financially viable operation. (I hadn’t heard of them until I started working on this piece.) Tom and his friends explored the network on their days off, documenting the train cars and the ephemera they found along the tracks: the signs, boots, and old telephone boxes left behind by workers.

Tom’s photographs document an important place just before it flooded, in 1992, and before it grew far harder for urban explorers to access it, after September 11. But when I spoke to Tom, I learned that he did not know where the photographs were. Following his divorce in 2016, he put them in a handmade box and then lost it somewhere in storage. I felt that if I could find the photos, I might help Tom archive and receive credit for his work. Though other archival photographs of the tunnels exist, I doubt there are any as comprehensive as his, nor any formatted for 3D stereoscope viewers, as his were. Perhaps a new generation of transit-oriented young people, unaware of the tunnels’ breadth and complexity, might become interested.

It took me a while to persuade Tom to let me look through his belongings, but in February, he at last agreed. He would just need some assistance, he said. He had a spinal cord injury from a 2018 incident when a former roommate threw him over a railing. He also had a broken arm from a kitchen accident in January.

When we first spoke in person, Tom was sitting on his couch, nursing his injury and filling cigarettes with Gambler’s brand pipe tobacco. His wild white hair, reminiscent of Arthur Schopenhauer’s, rose above a face that recalled the honest man in Norman Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech. His home was decorated with busts of Nefertiti. Of his surrounding trailer park community, in Portage, Indiana, Tom said there were two kinds of residents: young couples hoping to save up for a better home, and people like him, living in “God’s waiting room.”

“I went to a radio college, the oldest radio school in the country, in Valparaiso,” Tom said. “I graduated in 1982. I loved radio, but I could see, even as a teenager, how it was falling apart. My friends and I met Larry Lujack, who was the biggest name in radio at the time. He said, ‘Don’t go into radio,’ and I said, ‘I already know.’”

“So I went to industrial process control at the steel mill first, for eight years. And then into high-speed printing presses, traveling all over, setting them up, starting them up. . . . I didn’t move up to Chicago until ’88.” In the city he linked up with two art students from UIC, Tracy Hixon and John Edel, both interested in photography, film, and postindustrial relics. Tom had found out about the tunnels via a train enthusiast club and invited them down with him.

The group of friends called themselves the Chicago Tunnel Company Benign Visitation Crew, words they chalked onto the tunnels’ concrete walls during their exploratory walks. They entered via an elevator shaft inside the former Soo Line terminal, now a Whole Foods parking lot off of Roosevelt Road. Miners’ helmets equipped with carbide lamps allowed them to navigate through the darkness. They also wore fishing waders to tramp through puddles, and suit jackets to lend an air of respectability to the endeavor.

John, who later founded a series of vertical farms in a former pork-processing plant, recalled a stretch of tunnel where stalagmites formed from road salt that had percolated down through the soil. Tracy mentioned the road signage at the tunnel intersection beneath State and Madison, once hailed as “the busiest intersection in the world.” Tom remembered an extra-wide section illicitly built to accommodate a full-size train; a stretch that led into the central post office and directly into the basement of an active bank; and the shaft that was built first, on Madison Street, which had once run up into a tavern owned by the corrupt 19th Ward alderman Johnny Powers.

Of all the places Tom had seen, however, the one that seemed to leave the strongest impression was the stretch of track under the Kinzie Street Bridge. In 1992, he saw mud oozing through a crack in a wall. Two weeks later, it burst open, flooding the system. Numerous buildings with long-neglected connections to the trains were suddenly inundated.

River water filled the Merchandise Mart subbasement, and the building engineer at the Randolph Metra station found lake perch inside the building. Trading shut down at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade. The CTA suspended service at State Street and Dearborn. Nearly $2 billion in damage accrued across the Loop, resulting in the firing of several high-ranking city officials. Mayor Richard M. Daley refused to take the blame, pointing to video footage of the leak that had gone ignored.

In the aftermath, crews were dispatched to blockade the tunnels with concrete bulkheads, bookending an existence already thoroughly attenuated. The dreams and money of many rich men, the time and lives of many working people, had poured into the ground, only to come roaring back in a torrent of river water.

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In 1899, the Chicago Tunnel Company announced the tunnel project as a way to build an underground telephone line, but quickly switched tack without telling anyone in City Hall and built a train line instead. The line was meant to alleviate overground traffic and featured small train cars running on two-foot-wide tracks.

The promotional materials resonate with the bygone prosody of 20th-century boosterism: “They carry as willingly a lady’s hat as a ton of coal. . . . They help to beautify the city by being the silent arteries through which flows the debris of razed buildings.” Six hundred visitors, largely drawn from the Chicago Press Club, attended the inaugural banquet, which was held underground. Waiters ran along wooden boards as they carried food to journalists, politicians, and investors. Later on, Mae West descended for a photo op, wearing an imperious expression and a winsome scarf. In a Golden Age radio play, a dinosaur that resides inside of the tunnels saves a woman from her murderous husband.

Much of the track was built with the mistaken assumption that everyone would simply want what the tunnels had to offer. Phone customers, encouraged to tap into a system that was eventually built, exploited the free promotion until it expired and then left the service behind. Many potential rail clients couldn’t be bothered to pay for connections forty feet down. The narrow train cars struggled against the Teamsters’ broad carriages and later lost out definitively against truck shipping. The cars moved coal into furnaces, but after a while, building owners switched to natural gas. Briefly, the tunnels functioned as a kind of cooling system, connecting the cold underground air into downtown theaters—a system that worked well enough until air conditioning was installed. The ventures became increasingly desperate as business continued to decline—first unevenly, then precipitously. At Sherman Street, train service stopped before workmen had finished the last rail ties.

Still, as it is written, “the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” The tunnels might be inaccessible, but their waste was and is essential.

When tweens rage at Lollapalooza, when Taste of Chicagoans carry under-spiced ribs up and down the slanted lawn near Randolph Street, and when water shoots high at Buckingham Fountain; or when King spoke to thousands in ’66, or cops clobbered protesters in 68, or when Obama spoke to the assembled masses upon winning the 2008 election, he, they, we trod upon landfill carved out from the tunnels by workers armed with silver knives. The red clay tunnel spoil—carted away by mules, then train cars, and dumped into Lake Michigan—forms the basis of Grant Park. In this way, their negative space proved more important than their positive.

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I was halfway to Indiana when Tom called to inform me that we couldn’t get into his storage unit. His daughter, Inky, had the keys, but she was not picking up the phone. She was at the Extended Stay America near Westfield Old Orchard. Could I get them from her? I said that I could, turned the car around, drove an hour, and found I could not. I pleaded with the concierge to knock on Inky’s door or call her room phone, but she wouldn’t budge. I pleaded more, the concierge at last relented, knocked on the door, and heard nothing. I called the line and also heard nothing. Inky’s phone had been disconnected. End of the first day’s search.

On the second day, Inky arrived at my apartment wearing a Juicy Couture sweat suit, carrying a clutch shaped like a little horse. She apologized for the previous morning’s absence while driving her car ninety miles an hour down the Indiana tollway and taking calls from her fiancé, who was incarcerated in the Cook County jail. When we arrived at Tom’s house, I noticed that the wheels on the pristine Dodge Charger I had seen on my previous visit were now splayed out like on an exhausted cartoon race car. The airbag had been deployed and the front window was smashed open. Inky had crashed the Charger, leaving only an Oldsmobile, a car she called the “chuck wagon,” available for use in the driveway.

Tom was inside, listening to birdsong from his TruAlert monitor and simultaneously watching a police procedural on mute. Two suited men interrogated a man tied to a chair while the monitor livestreamed robins drinking from an artesian well outside of his kitchen. “The robins are angry,” Tom said, then rolled up a cigarette, then vaped, then started talking about his time installing printers in Australia. Inky took another call, showered, did her toilette and her hair. She walked in and out of the living room wearing different blouses. An hour passed.

In the warm air wafting through Tom’s screen door—“false spring” as the weatherman called it—the photos and research started to feel inconsequential to me. An enormous vulture swooped past our ears when we finally arrived at the storage unit, though Tom insisted it was an eagle.

His two lockers were stupendously full of old things. Tables, shelves, cabinets, and chairs formed barriers that made it impossible to assess possibly essential boxes. Inky and I found dozens of machine parts and radio tubes, small cans of carbide and lubricant, and also a jar of mercury. We found rusted stovetop covers and barstools and wires, along with a large wooden hamper, purchased in Minnesota from a pair of Amish girls.

In one of the most promising troves, I found some somewhat racy photos of Tom’s ex-girlfriends; another had his father’s memory book from World War II; another, a collection of 45s; another, a set of fragile glass bulbs. We lost the thread again within a few hours, and by this time it was too dark to see. Inky’s fiancé called and said the other men locked up at Cook County were making fun of him for playing the oldies channel on his radio. A swarm of stink bugs crawled out from a corner of the locker.

The following weekend, I returned to the storage lockers with my partner, Blair. Upon arriving, we removed the picnic table and wooden chairs and machinery and placed it all on the gravel road that ran through the facility. Blair climbed in first, swinging their legs through a hole in the rafters and rifling through box after box. Forty minutes passed, and I despaired at the sight of them, how intrepid they looked, the hope with which they pursued the mission. Soon this despair transformed into anger, a propulsive anger that thrust me back into the work. We found little chisels and saws and used them to open boxes without having to move them outside. I cut into boxes with speed and abandon, as if I were trying to clear away brush in a forest. It was exhausting. The unit was extremely hot. After three hours, I was too tired to continue and surveyed my wasted efforts from inside a hollow I’d carved out from stacks of briefcases and wooden chests.

This time, our findings included heaps of batteries wrapped in old quilts, a collection of Highlights for Children magazines, a set of immobilized cart wheels, a box of rotary phones and a box of wooden cutlery, plastic flowers, and vintage English candies turned to syrup in their rotten tin. Then in a box labeled—Oh God! at last!—“tunnel,” we found an enormous rusted chain. It was shaped like a branch of coral, and each time I stirred, flakes of oxidized steel fell from the holes of its links and rained down onto the floor. When we brought the chain back to the trailer, Tom was overjoyed to see it and told us he’d kept it in his fireplace in a former apartment.

Again, we talked some more. There was nothing else to do. He explained that his interest in trains derived from his childhood in Hobart, Indiana.

“We had three train tracks through the town,” he said. “One was the EJ&E. The other was the Nickel Plate. And then the Pennsylvania. They all ran through town at slightly different angles, so they were convenient for the shortest path across town.”

“My cousin Ed Wells ran the interlocking towers—the two-story towers where train tracks cross. My dad would take us to go and see them. He made shear knives at US Steel.”

In school, Tom’s teacher gave him a 3D 35mm camera that he used to photograph trains. “I’d screen mount them in a cardboard-pressed frame approximately the proportions of a license plate. I’d stick each photo into a viewer, hold the viewer up, see the left eye and the right eye, and get the 3D effect. A lot of pictures ended up in the yearbook only as a single picture, but I made 3D versions for myself,” he said.

He worked for the Hobart Historical Society, then the Hobart Gazette. He shot photographs of a burning apartment for the paper; “After that, you didn’t see me without a camera. I had an ingrown camera at that point,” he said.

The camera came down into the tunnels. So did his tape cassette recorder. A folder of MP3s, on a computer whirring inside of his closet, includes a file of his friend singing about needle-nose pliers inside of the tunnel. He had played the song on his former pirate radio station, named the “Chicago Tunnel Company.” The sound of footsteps splashing through water and loud metal clangs can be heard in the recording. He knew exactly where he’d made it, and in fact seemed to know the entirety of the system as if it were the city aboveground.

“East of the river down to Roosevelt, the tunnel is more or less continuous,” he said. “There’s a little on the west side of the river that runs up to where Canal meets Milwaukee at Kinzie Street. The main stretch we explored was Randolph, which went past City Hall to Wabash, and then below Marshall Fields. City Hall had a weird little bypass that would take you up into their basement.”

“At Washington and Van Buren, we saw the original hole that was dug in the back of a tavern. It was a very small tunnel that was oval-shaped, almost lip-shaped, and the track was, I think, two feet wide. Although the main section was forty feet below, here the tunnel was only about 30 feet below.”

Other sections unfolded in his mind’s eye and his tellings. His passionate interest in the various grades and widths of track felt somewhat mysterious to me, as, I suppose, all serious interests do to those who do not share them.

After these three excursions—two to the lockers, one to the hotel—we had succeeded in finding only one small picture of the tunnels, in an otherwise unrelated assortment of documents. It was a small, square picture depicting a tunnel intersection lit by orange carbide light. Its upper-right corner was torn slightly and two vertical creases ran up through the middle, dividing the left-branching tunnel and the right in half.

On the ceiling, small, stout crystals run from the bottom to the top of the arch. The tracks below are caked in mud—wooden boards cross through them. At the picture’s vanishing point, small electric lights can be seen.

When presented with the photo, Tom examined it in the sunlight and then placed it in a tin of Egyptian cigarettes that he kept beside his feet. We talked a little bit more about his old tunnel-themed radio station. Its call sign was “W Nothin’ Nothin’ Nothin.’”

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