In the best science fiction movies, there are parallel universes, worlds within worlds, secrets locked in forgotten codes. And so it is with the New York subways, which were envisioned to go far more places -- in a skein of routes that might dazzle present-day straphangers -- under bold plans that have faded into distant memory.
Some of this elaborately plotted system never emerged from planners' doodles but a surprising amount of it can be seen in concrete, brick and tile in spur lines leading to nowhere. There are tunnels and platforms that begin, then abruptly stop. Where were these trains going? From where? What did they connect to?
Yellowed plans in Transit Authority file cabinets hold most of the answers, but even the agency's experts find themselves puzzled by some of the unrealized links. And rail buffs glory in the sometimes mysterious possibilities. It is enough to make you wish you had been here yesterday, until you realize that yesterday never happened -- at least not yet.
And so it came to pass on a recent Sunday morning that 40 rail enthusiasts and curiosity seekers assembled for a tour of the Land of Might Have Been. They descended upon the Roosevelt Avenue station in Jackson Heights on the Queens Boulevard IND line. There, they stumbled along a three-block-long roadbed that has never been used by a train. The platform, above the existing Queens Boulevard line, was finished in 1936, but tracks were never laid.
Some carried flashlights to navigate the darkness. Leaves rustled beneath them. The tiles announcing the station's name were faded, never seen by a passenger. The dust in the air contained minutely ground steel that had billowed up from the lower line. The transit corridor had become a storage site for everything from used office furniture to steel pipe.
Continue reading the main story''I came to imagine what might have been,'' declared Bill Bellmer, an engineer from Garden City, L.I.
''This is history,'' said Lewis Hitch, a retired subway signalman who lives in Elmhurst, Queens. ''This is the history that should have been.''
Jennifer Egan, one of the few women on the tour, proclaimed that she was seeing a part of her home station that she had never imagined. She said she yearned for a renewal of the monthly Miss Subways competition so she might compete. She volunteered that her favorite thing about the system is that Staten Island is not connected to it.
The funny thing is, it almost was: construction drawings were prepared in 1925 to connect the Brooklyn Fourth Avenue line to Staten Island.
From a Second Avenue line -- partly built, then left in sepulchral splendor -- to lines that would have connected to the New York City airports, the northeastern Bronx and eastern Queens, previous generations of planners had enormous ideas. Often, they even money lined up, only to see it gnawed away by bad times or simple operating needs.
Had these visions become reality, the city above might have been more populated, denser and taller, said Joseph R. Raskin, a Transit Authority government affairs officer who dreamed up the tour for the Transit Museum and then led it. This was the first of what is intended to be a series of tours, with different sites visited each time.
''People today don't know that many years ago, back in the 20's, there were minds planning the movement of people with incredible foresight,'' Mr. Raskin said. ''The city might have grown a lot bigger. It's a pity the vision never materialized.''
The audacity of the planners is obvious from an article in The New York Times on Sept. 22, 1929. It began, ''The younger generation who use the subway today may confidently look forward to a time when, still in the prime of life, they will be able to go to almost any point in Greater New York during the rush hour without experiencing a dangerous or indecent degree of overcrowding.''
Staten Island apparently already out of the picture, riders in the other boroughs were promised much more attractive stations within a half-mile of their homes. Fares would remain at a nickel.
Then came bad luck, lots of it, starting with the stock market crash a month later, the opening salvo of the Great Depression. World War II further drained government coffers, and politicians' insistence on keeping the nickel fare meant the system hovered on financial collapse. The war's aftermath saw Robert Moses crisscrossing the region with roads, bridges and tunnels, as Washington poured billions into highways.
The last mammoth effort to build large additions to the subway system was Mayor John V. Lindsay's 1968 proposal to spend nearly $1 billion on eight new subway lines, including the Second Avenue line promised since the 20's. But soon, the city was being strangled by another fiscal crisis, and new building was impossible. Even maintenance became problematic, and the subway became popularly derided as the Electric Gutter. Today, the system has dramatically rebounded from its depths, but the only expansion underway is a project to connect the Q and B trains to the Queens Boulevard line.
But just how the big dreams ground to a halt remains an elusive question. ''I cannot find one specific cutoff point where someone said, 'Hey guys, we're not going ahead with these,' '' Mr. Raskin said. Nor does the subway movie buff (he reviews movies set in the subways for the T.A. newsletter) necessarily urge a return to the original plans.
His reason for not being completely sure the big plans should now be implemented relates to his sense of drama, as well as the proper order of things. He cites a popular episode of ''Star Trek'' in which McCoy travels through a time portal to 1930's New York, from where Spock and Kirk must rescue him as well as repair a badly damaged time line. The tension is making sure nothing done in the past engenders a chain of consequences that change the present in unpredictable ways.
''The world is effectively saved,'' Mr. Raskin said of the show. The lesson, he suggests, is that things might be pretty much how they were meant to be. And transit buffs might be likened to Trekkers in their enthusiasm. Many have model railroads at home, and like nothing so much as correcting one another's esoterica. Accordingly, Transit Museum tours are popular. They range from roaming stations to admire terra cotta decor to visiting seven ''ghost stations'' no longer in service, most spectacularly the elegant one directly beneath City Hall.
Some of their regular visits go back to the misty past such as one to a Long Island Rail Road tunnel beneath Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue built in 1844, sealed in 1861 and rediscovered by a buff in the early 1980's. He had only read about the line, which connected downtown Brooklyn to Suffolk County and from there, to Boston by boat.
Others are impossible to visit, but remain captivating mental journeys.
Many subway buffs enjoy exchanging details about Alfred Ely Beach's subway deep beneath City Hall. It was a pneumatic tube, just 312 feet long, and built secretly as a prototype by Mr. Beach, who was editor of The Scientific American and publisher of The New York Sun. He hoped to present his creation to William Marcy Tweed, who opposed it because he did not have an illicit piece of the action.
The subway had a waiting room with Greek statuary, a fountain, a goldfish tank and a baby grand piano. In its first and only year, 1870, more than 400,000 people paid a quarter each to ride it the short distance between Warren and Murray Streets. But Boss Tweed succeeded in killing it anyway.
Like its successors, even this short, early line was meant to be connected to more ambitious routes, specifically to Central Park. But it was forgotten until 1912, when workers building the new BMT subway line chanced upon it, piano and all.
Seeing the barest beginnings of something never realized is an entirely different matter, of course. One of these is the infamous Second Avenue tunnel. The tour group went to Brooklyn Bridge and climbed down a ladder to behold a tunnel, an eighth of a mile long and going north-south in Manhattan. It is oddly clean, with no trace of steel dust. The long, ribbed ceiling bespeaks modernity. It is dead silent. There are two other spaces like this in East Harlem. Otherwise, there is nothing but the agreement of generations of planners that the East Side line is needed.
Mr. Raskin says many lines have what are known as ''bellmouth tunnels,'' which widen to allow another line to intersect with an existing track. Often, they are between stops, and the only way for the average person to observe them is through the front or rear window of a moving train. There are also beginnings of turnoffs, like one at Ditmars Boulevard, at the end of the N line in Queens. A 1929 plan called for the N line to go to Bayside, meaning it would have gone to La Guardia Airport and beyond. The turnoff is the tiny first step in the journey never made. At Utica Avenue on the A line in Brooklyn, a bellmouth exists that might have gone all the way to Sheepshead Bay.
And in Manhattan, the E and C lines have the beginnings of a link to a never-built line going across the island and over the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn.
There are many others, but perhaps the most intriguing is a connection from Brooklyn to Staten Island, which Mr. Raskin has been told by some enthusiasts runs off the R line.
He has never seen it himself, though he has found detailed construction drawings for the project, dated 1925. ''People have told me it's there,'' he said of the incipient tunnel. ''People I trust.''
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