With plans afoot to transform disused London tube stations into tourist attractions, ... how they get abandoned in the first plae

New York, not surprisingly, has quite a few ghost stations; the most famous one, City Hall on the Lexington Avenue line, was closed in 1945 because retrofitting it to serve newer trains was considered too expensive. Another station, South 4th Street in Brooklyn, never saw service after funding for the rest of its line was cut. Unlike their European counterparts, American ghost stations stand out for their unassuming pragmatism. The abandoned stations in Rochester, for example, have a distinctly utilitarian feel.

Although other countries on the American continent may not have embraced the automobile as enthusiastically as the US, they’re still home to a number of ghost stations. Toronto’s Lower Bay station was closed in 1966, allegedly due to an overly complicated track arrangement. There is also a small concentration of ghost stations in Latin America: Buenos Aires’s San Jose station was abandoned when one of the city’s subway lines was rerouted to the city centre in an effort to attract more users. And in Santiago, several metro stations were closed as a result of a massive earthquake in 1985.

In these capitalist countries, where one generation’s crisis is the next generation’s tourist trap, many of the stations have been repurposed. London’s Aldwych station has become a favourite for movie shoots, while Toronto’s Lower Bay has become a location for parties during the city’s huge film festival. Cincinnati’s abandoned subway line is occasionally opened for visits, and South 4th Street became a kind of gallery for Brooklyn street artists.

Crisis also spawned the ghost stations of the former Soviet bloc – created not by market fluctuations but overbearing authoritarian rulers. Berlin’s U-Bahn was a particularly noteworthy example. Though all the city’s stations are open today, during the Cold War a number of stations on lines that crossed through east Berlin were closed, sealed, and monitored by armed guards – who occasionally tried to escape to the west by jumping onto moving trains. These stations were poorly maintained yet seen by passengers daily, an eerie phenomenon that, in fact, gave rise to the term “ghost station”. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, all 16 Berlin ghost stations resumed service.

In Moscow, construction of Spartak station was completed in 1975, but when the housing complex it was supposed to serve was abruptly cancelled, the station sat unused. It has reopened this year to serve the new Spartak Moscow football stadium.

Perhaps the most famous disused subway in Moscow is the Metro 2, a top-secret, parallel subway system reported to have been constructed in the 1940s for the emergency transportation of Communist party top brass. Many doubt it exists, and there are no photos of its lines or stations, but many top Russian officials, as well as a US intelligence report from 1991, have attested to its existence.