Hacker Cinema
The Race Underground
2017 · Film · documentary · 52 min
Directed by Michael Rossi
Based on Doug Most's acclaimed non-fiction book of the same name, The Race Underground tells the dramatic story of how Boston overcame a litany of challenges, the greed-driven interests of businessmen, and the great fears of its citizenry to create America’s first subway.
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Whenever I see comments about how slow public projects are these days, I think about this documentary: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/race-underground/
It's a PBS special about the history of the Boston subway (which was one of the first in the nation).
To give you an idea of what construction safety was like back then, they would routinely encounter gas lines, cut them WITHOUT turning off the gas, and keep working.
Obviously, this led to lots of explosions but also very quick construction. If you are optimizing for speed over safety/environmental/etc it's pretty surprising how quickly you can build something.