Pure luck. We always joke that we possess some sort of special urban exploring powers, but in truth, it’s the good old UEM luck that provides seventy-five percent of the locations we explore, with the rest being places other explorers tell us about.

Fall had come to the year 2003, and it was getting colder – soon it’d be just too cold to wander around town, looking for boarded-up windows or graffiti. Our target for the day was the Darling Foundries, somewheredowntown. We never could find it, though: either we missed it completely or it got renovated/demolished.Undaunted… Well, okay, somewhat dejected, we began roving around the area, and drifted south to Silo #5, where the Mosaicultures were still going on. We passed by and eventually ended up following the Lachine Canal, just looking around at big buildings, clambering up to train tracks here and there… when we discovered a shed-sized out-of-the-way building whose door wasn’t locked at all! Needless to say, we hurled ourselves in, revealing a metallic staircase that descended into darkness too thick to pierce.

But hey, they make flashlights for a reason, right? At the bottom we found ourselves at the mouth of a gaping tunnel large enough to be a road tunnel. Surely, this was some secret maintenance tunnel, and our entrance was an emergency exit! Probably alarmed, too. Damn. It was thus with quite a bit of nervousness that we set forth, listening for possible maintenance workers or blaring alarm sirens. But when we came upon a large section of the tunnel that had been partially flooded, we realized this was a disused tunnel. And the Wellington one, probably. This we confirmed afterwards via a quick topside search for the notorious gated exit, which we found.

Some days, Saint Damascus just smiles on you....

Enter the Wellington Tunnel