Students explore
4ggie catacombs
By LISA JUNOD
My hands gripped the cold steel rungs as
slowly lowered myself down the ladder
idintothe darkened tunnel. Soon my foot
inched the ground, and I relunctantly re-
ased my death grip on the ladder,
uart SpeiKs; [pthed in an over-sized dark green swea-
director, tol §, a pair of battle-scarred blue jeans and a
iroon bandana, I was about to embark
ponone of the strangest adventures of my
featTexas A&M: a trip through the steam
'esidentlulj
major stateij
a Florida tol
ction.
California, t| mnels.
)t be word Rumors as widespread and ancient as the
nderground system of tunnels have
an overstas rompted my nocturnal mission. My prim-
Presidentni y task was to search for an underground
e and with jlroad that many old Aggies claimed ran
always lui etween Sbisa and Duncan dining halls.
“They used to run food back and forth on
nderground railroad tracks,” one former
indent reminisced. Another claimed that
was not railroad tracks, but trolley tracks
at transported the food. One Maggie pre-
ntly enrolled at A&M boldly stated that
ider the campus lay “open tunnels frig
iiough to drive a truck through.”
But I found neither railroads nor trucks
I slipped down into the tunnels on that
idly evening: 1 found instead a unique
S J art of the A&M campus that is seldom
I sen by present day students, and I disco
vered an Aggie tradition older than calling
oil at Silver Taps or kissing after
[ouchdowns at football games: the lost art of
nnnel ratting.
The tunnel floor was firm beneath my
as I backed into the darkness to allow
companion, Will Anderson, to climb
pwn the ladder. The moonlight, still shin-
E JJ Ig brightly through the tunnel entrance,
as abruptly extinguished when Will slid
"le manhole cover hack over the hole. A
|w pebbles clattered down the walls as
dropped to the floor beside me, and
ien—near silence, punctuated only by
lie rhythmic ticking of my watch.
We had entered the tunnels near the
arms on the north end of the campus, so
fewanted to head southeast toward Sbisa.
turned my hack on the tunnel entrance
id took a confident step forward— only to
lunge my foot ankle-deep in mud. Will
I fckeci the switch on his flashlight and a
(\ ( nghtbeam of light shot down the expanse
iftunnel in front of us, illuminating a seem-
tigly endless stretch of muddy earth. He
tepped past me and began sloshing down
he tunnel, and after screwing up my cour
ge and hitching up my pants, I followed
im.
The tunnel was larger than I had ex
erted, nearly six feet high and wide
plough to walk through comfortably with-
nit bumping into tlm sides. It seemed to
tretch on forever: an uninterrupted pas-
ffieway of blackness lined on one side with
luge heating pipes and on the other side
ih dim, dusty light bulbs spaced about
wry 30 feet.
Although the outside temperatures were
y,
e or take#
are
...1.2
...1.2
..$1.2S
in the lower fifties, the air inside the tunnel
was warm and I soon began to perspire
under the weight of my sweater. The air
was also quite still and a bit steamy, and felt
like College Station after a good rain.
The air was still, but not as silent as I had
first imagined. The steam tunnels have
their own peculiar noises — traveling
down the passageways I heard pressure
valves hissing gently as they released tiny
rivulets of stem into the warm moist air. I
could hear the faint sound of generators
whirring in the distance and pipes clanging
and banging as the loads they carried
changed.
I became so engrossed in the tunnel
sounds that I nearly ran over Will, who had
stopped to stare at some markings on the
walls. He aimed his flashlight at a group of
them: I could barely make out the words,
“Animal Eight — Best Damn Outfit on
Campus. As our eyes became accustomed
to the darkness we began to notice more
markings on the dust-covered concrete
walls, most of them names of Corps outfits
and students written in paint, felt-tip
marker and even dried mud.
In the older tunnels we found, “SDQ 5
’68”, “Filthy Fifth”, “Salvation of the Corps
- D.B.”, “Devil D-l” and “Beat the Class
75 Hell outa t.u.”
I was staring intently at some initials and
a “’61” carved in a wooden beam when Will
called to me from further down the tunnel.
He pointed his flashlight toward a hole in
the wall, and exposed a pipe as wide as a
coffee can teeming with giant roaches,
some of them peering through the eye soc
kets of a cleanly-picked rat skull. I shud
dered and drew back instinctively, but Will
simply laughed. He had been through the
tunnels before and had already seen the
gargantuan roaches and spindly-legged
spiders that inhabit the darkened depths.
Nocturnal insects abound in the tunnels,
but there is a noted scarcity of rats and
snakes. Will suggested most of them are in
the Administration Building. That is prob
ably because no such creature could exist
for long in such a steamy, hot environment.
We grew painfully aware of the intense
heat as we trudged on through the tunnels
that run underneath the front of the chem
istry building and the library. One Aggie
wrote on the wall, “Hot in Here,” an obser
vation any tunnel rat would agree with.
Once under the biological sciences
building, we came to a crossroads in the
tunnel, and turned toward an archway
adorned with a “Welcome to the Pit sign.
We cautiously crawled through the entr
ance, and found ourselves staring through a
wall of pipes at a small room. Empty except
for various valves and pipes, the room
opened on one side into a smaller an
teroom, and in one corner into a ragged
staircase. The anteroom was devoid of fur
nishings and filled with graffiti from more
recent year — “WE STOLE BEVO ’6
NOV 72” written in large, bold strokes.
Staff photo by Kevin Venner
The writings indicated that the secret
room must have been deserted for years,
but what was it doing there in the first
place? Was it the hidden lair of some long-
forgotten maniacal biologist, a madman
who performed sex change experiments on
frogs? Or did he concoct secret potions,
perform Frankensteinian experiments or
hold captive a lovely damsel in distress???
Whatever its cause for existence, the
room reeked of the past and I shivered as I
tiptoed toward the staircase, a structure
that rose ten or twelve feet in the air, then
ended abruptly. A staircase leading
nowhere, that at one time must have step
ped up into some mad professor’s office or
into some secret storeroom.
Slowly I left the stairs and climbed back
over the pipes and into the tunnel. Will
tried to jiggle the staircase door loose, but
it was wedged tightly into the cement and
soon he gave up and followed me.
After leaving the room, we reversed di
rection and headed across campus toward
the Corps dorms, to find some of the older
writings and see if we could find any traces
of the rumored Sbisa-Duncan railroad. By
this time my legs were aching and my
shoulders permanently stooped from bend
ing over to fit through the low passageway.
The older steam tunnels have much lower
ceilings than the new ones, sometimes only
about five feet high. This particular tunnel
was flooded, and I found myself sloshing
through long stretches of the black muck on
the tunnel floor.
But all the slime and clammy mud left
my thoughts when Will turned his
flashlight to the wall, and we came face-to-
face with a historical marker: an Aggie cen
tennial ring imprinted on the tunnel wall in
sealing wax. One tunnel rat had written
on the wall, “PIG CAN GO ME,”
proof that Aggies are couth even in steam
tunnels. ,
THE BATTALION Page 3
THURSDAY, MAY 6, 1976
Steam tunnels
had many uses i
By LISA JUNOD
»
(Note: Entrance into the university’s J
steam tunnels is strictly prohibited by •
paragraph 48, part b of the University !
Rules and Regulations which warns \
against “the willful and illegal entry of any ]
University property, including dormitory ;
basements, utility tunnels and utility*
chambers between floors and in walls.” I
Offenders may be punished by expulsion,
dismissal, suspension or other disciplinary \
action.)
«
The steam tunnels, reputed home of the ;
legendary Gigags, are narrow under-*
ground passageways designed to allow’*
maintenance workers easy access to the
university’s heating pipes. These tunnels;
now house pipes that carry hot and cold;
running water, steam heat, telephone-
lines, and power and television cables. , <
The tunnels are reinforced concrete •
structures buried about ten feet under-'
ground. Three main tunnels radiate out!
from the university power plant and, aided;
by nearly a dozen smaller branches, reach •
into the basements of nearly every heated
building on campus.
Despite their utilitarian purposes, in
past years the tunnels have served as a
rather unusual recreational area for stu
dents at A&M. One Old-Army Ag claims
that during the 1950s on any given Satur
day night the tunnels were a beehive of
activity, so busy that “they could have used
a traffic cop down there. There were guys
wandering all over.”
In those days when Corps membership
was compulsory and no women lived on
campus dorm rivalries were stronger, and
many Aggies used the steam tunnels to gain
access to other dorms. Sometimes the in
vaders would climb up inside the dorms
and awaken their sleeping enemies with
buckets of cold water; other times they
would paper their rooms or try to flood the
halls. Often the attackers simply turned the
pressure valves in the steam tunnels, cut
ting off the heat leading into the dorm and
freezing students out of the building.
University records don’t show how old
the steam tunnels are, but they date back to
at least the 1920’s when cadets lived in tent
city (now the site of Law and Puryear Halls)
and sought refuge from the chilling College
Station winters in the steamy tunnels. The
main tunnel system now in use has been
here since 1939, when branches extended
down Military Walk and to the north dorm
area, the systems building and the biologi
cal sciences building.
Modern-day tunnel rats can find re
mnants of past Aggie civilizations etched on
the walls; students’ names, classes and
sometimes even phone numbers. The ear
liest date found in the tunnels, “1920”, was
scratched in the concrete wall of a tunnel
beneath the biological sciences building.
Above the date a “Welcome to the Pit” sign
enticed brave Aggies to enter the steamy
lair.
Bookmart will be open from Monday May 10 — Friday May 14 from 9-5 daily, and will be located in room 137 of the
MSC. Due to limited funds we are able to buy only the books listed here. We are selling quite a variety, however. We
will open again for the first two weeks of fall semester to sell and will buy for the last two weeks of the fall semester.
Hopefully at that time we will be able to buy all books which will be used in the spring of ’77. We re sorry we can’t buy
more books at this time, but we hope this will help us to better serve you in the future. Any questions, please call the
Student Government Office at 845-3051.
EE!
I
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336 Egan
427 Crowley
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427A MFPATS
428 Ferguson
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453 Clough
470 Labor Relations Re
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617 Dagosino
Auntington
Construction Principles 3ed.
Mech and Elec Equipment 5th ed.
Concepts in Thermal Comfort
Steel Building Design Manual
Steel Construction Manual
Wood Construction Data 1-6
Reinforced Fundamentals 3ed.
Building Code rev. Reinforced Construction
Construction Contracting
Primer for Labor Relations
Building Estimates Reference Book
Methods and Materials of Comm. Const.
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140 Newton Design on the Land
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327 Meigs
329 Horngren
409 Benjamin
A guide to Drawing
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Art through the Ages
Figure Drawing
Intermediate Accounting
Cost Accounting
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Aerospace Engineering
201 Dommasch Airplane Aerodynamics
301 Kuethe Foundations of Aerodynamics
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105 Snodgrass Ag Eco and Resource Mgmt.
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102 Beakley Engineering
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107 Campbell
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225 Cambell
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301 Garbarino
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107 Keeton
113
114
114 Bold
201 Porter
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204 Haynes
Business Analysis
217 Donald
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The Science of Animals that Serve Mankind 2ed.
Basic Animal Science Lab Manual
Human Engineering
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Native American Heritage
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The Plant Kingdom
Texonomy of Flowering Plants
Flora of South Central Texas
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Computers in Business
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204 Hougen Chemical Process Principals
304 McCabe Unit Operations
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101 O’Conner
227 Morrison
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201 Herubin
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Fundamentals of Chemistry
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Statics and Strength of Materials
Water Supply and Pollution Control
Fortran IV Programming
Advanced Mechanics of Materials
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203 McConnel
Bingham
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101 Funk
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201 Sears
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Roth
Engineering Technology
105
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106
Walker
207
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201
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203
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204
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231
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101
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109
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301
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211
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312
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363
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102
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103
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104
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121
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130
Salas
165
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230
Whipkey
Economics
Study Guide to Accompany Economics (McConnel)
30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary
Electricity and Magnetism
Basic Circuit Theory with Digital Computation
Use of the Oscilloscope
Technical Woodworking
Modern Metal Working
Materials in Industry
Ten Stmt Fortran plus Fortran IV
Fortran IV with WATFOR and WATFIV
Assm. Lang, for Fortran COBOL and PL-I Prog.
An Introduction to Programming
Norton Anthology of English Lit.
General and Applied Entomology
North American Trees
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Forest Ecology
The Practice of Silviculture
Man and the Land
One World Divided
Physical Geography Today
Geography of Economic Activity
Earth
Earth Science
Elements of Mineralogy
American History — A Survey 4ed.
Construction/Manufacturing Wood Products
General Metals
Introductory Statistics
Statistics for the Biological Sci.
Media: An Introductory Analysis
Reporting for Print Media
The Art of Editing
The Professional Journalist
Creative News Editing
Introduction to Photography
Television Production Handbook
Broadcasting in America
Basic Marketing
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213
222 Van Vlack
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Understanding our Atmospheric Env.
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Beginning Spanish
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Decouverte et creation
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Pet. Eng. Drilling and Well Completion
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Beneficent Euthanasia
Introduction to the Old Testament
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102 Bell
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How to Identify Plants
100 Native Forests in 11 Southern States
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201 Carlson
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Recreation in American Life
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