See Central Subway’s progress with these incredible photos

Here’s what happening beneath our streets

By Adam Brinklow Jan 20, 2017, 1:32pm PST

A line of men in hard hats and safety vests peer up at a massive drilling machine more than twice their height.

In February, it will be seven years since the city broke ground on the Central Subway, a massive (and massively expensive) north-south extension of the T-Third Street Muni line that will eventually terminate at Chinatown.

The project is scheduled to finish by 2019. And much work has already been completed on the mammoth project. However, the average San Franciscan doesn’t get to see said progress, save for a few rows of fences and plywood barriers, with occasional glimpses of machinery or great subterranean depths opening up below.

But for the entirety of the project—even going back to before the official groundbreaking—the tireless Central Subway photographers have documented the entire affair, uploading dramatic images of the seemingly endless digging to a Flickr account.

In all, over 5,000 images are available for pubic perusal. It’s a gallery of drilling, welding, and occasional flooding on a scope perhaps never before assembled.

To date, only a handful people have subscribed to the Central Subway photo stream, which is a shame given the quality of the images and the valuable window they give into the hidden day to day affairs of the city’s ongoing transit overhaul.

Below is just a sampling of the highlights, but don’t neglect to check out the rest here.