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Construction of the AT&T Long Lines "Cheshire" underground site
- metadat 2y ago> Clothing was available for contaminated workers including dozens of boxes of brand new Converse sneakers, c. 1968! Why would the workers be contaminated? Struggling to understand the purpose of this station, at the top it says coax but why all the fancy cooling and contamination protection?
- space_fountain 2y agoThese facilities were designed to be hardened so as to survive a nuclear war. The air intakes were presumably needed to provide cooling for the communication equipment inside and decontamination was for any workers who needed to visit after the outside has all been contaminated with nuclear fallout
- BoorishBears 2y agoFirst lines: > The Cheshire ATT facility is an underground complex originally built in 1966. It was an underground terminal and repeater station for the hardened analog L4 carrier cable (coax) that went from Miami to New England carrying general toll circuits and critical military communication circuits Critical military communication circuits implies it was meant to survive a nuclear attack.
- diggernet 2y agoThe site was built to survive a nearby nuclear attack.
- nrr 2y agoThis facility is what's called a tandem office in the old long distance telephone network here in the US. The idea was that it formed a link in a routing chain between two end offices when a long-distance call was placed. Cheshire, CT, also happened to be an AUTOVON site, which carried with it military and national security significance. This is why it was hardened against nuclear attack, including the air handling augmentations, decontamination shower, gamma ray detection equipment, and so on.
- bregma 2y agoYou mean "couldn't they just reboot the server remotely using the terminal on their Mac after the crazed fools in the White House and the Kremlin annihilated civilization through nuclear holocaust in 1968?" Well, all I can say is thank goodness we're not in that situation today so that people don't understand the "why"s. Aren't we?
- 082349872349872 2y agoThat background though... ( https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/da3386ad-a465-4e41-834e-354cc46f825a/legacy/mirv.jpg https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/da3386ad-a465-4e41-834e-354... )
- pixelesque 2y agoMIRV re-entry test...
- msisk6 2y agoThose MIRVs come in kinda fast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZM3y5qpMgY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZM3y5qpMgY
- dredmorbius 2y agoMach 23, as noted toward the end of that video.
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y agoIn fully glory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targetable_reentry_vehicle#/media/File:Peacekeeper-missile-testing.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targeta...
- Animats 2y agoThat's an AUTOVON switching center.[1] There were at least 38 of those centers in the US. They were located in places some distance from major cities and military targets. They were hardened telephone central offices, but with many more redundant links between switches than the commercial system. So this system really was intended to survive a nuclear war. The technology was Western Electric's 1ESS (#1 Electronic Switching System), and all 4-wire out to the handsets, so that conference calls would work clearly without feedback. 1ESS was a very bulky system. It was basically a pair of large mainframe computers running a big dumb switch fabric. The switch fabric is analog and electromechanical, using reed switches with a ferrite element so they stay in the last state to which they were set. That's why these were such big installations, even though they didn't have a huge number of lines. [1] http://autovon.org http://autovon.org
- metadat 2y agoHow deep did they bury the wires? Were they run full depth from point to point?
- walrus01 2y agoGoogle "L4 transcontinental cable", but the majority of the long lines network was the famously known horn antennas on towers for FDD microwave point to point links in the 6GHz band.
- jcrawfordor 2y agoIt would vary by terrain and land use (e.g. agricultural), but generally just 2-3 feet deep by vibratory plow. Deeper emplacement and directional drilling were used as required to handle obstacles. For most L-carrier the entire en-route infrastructure was below ground, but it was more extensive than just the cable, with active repeaters in manholes required at 2-mile intervals for L-4. L-4 also required an "equalizing repeater" about every 50 miles, which was installed in a manhole but had a shed on top to facilitate technicians adjusting the equalization. Main stations, such as this one, were required every 150 miles.
- PROMISE_237 2y ago
- leoh 2y agoWhy was there a gamma ray detector?
- nrr 2y agoGamma rays are an early danger from the fallout from a nuclear blast.
- kev009 2y agoGamma rays also travel faster than the other destructive waveform. Much of the expansive destruction from a nuclear bomb is due to "over pressure", and these facilities have spring loaded blast valves that quickly snap shut when signaled via the gamma detector or a manual control to limit it from entering the protected zone. Bunkers have different grading in terms of blast resistance and most of the AT&T bunkers were engineered for something like 5, 10, 15, or 20 mile air burst strikes of certain warhead yield. The AT&T bunkers are mostly far removed from population centers such that a direct nuclear strike would be a waste of a perfectly good nuke. In reality, a directly targeted conventional warhead or sabotage would be plenty effective in causing major service disruption so I think a lot of the realities for survivability would be aftermath repair capabilities.
- Lammy 2y agoThis other page goes into a little more detail on the detection system: https://coldwar-ct.com/Blast_Detectors.html https://coldwar-ct.com/Blast_Detectors.html “Most sites included Gamma detectors that were designed to detect the radiation wave as well. They were redundant systems, any detection, overpressure or Gamma would button-up the site at which point signals were sent to all Continental U.S. sites that a blast was detected, where it was, the size of the blast and wind speed and direction. Sites within 250 miles of any detection would go to Auto-Lock down.”
- jeffbee 2y agoI wonder how sensitive they were/are. Can you goof on them with a portable medical gamma ray source?
- rasz 2y ago[flagged]
- p_l 2y agoThey used to be (valve systems designed to protect from shockwave were installed) but are no longer ;)
- baliex 2y agoAs a Brit that map at the bottom is very confusing. A Bristol not to far from a Glastonbury, ok yeah, that makes sense but the map mustn't be north-oriented. Oh, and what's Manchester doing so close to Glastonbury, and that's not where Durham would be, or Norwich, or New Haven. Hmm.. and I didn't think we had a _New_ London. https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/da3386ad-a465-4e41-834e-354cc46f825a/legacy/att_ct_route_map_ch5s.jpg https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/da3386ad-a465-4e41-834e-354... Also, Cheshire is a county in the north of England so the whole article was very confusing from the get go as to where this station was located. Here it is on Google Maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/aEWT2L6QYqntYDDz5 https://maps.app.goo.gl/aEWT2L6QYqntYDDz5 Bolton, Kensington, Oxford, Coventry, and—slightly left field—Berlin are also nearby.
- Retric 2y agoThe 42 degrees north goes through the northern US and northern Spain, but is well south of England. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42nd_parallel_north https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42nd_parallel_north The New is also a hint aka New York, New Jersey, etc. It’s a map of Connecticut, USA.
- willwade 2y agoI'm with you. I started reading and was like "wait.. this is not the Cheshire I know of - where has this been hiding".. Then on the map: Lebanon and Brooklyn. Also Wallingford. I bet thats nothing like the Wallingford I know of (Oxfordshire Town)
- qingcharles 2y agoSo many places in the USA have matching British names I had to check to see if Brooklyn was one of them, but looks like it's named for a Dutch town, which makes sense.
- com 2y agoYeah, that’s a funny spelling of Breukelen, now an exurb of Amsterdam, NL.
- mike503 2y agoAnyone else in awe at all the infrastructure, systems, etc that were setup especially due to the Cold War? Things like Operation Looking Glass, keeping a staffed plane in the air, 24/7/365 for nearly 30 years, all these kind of hardening projects, it's crazy to me how much work and how many decades it spanned. And that's just the stuff we now can openly read about. I can't imagine all the systems and redundancies in place right now... but probably a lot more digital with analog backup only.
- fmajid 2y agoSee also: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-town-that-kept-its-nuclear-bunker-a-secret-for-three-decades-180984107/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-town-that-kept-it...
- worstspotgain 2y agoThe thing that really drops my jaw is the handwaving conjecture that the doomsday risk level has decreased a lot since then.
- flyinghamster 2y ago2022, nay, 2014 should have been a wake-up call that World War III was underway.
- snakeyjake 2y agoIt's not handwaving conjecture, it is cold calculation. Russia has a nuclear triad the same as the US. 1. Russia's submarine forces have been gutted since the Cold War. Poor training and maintenance has led to a slew of launch failures in recent years and analysis of their deployment tempo seems to indicate only a minimum number of submarines are deployed at any given time. 2. The long range strategic bomber forces of the Russian Aerospace Force are so outdated and vulnerable to western air defense systems that they rarely if ever enter the airspace of Ukraine, with the Tu-160 supersonic bomber lobbing cruise missiles from well outside Ukraine's air defense zone, the Tu-95 doing the same, and the Tu-22 only targeting areas not protected by Patriot missiles. 3. Aging systems, poor maintenance, and a lack of adequate funding has severely hampered Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces. They lack the precision to ensure a favorable outcome in the event of a nuclear war because they were designed for scenarios where dozens if not hundreds of warhead were used on individual area targets in an age where there were tens of thousands of warheads available for use. All of Russia's "superhypersonic killer nuclear-powered unstoppable death machine weapons test" rhetoric is an attempt to fool the US into believing that they have something up their sleeve because they know that the US knows that each of the three spokes of their triad have been degraded so much. Russia also knows they can't afford to rebuild their forces, so wonderweapons it is. They can't even build enough radios to equip all of their ground forces in Ukraine with communications gear and their megaweapons programs are hollow vanity projects. Do not mistake any of this for hubris. Russia can still launch nuclear weapons and any such usage would be disastrous. The doomsday scenarios at the height of the Cold War where 40,000 Soviet warheads could be mustered for deployment by a variety of difficult to stop systems to be met with a response of 20,000 US warheads thus irradiating the entire northern hemisphere and dooming humanity to extinction is all but impossible. So unless the definition of "doomsday" has changed from "the extinction of all of humanity" to "a really shitty time where hundreds of thousands die in an instant" the doomsday risk level has indeed decreased.
- trhway 2y agoThe toilets are on springs to survive the shock wave. My acquaintance long time ago told me that in their deep (much deeper than in this article) underground USSR military communication center the whole floors were on some kind of springs and shock absorbers.
- fmajid 2y agoNORAD headquarters at Cheyenne Mountain: they hollowed out a mountain, and installed an entire complex mounted on springs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyenne_Mountain_Complex https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyenne_Mountain_Complex
- bregma 2y agoThere's a bunker outside of Ottawa Canada, intended to house a select core of the federal government during and after a nuclear horrocaust, that is (at least) 10 storeys of underground on a sprung foundation. It's now a museum to the cold war open to the public (and worth a visit if you're in the area) and you can actually see the massive foundation springs. Also, they run escape rooms where you're caught in the bunker during a nuclear event, which would be kind of cool.
- msisk6 2y agoJust in case anyone is wondering what kind of shock waves a nearby nuclear blast would generate, watch this video of a 1-megaton test in central Nevada. You can drive right up to this point today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ETHnsKnKiA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ETHnsKnKiA
- DonHopkins 2y agoI bet the late Robert “Ozzie” Osband (Richard Cheshire, The Cheshire Catalyst) would have loved to hack into there. https://infocondb.org/presenter/richard-cheshire-the-cheshire-catalyst https://infocondb.org/presenter/richard-cheshire-the-cheshir... >*The Cheshire Catalyst (@Cheshire2600)* (Richard Cheshire) was the last editor of the notorious TAP Newsletter of the 1970s and 1980s. (TAP was a predecessor of 2600 Magazine.) In his "share the knowledge" spirit, he has volunteered at every HOPE conference since the first one in 1994. His PHonePHriendly.Com sets up web pages meant to be read on mobile phone web browsers, and allows him to delude himself that he's still into phones as a phreak.
- justin66 2y agoI never knew him, but Jason Scott did what seemed like a nice job of memorializing him after his recent death: https://textfiles.libsyn.com/the-cheshire-catalyst-episode https://textfiles.libsyn.com/the-cheshire-catalyst-episode
- TomMasz 2y agoMy dad would have been very interested in these photos. He worked for Western Electric and spent most of his time working on Long Lines installations in NYC.
- eddyg 2y agoMore info on the Long Lines system, for those interested: http://personal.garrettfuller.org/blog/2018/01/19/att-long-lines-a-forgotten-system/ http://personal.garrettfuller.org/blog/2018/01/19/att-long-l...
- A_Duck 2y agoAll I can think as I read this is how much education and medical treatment this could have paid for Not that it wasn't sadly necessary... but it seems a waste of human endeavour
- clarionbell 2y agoI'm afraid we may have to refurbish these ... quickly.
- krunck 2y agoWhy?
- HFguy 2y agoLooks like a Fallout Vault These facilities were not cheap to design and build. Obsolete now.
- 9cb14c1ec0 2y agoThis is the kind of information I read hn for. Really fascinating stuff that I probably wouldn't know about otherwise.
- zoombippy 2y agoMakes me depressed to think that I'll never again enjoy the crisp, clear communication of a landline phone call.
- phone8675309 2y agoThis is fake nostalgia. There were a lot of places in the world (and still are many places in the world) where the copper phone lines are anything but crisp and clear - lots of noise and hums and clicks and static. That's the rule more than the exception in some places. Now these intrusions are typically not enough to disrupt a voice call, but they were a major issue using modems and DSL.
- kev009 2y agoThe "best" nostalgic connection would be mid 1990s to whenever 2000s ISDN where you have end to end PCM on a nailed down circuit switched network. There are a lot of issues to deal with going 2 wire to 4 wire to some kind of carrier and back again in an all analog network, and once you introduce some kind of hybrid network like PCM carrier and TDM switching any remaining analog links are only a liability. Modern codecs can pack a lot more quality into less bits and with FEC.. so an HD Voice VoLTE or Opus VoIP call are technically "better" than anything used for baseband voice on circuit switched networks in the past. You could easily recreate circuits with dedicated fiber wavelengths these days and have the best of all worlds.
- Aloha 2y agoa modern call phone call, does actually meet or exceed the quality from a landline. I know because I still had a landline until 2019 - and I have a VoIP one now.
- rob 2y agoAmazing. I live in the next town over and had absolutely no idea about this. Thanks for sharing!
- sleepybrett 2y agoBet those all stars would make bank on ebay.
- throwaway173738 2y agoLove seeing the old civil defense crystal dosimeters and the charger lower down. I have an old CDV-741 kicking around.
- Reason077 2y ago“dozens of boxes of brand new Converse sneakers, c. 1968” Wow! New-in-box 1968 Converse sneakers must be worth a fortune. AT&T (or whoever owns the site now days) is sitting on a gold mine here!
- uncanneyvalley 2y agoThose boxes of brand new Gillette razors are worth a fair amount too!
- ggm 2y agoI'd love to know if the shock defensive construction (springs on piping, toilets, you-name-it) was tested by deep structures planted close to the underground tests so they had higher confidence this would actually "work"
- dredmorbius 2y agoNot deep structures, but yes: Project "Faultless": <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=9R2Ok4_Ze3g https://yewtu.be/watch?v=9R2Ok4_Ze3g>. A surface structure mounted on springs was directly above the 1 MT shot, which was 3,000 ft (~900m) below the surface.
- zackkitzmiller 2y agoThis webpage is truly the peak of webpage design. It's got everything you need, nothing you don't, will load nearly instantly on basically any internet connection. I was just having a conversation the other day about the demise of niche websites. There really are only about 20 websites on the internet anyway, rather than the millions and millions of vertical sites maintained by people passionate about their subject matter.
- Log_out_ 2y agoOne wonders if there is not a better way to build these kind of hardened structure.just build it on the surface, then "sink" them with water and ultrasonic vibrations to sink it. Make it a serious of cone shaped structures and voila.