The story started on May 25, when somebody on Reddit posted a photo titled “I want to go down the forbidden ramp at Southern Cross Station. I’ve got no idea what’s down there, but I’m assuming dragons?” over at /r/Melbourne.

Now I’ve got a lot of photos online showing the old underpass beneath the station, so it wasn’t long before someone shared them to the thread.

Setting off the hits on my photo gallery.

By July 2021 piece on the remains of the Spencer Street Station subway also got a run, alongside my follow up piece Building the Spencer Street Station subway – a history.

Victorian Railways annual report 1961-62

Then the next morning something different – messages via various channels from a producer at ABC Radio Melbourne.

Hey Marcus

Is there a number I can call you on?

Love to chat to you about the Southern cross tunnels…

Anyway, I gave them a ring, and later that day I was on the radio blabbering on about the tunnels at Southern Cross Station.

Which was then followed by a handful of text messages and emails from friends and family who listen to ABC Radio and heard me on air.

You can listen to it at the ABC Radio website, or below.

Footnote

I even managed in to slip in a bonus piece into the interview – why the Western Ring Road takes a kink around Ardeer.

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A random commenter recommended this site, with one wag adding this follow up comment.

For those who don’t frequent Reddit, TIL = Today I Learned.

I hope you all enjoy the random stuff I dig up as well.

And another one

Someone shared a link to my blog on r/Melbourne – and this was somebody else’s reaction

And yet another one

Another link on r/Melbourne, another reader down the rabbit hole.

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The answer was Reddit – the massive social news website where people posts links and comment on them. In my case somebody posted a link to my January 2012 blog post about Melbourne’s empty skyscraper to the /RedditDayOf subreddit, where the topic for August 13 was ‘abandoned buildings‘.

Sometime around midnight Melbourne time people upvoting the link promoted it to the front page, where I got 313 hits on the evening of August 13, and another 594 hits on the morning of August 14.

Unfortunately for me traffic from Reddit is a fickle beast, with the traffic to my blog dropping back to normal when the link disappeared back into the depths of Reddit. Such is life… but at least my website appeared to avoid the Slashdot effect!

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