Thousands of people are fascinated by the sounds of the metro. Just surf online and before you know it you hear a crappy recording of a metro announcement in Sint Petersburg: “Ostorozhno, dveri zakryvautsa” (“Mind the closing doors”). So, close your eyes and listen to departure sounds and next-station announcements in subway systems around the world. For instance on the website Metrobits (they call it: Voices in the Deep, how poetic) ) or on Sounddogs.com where you can listen to great MP3’s,

At least 160 cities around the world sit above underground labyrinths. The London Underground is Europe’s largest and oldest metro subway system (1863) which transports 976 million people yearly. The Paris subway system is the second oldest (1900) and transports roughly 1.365 billion people. The Madrid Metro is the second largest underground system in Europe and the sixth largest system in the world. The Tokyo subway system carries approximately 2.8 billion people per year to 282 subway stations.

Subways can be stunning underground palaces. We love to wander there. Subways are the world’s longest art galleries. Just look around you: advertising posters, station designs, beautiful infrastructure, great architecture and even your ears get a treat with resound live music from street artists. It’s art as far as we’re concerned and every city outshines in a different way. It can range from 1960s Minimalist style and colorful 1970s Pop Art design to Postmodernism. Descending to the metro in Paris happens to be très elegant Art Nouveau style. Stopping for the Louvre (line 1) gives the impression that the train has pulled into the Museum itself. Nope, it’s ‘just’ the metro.

Remember Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle chasing an elevated train through South Brooklyn in The French Connection? Or, how about Tom Cruise get killed in a risky business in Collatoral? There are numerous celluloid moments with the subway as decor. Eddie Murphy (in Coming to America) and Paul Hogan (as Crocodile Dundee) proposed to their brides in the New York City subway. Look at the wiki for all New York City Subway in popular culture.

The underground is also known as subway, metro, T-bane, MRT (Mass Rapid Transit), tube or U-Bahn. In Glasgow, Glaswegians refer to their network as ‘the Subway’. Folklore has it that the Glasgow subway is known as the ‘Clockwork Orange’. Their orange carriages are spinning on two tracks, clockwise and anti-clockwise, that’s why. We’re proud that our third citizenM is being developed in this beautiful Scottish city and will open in 2010. We hope you’ll end up here and stay with us. Just take the subway from the airport and get out at station Cowcaddens.

We humans want to leave a trace, aiiiight? Whether you call it bombing, tagging, graffiti, a typographical party of a horrible maligned art form, the city of New York has always been the Mecca of graffiti. In the 70s the favored place to paint were the trains of the subway. Literally thousands of crews “bombed” (tagged) the trains, like famed writers Lee, Futura 2000 and Crunch. Nowadays, the NYC trains run clean. Still, teenagers and ‘graffiti tourists’ romanticize the whole era and want to revive it. Their work exists only in their own pictures due to a zero tolerance policy. No art show on wheels anymore. The guys of the 70s did their job though, kick starting the entrance of graffiti into mainstream pop culture.