In 1875, engineers opened a funicular beneath Istanbul’s steep waterfront slope; the Tünel still operates more than 150 years later

New York's subway is turning 122 this year and still can't handle the heat of a summer surge without a halt. Half the system goes on strike, and it becomes impossible to get anywhere. Istanbul has one which is on an even older stretch of track and doesn't need a personality transplant to continue working. The two-minute underground funicular which ferries passengers from Karaköy to Beyoğlu has been running up the same brutal hill since 1875, and according to a technical history published by Istanbul Technical University's transportation faculty, it is the world's second-oldest underground urban railway, beaten only by London. The Tünel is 573 meters in length, shorter than most airport terminals and has done its one job for more than 150 years.

A tourist's pet peeve became permanent infrastructure

The Tünel exists because one man was annoyed while on holiday. French engineer Eugène-Henri Gavand visited Constantinople as a tourist and watched locals trudge up and down the brutally steep hill between Galata (the banking district) and Pera (the social and diplomatic quarter). The same ITU history records that Gavand proposed an underground funicular to Sultan Abdülaziz, who approved the plans in 1869.

Construction work began in 1871, and the line opened on January 17, 1875, its steam-powered, gas-lit cars an immediate hit. This is the part which should give an uncomfortable wince to anyone who's seen a US transit expansion grind to a halt after a decade of paperwork: a 19th-century empire with far less bureaucratic machinery than a modern city council took it under four years' work.

The "world's first" title actually belongs to London

The first railway to run underground anywhere was London's Metropolitan, which connected Paddington to Farringdon with steam locomotives and cut-and-cover tunnels. According to the London Transport Museum, it opened on January 10, 1863. Istanbul's Tünel came twelve years later, making it the runner-up in this particular race, but the oldest surviving underground line of its kind in continental Europe.

For scale and because that's the comparison which will most resonate with a US audience: New York's subway didn't open until October 27, 1904. That's nearly three decades after the opening ceremony of Istanbul's little funicular. According to History.com, Boston beat New York to the punch as America's first subway city in 1897, but that's still 22 years behind Istanbul's head start.

A working line, not a museum piece

Here's the genuine surprise: the Tünel wasn't preserved as a museum piece, but continues to serve as a working commuter line which feeds directly into Istiklal Avenue, one of Istanbul's busiest pedestrian corridors. The line's history is a bit more layered than a single renovation. Its original 42-year operating concession, held by a French-registered company, was transferred to a new Ottoman-registered operator in 1911, and the mechanical system itself was overhauled only once at scale: modernization work began in 1968 and the line reopened on November 2, 1971, when the original steam engine was replaced by an electric motor driving rubber-tyred cars.

Compare that to the perpetual "signal upgrades", multi-decade rebuild plans and cost overruns which define infrastructure conversations in most American cities, and the Tünel begins to sound less like a charming quirk of history and more like an indictment. It's not a matter of 19th-century engineers being inherently smarter than their modern counterparts. It's the fact that a narrow, clearly-defined problem was solved once, properly, then simply maintained. It's not a particularly glamorous lesson for a generation which values disruption and reinvention, but there's something oddly comforting about a 150-year-old tunnel which continues to do exactly one job, without the help of any apps.