How to locate College Tunnels

1) find the central steam heating plant/physical plant building. this may or may not be marked clearly on campus maps. it is generally one of the weirdest and ugliest (to normal people) buildings on campus, and belches tons of steam all the time.

2) look for main roads leading out from here, and follow them one by one, looking for all manholes and grates, and trying simply to understand *where* the steam is going, without necesarilly worrying about gaining entry yet--but always keep an eye out.

3) grates are good, manholes are bad. this is not to say you cant pull up manholes easily with a good chunk of rebar or a hook, just that grates tend to have better stuff under them, and of course are easier to recon. exception to this is u. of Chicago, where you really need to pull up manholes to get in.

4) if you are in a cold climate, steam tunnels are easy to spot because they melt the snow. one good snowfall can be as good as hours of recon.

5) go to the library, and carefully circumnavigate the perimeter, looking for large whirring grates. this may or may not connect to the steam system, but it will often get you into library maintenance systems that are neat in their own right, if smaller.

6)construction areas. if your campus has construction areas that are in regions that might be connected to the system, this may very well be your easiest way in by far--just keep going down, and you can distinguish the tunnels discussed in this forum from regular hallways by the power cables, phone cables, fiber optic cables(the orange corrugated plastic ones), and steam pipes(generally about 1 ft in diameter.)

7) develop instinct. after you have been doing this for a long time, you get a sixth sense for what is a worthless little cable vault and what is the door to a new system.

Also note that i'm pretty sure a lot of younger and smaller schools just don't have them.