I found myself on the Stanford campus last night with my son, and I asked him if he’d like to try to sneak into End Station III. His eyes lit up because he had heard my memories of my last visit, many moons ago, as a grad student:
… the incredibly bizarre “End Station 3” nestled underground in the engineering campus. It’s a strange building with no windows and peculiar, yet fetching, warning signs (“no animal experiments in this area”). After going underground a bit, you find yourself on a metal gang plank overlook looking down into a cavernous football-field-sized room with 5-ton cranes overhead on rail tracks, and little people below. (flickr memories)
The entry door that I found propped open 20 years ago was locked and reinforced. I used my phone to email an old dorm mate from that era to see if he might still be inside (he has been continuously working on Gravity Probe B ever since I was a EE PhD neophyte with him) but alas he was out. We drove around the perimeter, checking the doors. And then my son spotted a student entering the building. Bingo. We were in.
It looks just like I remembered it, with a cornucopia of microwave pipes and wires (partially seen here on the bottom right). Last time, I entered on the top right. The three tunnels on the far “S” (south) side lead off to experimental bays, and must be the loci of sundry X-File activities. The building on the bottom left reminds me of the RF-shielded rooms we used at HP for microwave circuit testing.
The animal signs were no longer there, but they do have a new enormous diesel power generator in shiny black. (As an aside, when the new Bio-X building went in, the animal lab is located in the basement, and there are escape tunnels that run under the street and exit to unmarked doors in an underground parking garage.)
P.S. Josh posted some interesting background research and diagrams of End Station III in an earlier discussion.
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