For decades, Conway worked mostly alone, crafting a one-of-a-kind underground home into a Missouri mountainside — no permits, no architect, just him and his son growing up right alongside him, and an occasional friend.

Conway was an engineer who spent his career in the region’s lead mines and never lost his fascination with trains — and he put both to work here. He dug straight down into the hillside and sealed it behind a foot of steel-reinforced concrete, then engineered a ventilation system that draws air through the surrounding earth to cool the house in summer and warm it in winter. At the entrance, a single wall of hand-welded framing holds the glass that catches the light like the mouth of a cave.

Before any of that, Conway had already spent years living underground — one of four men crewing a Titan II nuclear missile silo for the Air Force. Whether that’s where the idea came from, even his son isn’t certain. Conway never said.

Inside, the house reads like a mine shaft crossed with a train depot: oak timbers, kerosene lanterns, a homemade airboat with an aircraft engine, and, parked on its own hand-laid track out back, a 58,000-pound vintage railroad caboose he had craned in piece by piece.

Conway died in 2018. His son, Zane, has spent years restoring the place – room by room, the same way it went up the first time.

Fifty years after the first shovel of earth came out of that hillside, it still hasn’t leaked. Once you see how he engineered it, you’ll understand exactly why.