Subway Trivia
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47 free Subway trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free Subway trivia questions with answers. Subway trivia comes in two flavours, and this quiz serves both. The first half covers the sandwich chain: the 17-year-old who borrowed $1,000 from a physicist in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1965, the Pete's Super Submarines name, the switch to Subway in 1968, the growth to more than 37,000 restaurants in over 100 countries, the $5 footlong, the Eat Fresh slogan, the Jared Fogle era and its end, the Irish court that ruled the bread was cake, and the 2023 sale to Roark Capital. The second half goes underground: the world's first underground railway in London in 1863, why only 45 percent of the Tube is under ground, New York's 472 stations and 24-hour service, Harry Beck's map and Mind the Gap, Paris's Art Nouveau entrances, Moscow's palatial stations, Budapest and Glasgow's 1896 lines, Boston's first American tunnel, the pneumatic prototype under Broadway, Beijing's record length, Stockholm's art gallery, Montreal's rubber tyres, Tokyo's pushers and baseball's Subway Series. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The family friend who lent a teenage Fred DeLuca the money to open Subway was what kind of scientist?
Physicist
Physicist: he was helping to design nuclear power plants when he put up the cash so the 17-year-old could pay for college, and the two founding families still owned the chain when it was sold 58 years later.
Q 02What was the Subway chain's original name when its first shop opened in 1965?
Pete's Super Submarines
Pete's Super Submarines honoured the family friend who put up the money, but on local radio the name sounded like 'pizza marines', so the partners changed it and ended up with Subway.
Q 03How much did Fred DeLuca borrow to open the first Subway?
$1,000
He was 17 and hoping to fund medical school; the chain he built was sold to Roark Capital for $9.6 billion in 2023.
Q 04About how many Subway restaurants were there worldwide as of 2023?
37,000
37,000 or so, in more than 100 countries, was a retreat: Subway's own website still boasted of more than 40,000 shops in 2019, before years of closures across the United States.
Q 05In 2008 Subway launched a famous promotion selling every regular one-foot sandwich for how much?
$5
$5 was meant as a limited-time price, but the deal and its jingle caught on so fast that it became the chain's most successful promotion and stayed on the menu for years.
Q 06What two-word slogan did Subway use to stress its freshly baked bread?
Eat Fresh
Eat Fresh sold the bread baked in every shop, yet in 2020 a national supreme court ruled that same bread too sugary to count as bread for tax purposes.
Q 07Which country's Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that Subway's bread was too sugary to be legally bread?
Ireland
Ireland's top court found the dough's sugar came to 10% of the flour's weight, five times the 2% limit for bread, so the rolls could not be sold tax-free as a staple food.
Q 08Which Indiana student became the face of Subway's ads in 2000 after losing 245 lb on a diet of its sandwiches?
Jared Fogle
Jared Fogle fronted the ads for 15 years, though the chain leaned on him less once price deals took over in 2008, and it cut ties in 2015 when he faced federal charges.
Q 09The first Subway opened in 1965 in the port city of Bridgeport, in which US state?
Connecticut
Connecticut: Fred DeLuca opened the shop in Bridgeport to pay his way through the city's university, and he did go on to graduate there.
Q 10What job title does Subway give the staff who assemble your order?
Sandwich Artist
Sandwich Artist is the trademarked title for the crew who build each sub to order in front of the customer, and the chain says countless shop owners started out as one.
Q 11Which private-equity firm, named after the protagonist of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, agreed to buy Subway in August 2023?
Roark Capital
Roark Capital already backed the owner of Arby's, Dunkin' and Jimmy John's, so the deal put Subway in the same stable as a rival sandwich chain after 58 years in its founding families' hands.
Q 12Which regional name for the submarine sandwich originated in the Philadelphia area?
Hoagie
Hoagie is Philadelphia's word, and its origin is a local argument: one telling credits Italian shipyard workers on Hog Island, another the songwriter Hoagy Carmichael.
Q 13Which railway company opened the world's first underground passenger line in London in 1863?
The Metropolitan
Q 21Which animal went viral in 2015 after being filmed dragging a slice of pizza down New York subway stairs?
A rat
A rat, at once nicknamed Pizza Rat, became such a star that a science magazine asked an expert why rats love pizza, and Pizza Rat costumes were on sale by Halloween.
Q 22Which city opened continental Europe's first electric underground railway in 1896, in time for a national thousandth anniversary?
Budapest
Budapest ran the line under its grand Andrássy Avenue to the park where Hungary's millennium celebrations were held, and Emperor Franz Joseph opened it himself.
Q 23Which British city's subway, opened in 1896 and never extended, is a single loop of 15 stations?
Glasgow
The Metropolitan ran gas-lit wooden carriages behind steam engines, and despite the sulphurous fumes it carried 9.5 million passengers in its first year.
Q 14About what share of the London Underground's network actually runs in tunnels?
About 45%
About 45% of the network is in tunnels, because the lines climb to the surface once they leave central London for the suburbs.
Q 15As of 2023, which station is the busiest on the New York City Subway?
Times Square–42nd Street
Times Square–42nd Street is counted together with the Port Authority station it is joined to, so riders from more than a dozen routes add up to about 54 million a year, far ahead of Grand Central.
Q 16Who refused to give up the controls after driving the first New York City Subway train on opening day in 1904?
The mayor
The mayor, George McClellan, was only meant to start the train and hand over to a motorman, but he enjoyed it so much that he drove from City Hall all the way to 103rd Street.
Q 17Alfred Beach's 1870 demonstration subway, one block long under Broadway, moved its single car how?
Compressed air
Compressed air from a giant steam-driven blower pushed the car one block along the tunnel, then the airflow was reversed to draw it back to the line's only station.
Q 18The Paris Métro's first line opened on 19 July 1900 to coincide with what event?
The World's Fair
The World's Fair was the spur: with it approaching, Paris started digging in 1898, and Line 1 also served the 1900 Olympic events held in the Bois de Vincennes.
Q 19Hector Guimard's cast-iron Paris Métro entrances are a landmark of which design style?
Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau began in the town houses of Brussels, but Guimard's plant-like entrances, his best-known works, put the style on the streets of Paris from 1900.
Q 20Which city's metro, opened in 1935, is famed for stations lit by chandeliers?
Moscow
Moscow's stations were conceived under Stalin as 'palaces of the people', their marble, mosaics and chandeliers meant to show commuters what the Soviet system could build.
Glasgow's trains were hauled round the loop by a moving cable for almost forty years, until the system was finally electrified in 1935.
Q 24New York's subway opened in 1904, but which city had opened North America's first subway tunnel seven years earlier?
Boston
Boston dug the Tremont Street tunnel to get its jammed streetcars off the surface, so the first American subway carried trolleys, not trains.
Q 25Which Underground employee designed the schematic London Tube map in 1931?
Harry Beck
Harry Beck modelled it on the circuit diagrams of his day job, and the publicity office turned it down as too radical until a trial print run showed it was just what passengers wanted.
Q 26Which London Underground line, opened in 1979, was planned and partly built as the Fleet line?
Jubilee line
The Jubilee line was being built as the Fleet line when it was renamed for the Silver Jubilee of 1977, then opened two years too late for the party.
Q 27The London Underground's famous 'Mind the gap' warning exists because of what feature of some stations?
Curved platforms
Curved platforms leave a gap beside straight carriages; at Embankment an old recording by the actor Oswald Laurence was restored in 2013 so that his widow could go on hearing his voice.
Q 28In the mobile game Subway Surfers, who chases the player along the train tracks?
An inspector and his dog
An inspector and his dog give chase after catching the player's character spraying graffiti on a carriage; the 2012 game went on to pass three billion downloads.
Q 29Which two teams met in the 2000 World Series, the first Subway World Series since 1956?
Yankees and Mets
Yankees and Mets met in the first all-New York final since the Dodgers and Giants left for California, and the Yankees won it in five games for a third title in a row.
Q 30In which city is Arsenalna, one of the world's deepest metro stations at 105.5 metres down?
Kyiv
Kyiv's station is so deep because it lies inside the high bank of the Dnipro, which rises above the rest of the city; it was the world's deepest until a station in Chongqing opened in 2022.