Read The Subterranean Railway Online
Authors: Christian Wolmar
The Subterranean Railway (39 page)
Work, too, has started on the new Thameslink service which uses the old City widened lines, the first extension of the Metropolitan Railway, giving it the remarkable capacity of twenty-four trains an hour, each with twelve carriages (rather than eight, as before) and passing through the centre of London. Throw in, too, Crossrail which has also been given the go-ahead in the intervening period after years of prevarication and delay. This will be a major addition to London’s rail network, providing a range of new journey opportunities – as they say in the jargon – and undoubtedly attracting more people onto the Underground as a result.
In the first edition, I wrote that ‘all these schemes are in the balance’. Now they are all underway, marking a step change in political attitude towards rail investment. Indeed, despite the recession triggered by the 2008 banking collapse, work is proceeding apace, with delays of only a year or so to overcome extra financing problems. By the time a new edition of this book is needed, London’s rail network will have been fully transformed. Hopefully, too, Crossrail 2, the old Chelsea– Hackney line project – though now modified with several possible variants but being promoted strongly by various interested parties – will be underway or at least have been committed.
In a way we have come full circle. As mentioned in
Chapter 1
, Charles Pearson at one point lobbied for a central station at Farringdon, serving all points of the compass. It was a wonderful dream, a London
Hauptbahnhof
that would have served as the whole nation’s transport hub. Not surprisingly, though, it was vetoed by the subsequent commission because of the extensive demolition it would have required in the City, and instead we got the girdle of stations around central London served by the Circle Line. Now, however, Farringdon is being reborn as a key station in the National Rail Network and, in 2018, when both Thameslink and Crossrail are due to be completed, it will be the crossing point of the north-south Thameslink services, and the east-west Crossrail routes, as well as being on the Circle and Metropolitan lines. Trains from Farringdon will, as originally intended, serve destinations in all directions: south to Brighton, west to Maidenhead, north to Peterborough, and east to Shenfield. Already the Tube station has been greatly extended from the cramped little building which still oddly enough bears the name, ‘Farringdon and High Holborn’, given it in 1922, though it is some distance from the latter. With the revamped Thameslink and Crossrail, London is effectively getting the equivalent of the much-vaunted Parisian RER, with full-size trains going through tunnels under the centre of London but serving destinations fifty or more miles away with frequent services.
Then there is the story of the Docklands Light Railway, an ugly
duckling of a railway that celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2012 and which has grown into a fully-fledged part of London’s infrastructure. Originally conceived as a cheap single line route between the City and Docklands costing under £100m, it has been extended several times and now links numerous parts of the capital with East and South London such as Lewisham, Woolwich, London City Airport, Stratford and Beckton. It is officially a light rail system but unusually, it does not run alongside cars in streets, but mostly along disused railway tracks with additional sections of line. Its trains have been lengthened from two to three cars to cope with the sixty million passengers annually, and the system now consists of nineteen miles with forty-five stations including one, Bank, which is underground.
These railway developments have begun to blend the London Underground with other rail services in a way that harks back to a time when multiple railway companies ran services on the tracks of the Metropolitan Railway. Crossrail will be part of the national rail network but will also have a variety of interfaces and connections with the Underground. The London Overground uses former Underground tracks but is no longer included as part of the Tube, and yet it is integrated into London’s rail network, benefitting from the Oyster Card, another major improvement enjoyed by passengers in recent years. In 2003, Transport for London started introducing the Oyster Card, the most radical change in the way people pay for the Tube since its foundation. Virtually all transactions now no longer involve paper tickets. Thanks to an extension of the Oyster card, agreed after much negotiation between the Department for Transport and the train operators, passengers can now use Pay As You Go Oyster cards throughout the London suburban rail network. While Crossrail, too, will be administratively separate from the Underground, passengers will pass seamlessly from its platforms to those of the Tube using their Oyster cards.
London is, therefore, at last, getting the type of integrated railway that Ashfield and Pick strived for and came close to achieving. There
are still obstacles to overcome. Like those two illustrious pioneers, the current London Mayor, Boris Johnson, would like suburban rail services to be run by London government. In his 2012 re-election campaign manifesto, he proposed that Transport for London take over national rail franchises, to run them like the London Overground. It would be a sensible move towards a genuinely integrated system, but successive governments have been reluctant to extend the mayor’s powers in that direction. Nevertheless, thanks to these developments and the huge amount of building work taking place on railways in the capital, it is possible to end this story with a much more optimistic tone than in the original edition of this book. Contrast the situation of the Underground today with the fifties when the system was almost moribund, and there is much to celebrate. There are, though, still many parts of London which are ill-served by the Underground or, indeed, by any type of railway and it may need a modern-day Pearson or Yerkes to remedy that situation.
NOTES
Introduction: THE PHANTOM RAILWAY
Peter Ackroyd’s picaresque |
Chapter One: MIDWIFE TO THE UNDERGROUND
Quoted in T.C. Barker and Michael Robbins, | |
While there are some claims that the line which opened in Budapest in 1896 was an underground railway, in fact it was little more than a tunnel for part of a tramway system. | |
Simon Jenkins, | |
Hugh Douglas, | |
The term became current in the US in the 1840s, taken from the custom of people who ‘commuted’ their daily fares into a season ticket, but was not used in Britain until a century later. | |
F.M.L. Thompson, | |
Gavin Weightman and Steve Humphries, | |
Jenkins, pp. 100–102. | |
John Kellett, | |
Ibid., p. 26. | |
House of Commons, | |
Ibid., p. 5. | |
Quoted in Kellett, p. 5. | |
Commons Select Committee on Metropolitan Communications, 1854–5, question 1345. | |
Kellett, p. 48. | |
The best description is to be found in B.G. Wilson and J.R. Day, | |
Henry Mayhew, | |
Ibid., p. 145. |
Chapter Two: THE UNDERGROUND ARRIVES
The terminus was originally called Farringdon Street, and did not assume its present name, Farringdon, until 1936. | |
Jack Simmons, | |
At the time it was known as New Road, as its construction started in 1756 to appease City dwellers because, even as early as the mid eighteenth century, traffic had began to be a source of annoyance. It was effectively London’s first bypass. | |
It was not until 1874 that railway companies were obliged to rehouse displaced residents. | |
George Godwin, | |
Reverend William Denton, | |
Nicholas Faith, | |
He posted out this letter to prospective shareholders with a stamp for subscribers to reply, a very early example of such direct mail marketing given that the first stamp had only been introduced in 1840. | |
F.S. Williams, | |
The Metropolitan Board of Works was the first and only London-wide administrative body and it was a very new concept. Created in 1855, it was indirectly elected by parish vestries and other local authorities, and it | |
London Journal | |
Trench and Hillman, p. 132. | |
As an aside, a small atmospheric ‘tube’ narrowly missed being London’s first underground railway, albeit passengerless. A 2ft 6ins diameter tunnel was built by the London Pneumatic Despatch Company (chaired by the Duke of Buckingham) from under Euston station to a post office sorting unit half a mile away in Eversholt Street. The little piston-shaped trucks were powered by compressed air in one direction and pulled through by a vacuum in the other. The line started operating on 20 February 1863, just a few weeks after the Metropolitan opened, and carried up to thirty-five mailbags twice as fast as they could be transported on the surface. The plan was to demonstrate the viability of the concept and then extend it to a series of stations around London underneath railway termini, post offices and market places, to transport general freight and, eventually, passengers. The system was extended to Holborn, with a bigger, 4ft 6ins diameter, tunnel through which the capsules averaged an impressive seventeen mph. But the Post Office was never quite convinced about the idea and in 1874 stopped using it, forcing the London Pneumatic Despatch Company into liquidation. Half a century later the Post Office built a system of driverless trains to carry mailbags under London using rather large tunnels, which kept running until 2003. | |
It may well, however, have served the Metropolitan’s purpose. The company’s promise of smokeless locomotives had, after all, ensured the successful passage of the Bill through Parliament. | |
Quoted in Trench and Hillman, p. 138. |
Chapter Three: LONDON GOES UNDERGROUND
The Times | |
Illustrated London News | |
At the time, Great Western trains operated on a wider gauge, 7ft 0¼ins rather than the standard 4ft 8½ins, and the Metropolitan was originally built to accommodate both types of train. |
Daily Telegraph | |
Morning Advertiser | |
Daily Telegraph | |
William J. Pinks, | |
A name normally associated with the Waterloo & City line built more than thirty years later. | |
S.M. Ellis, | |
As reported to Henry Mayhew in | |
E.L. Ahrons, quoted in O.S. Nock, | |
The Times | |
The Great Northern locomotives operated on the smaller standard gauge, using the hitherto redundant middle rail, and on the first day there were six derailments due to misalignment of the track. | |
Quoted in Hugh Douglas, | |
Mayhew, p. 146. | |
Quoted in Alan A. Jackson, | |
Pinks. | |
T.C. Barker and Michael Robbins, | |
This method of train control had recently, in August 1861, caused an accident resulting in twenty-one deaths and 176 injured in the Clayton tunnel on the Brighton line when a stalled train was hit by the following one. | |
Barker and Robbins, p. 118. | |
The powers were extended in 1864. Nevertheless, this shows that the Metropolitan was already thinking of expansion even before the first section had been completed. | |
This quote and all the following are taken from Mayhew, pp. 144–9. | |
Douglas, 1963, p. 111. | |
J.M. Wilson, | |
Commercially, it was probably a nonsense, illustrative of the railway companies’ tendency to run trains for the sake of them. | |
Nock, p. 27. | |
Ibid. | |
The excavated soil was used to reduce the depth of the lake in nearby Regent’s Park for safety reasons as forty skaters had drowned there in January 1867 when the thin ice gave way. | |
Roy Porter, | |
Quoted in Barker and Robbins, p. 127. |
Chapter Four: THE LINE TO NOWHERE
Piers Connor, | |
The Times | |
Where it can still be heard on a rainy day. | |
Most of these examples are cited in Simon Jenkins, | |
The Times | |
Now the site of the headquarters of London Underground and St James’s Park station. | |
The Times | |
Ibid. | |
Connor, p. 12. | |
Illustrated London News | |
O.S. Nock, | |
At which the famous accident that caused the death of the statesman William Huskisson took place. | |
Clive Foxell, | |
Stephen Halliday, | |
Both railways were, therefore, built somewhat on the cheap, a legacy which still affects passengers today, especially those in East Kent. The poor reputation of the two railways for feuding was legendary, as was their rotten service. | |
The result of this folly can be seen at South Kensington today where only the central platforms are in use, leaving the two outside ones redundant. | |
The track layout was also developed so that trains could connect from Earls Court with the putative Circle line, both eastwards and westwards. | |
Something which today would be illegal, and even at the time various court cases tried to put a stop to the practice. | |
T.C. Barker and Michael Robbins, | |
While conversions are necessarily vague, that sum would be worth around seventy times that figure today, i.e. almost £11m, more than today’s fat cats even dream of. | |
From the company minutes, 23 October 1872, quoted in Barker and Robbins, p. 161. | |
From the company minutes, 23 October 1872, quoted in Barker and Robbins, p. 162. | |
Barker and Robbins, p. 165. | |
Hugh Douglas, | |
Benjamin Baker, | |
The Metropolitan was, in fact, according to a deal reached in November 1884, allowed a couple of trains in that direction because of its greater original investment. | |
This was a problem which, interestingly, was to be repeated over a century later when Railtrack was privatized in 1996 and found itself under an obligation to allow trains onto its network without the capacity to cope with them. | |
The Times | |
The Times | |
At least they did not have to cope with the electrified third rail which would make such action far more dangerous today. | |
West London Advertiser | |
O.S. Nock, | |
Quoted from | |
Railway Times |
