The original Drain trains were replaced in 1940 with ones offering more standing room. At the time, the Corporation of London was trying to get overcrowding on the line debated in Parliament. The line was passed from the London & South Western Railway, via the Southern Railway, to British Rail, who sold it to London Underground in 1994 for the pleasingly simple sum of £1 – a very fair price, some of its regular users may think. Since the early Nineties the line has used modified Central Line trains, and the Drain has been given its own line colour: a queasy turquoise.
A RED CARPET (THE CENTRAL LONDON RAILWAY)
My first settled London home was in a rented house in Leytonstone, E11. It was a 1920s’ villa with an actual billiard room, although the billiard table was long gone. Not only this, but it was next to mysterious Wanstead Flats, famous for its gloomy fishing ponds and low winter mist; and I got to ride on the Central Line, which, as the Central London Railway, was another of the Tubes arising out of the 1892 applications.
The Central was my line. I knew that one of the original promoters, Sir James Henry Tennant, who had made the North Eastern Railway the most powerful regional railway company in Britain, had his main mansion in York, not far from my dad’s house, and the year of the manufacture of the carriages – as given on the door plates – was 1962, the year of my birth. I knew that the Central London Railway (and we’ll come to its early history in a minute) became the Central London Line on being taken over by London Transport in 1933; that the name was shortened to Central Line in 1937, and it had become the red line on the Tube map in 1934, having previously been a weak orange. Bakerloo, which had been red, became brown. Red suited the Central, and I thought of it as a red carpet rolled out through central London, or an arrow flying steadily along the primary London trunk route: Bayswater, Oxford Street, High Holborn. Its original promoters boasted of its ‘extreme directness’.
Every weekday morning I took the line from Leytonstone to Holborn, in order to attend lectures at the Inns of Court School of Law. As I rode into town, I gradually woke up, and as I returned to Leytonstone I often subsided into sleep, lolling against the substantial red armrests. But in 1992 my reveries east of Chancery Lane were interrupted, because a grim event befell the Central. Yes, it was upgraded, at a cost of more than £80 million. New trains were introduced. Whereas the 1962 rolling stock had had wooden floors and grey and red seats – a colour scheme pleasingly reminiscent of a coal fire in the later stages of combustion – the 1992 was red and blue. And about a week after the trains came in, all the armrests fell off, or were pulled off by vandals, as had happened in previous years to the armrests on the Bakerloo. London Underground commissioned a feasibility study into whether it might be possible to re-attach armrests and the answer was evidently ‘No’, because, ten years on, Central Line trains still lack armrests, as do Bakerloo ones.
Without them, it was harder to get to sleep, but there wasn’t much question of it anyway, because the 1992 stock were the first Tube trains to have automated announcements. It was a woman’s voice, and a platform guard at Chancery Lane told me Underground staff nicknamed her Sonia, because ‘her voice gets Sonia nerves’. Certainly there was an irritating contrast between the way she said ‘Bond Street’ (all breathy, parvenu excitement) and the way she said ‘South Woodford’ (no enthusiasm at all).
The new trains were introduced in conjunction with Automatic Train Operation (on the Central, as on the Victoria, the driver does little more than close the doors) and new signalling, but it took months for this to ‘bed in’, one result being that the new dot matrix indicators on the platforms would read ‘Check Destination on Front of Train’, which was like spending a fortune on a new watch only to look at the face and see the words ‘Ask a policeman’. But now the new signalling has bedded in, and the Central is the line that got its upgrade out of the way early. It gives the best train frequency on the network: thirty an hour in the peak. Even Sonia – because she still holds forth – is not so annoying now that all the other lines have their own equivalents. I no longer use the Central every day, but it usually gives no trouble when I do use it. The central stations of the Central have been restored to their original colour scheme – a simple and salubrious white – and it is once again what it always was: the most glamorous of the Tubes.
Well, it was a glamorous syndicate that built it. Handling the engineering side was the Greathead, thirty-one of whose tunnelling shields would be employed simultaneously at the peak of construction. Arrayed behind him were the money men, and the funding of the Central would be a mere footnote in their blue chip lives. They included, besides Sir James Henry Tennant, Sir Ernest Cassel, who lived at Brook House, Park Lane, who was a friend of the Prince of Wales and had built railways in China and Mexico, and who, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, ‘never neglected to keep in contact with the world of influence wherever it was to be found, whether at the card table, the dinner table or at Cannes’. There was also his other good friend Natty Rothschild, and Darius Ogden Mills, President of the Bank of California and of the Edison General Electric Company. The Americans were coming. On the Central, carriages were ‘cars’, as they are in America, and would come to be on the whole of the London Underground. (‘Pass down inside the cars.’) It would run ‘eastbound’ and ‘westbound’ instead of ‘up’ and ‘down’, and there would be leather straps to hang from, as on American commuter trains.
The line, authorised in 1892, was for a railway from Shepherd’s Bush to Liverpool Street. Digging began in 1896, and Greathead died soon after. In pursuit of free passage, the Central did its best to follow public roads, so the running tunnels are sometimes almost plaited together rather than side by side, and at St Paul’s (which was opened as Post Office), Chancery Lane and Notting Hill Gate the platforms are on top of one another.
The line wriggles its way through the City because the City streets are medieval and not straight, which is why you hear the sharp squealing of wheel rims on track at Bank as the bends are negotiated. At Bank the platform is curved to the extent that not only can you not see one end of it from the other; you can’t even see half-way. So there is the most yawning of all gaps between train and platform, and there used to be the greatest, most sonorous ‘Mind the Gap’ announcement there as well.
The line opened in 1900 from Shepherd’s Bush to Bank. (The promised Liverpool Street would not be reached for another twelve years.) The station buildings were of light brown terracotta with the word ‘Tube’ (they admitted it!) displayed vertically on the flat roof – a tackily expanded façade that gave them a Wild West look. The original style – although not the vertical signage – survives at Holland Park. Once inside the stations, however, there was something graceful and feminine about the line. The single-class carriages were spacious and filled with what looks like an alternation of sofas and armchairs – both transverse and longitudinal, with shaded reading lamps, and padded and evidently very well-fixed armrests. Not only were the platforms tiled in white, the tunnels were painted white too – to prettify them, and make them less claustrophobic – and the Central proudly issued a postcard of its tunnel-whitening machine. It and the even vainer Metropolitan would be the main issuers of postcards. (London Transport would stop issuing its own in 1974, but the London Transport Museum continues to produce them.)
Ladies in white dresses were depicted using the line in advertising posters. They showed how it was possible to ‘Take the Tuppenny Tube and Avoid All Anxiety’. They were shown buying the tickets in the stations, descending in the lifts and dropping the tickets into a box at the ticket gate, thereby sparing themselves the anxiety of having to retain the ticket on the train. They were shown in dangerously close proximity to smart, top-hatted men, but whereas the men were presumably going to Bank, the women were presumably going shopping at the department stores growing up along Oxford Street, and the Central’s nearness to these stores would make the advertising space in its stations the most expensive on the Underground.
Gordon Selfridge had wanted a tunnel connection between the Central station at Bond Street to the basement of his new store, and he wanted Bond Street station to be called Selfridges. (In 1932 Herbert Chapman, the dynamic manager of Arsenal, persuaded the Underground Group to rechristen Gillespie Road station on the Piccadilly Line Arsenal after the football club, whose stadium was near by. In 1939, as we shall see, the MCC successfully petitioned London Transport to re-christen St John’s Wood station on the Metropolitan Line Lord’s. In 2011 I asked Richard Parry, Deputy Managing Director of London Underground, whether I could rename a Tube station, say, Andrew Martin Place, and he didn’t entirely rule it out. After all, there’d been talk of calling Oval ‘Foster’s Oval’ after the sponsors of the cricket ground. ‘But it’d be vastly expensive,’ he said, ‘with all the changes to the maps and the signs. You’d have to put half a million on the table before we started talking.’) As it turned out, Mr Selfridge would have to be content with the installation of an in-store booking office supplied by the Central. It issued 5-shilling all-line season tickets for use by female shoppers in the January sales. (In the late 1960s the Central would run extra weekday evening trains for shoppers.)
The Daily Mail was a supporter of the Central, and approvingly christened it ‘The Tuppenny Tube’, a phrase hated by the Railway Magazine. In 1907 the Central introduced an additional maximum fare of 3d., and the Railway Magazine approved of that: ‘The Central London Railway has at length awoken to the fact that “2d. all the way” is not a profitable fare, and has wisely altered its fares introducing a maximum of 3d. The raising of the fare, of course, robs the gutter-title of Tuppenny Tube of its meaning.’ It approved of a 3d. fare partly, I suspect, because it made things more complicated. Victorian railways were complicated. If they were not complicated, there would be nothing for the Railway Magazine to explain. There was a joke about the flat fare in Punch. A yokel up in London for the day buys a ticket on the Central. On being handed it, he says to the clerk, ‘But there’s no destination stated.’ ‘That’s correct,’ says the clerk, ‘all our tickets are alike.’ ‘But,’ objects the yokel, ‘how will I know where I’m going?’ Today London buses have a flat fare, but the Underground covers too wide an area for the policy to be feasible on the network.
There were thirty trains an hour in peak time, twice as many as on the City & South London Railway. The stations, lifts and trains were all brightly lit with electricity, and there was no question of voltage drop from being too far from the source of the power because the Central was the first line long enough to justify the building of sub-stations along the route.
There were just two little problems, the first of which came from the 6-mile length of the line. It smelt. In 1904 the General Manager, Granville C. Cunningham, speculated that this might be ‘the smell of the earth’, and conceded that there had been objections from ‘delicate people’. Electrical fans were installed, then more fans. In 1911 giant fans began blowing ionised air and ozone along the tunnel. ‘You were meant to think you were at the seaside,’ John Betjeman would recall. ‘But you never really did.’ The other problem was that the electrical locomotives vibrated, with the result – a Board of Trade inquiry of 1901 found – that the draughtsmen in Cheapside could not draw straight lines. The electrical locomotives were put out to pasture, the carriages were adapted, and Electrical Multiple Unit traction was introduced from 1903.
We will be returning to the Central Line in the 1930s, when it was extended, but first a note about the migraine-inducing complications created by a preliminary, Edwardian expansion at its western end. In 1908 the line was extended to a station called Wood Lane, which was built on a terminal track loop so that trains could turn round and go back the other way, and which served the stadium that had been built for the 1908 Olympics. The station also served the nearby Franco-British trade exhibition held on a site that was called (because of the marble cladding on the exhibition buildings) White City. The stadium itself would later be named White City Stadium. Also in 1908, a station catering to the exhibition was opened close by on the Hammersmith & City Railway, and it was called Wood Lane (Exhibition).
In 1914 the above-mentioned station was closed. But it re-opened intermittently from 1920 under the name Wood Lane (White City). In that year the Central was further extended west to Ealing Broadway. In 1948 Britain again hosted the Olympics at the White City Stadium (Germany was not invited), and the visitors accessed the stadium from a new Central Line station called White City, opened a little to the west of Wood Lane in late 1947. (Wood Lane, with both its original loop and tracks allowing through-running to the stations west of it, was operationally complicated, hence its replacement.) At the same time as White City opened on the Central, Wood Lane (White City) on the Hammersmith & City spluttered back into life with another new name: White City. So now there were two stations called White City. Then, in 2008, a smart new station opened on the Hammersmith & City where its White City station had been.
The name of this new station? Wood Lane.
THE BIG TUBE (THE GREAT NORTHERN & CITY RAILWAY)
I sometimes catch a train from Highbury & Islington station to Moorgate. As I wait, I am standing on a subterranean platform with Seventies’ tiling and the colour scheme of the long-lost Network South-East subdivision of BR. A sign points towards the ‘North London Link’, which is what the stylishly rebranded London Overground was called a long time ago. The platform I’m on is not branded; it is called Platform 4, but there are no signs of any others. The platform is black; I’ve never seen a black platform before. I appear to be standing in a Tube tunnel, but there’s something wrong, apart from the colour scheme. It’s too big.
The train enters the tunnel, and it is definitely not a Tube train. It is a full-size electrical main-line train, and it might well be rain-smeared and filthy, bearing all the battle scars of main-line operation. There is the sense of something that should be outdoors being indoors, like a horse in a living-room. We have entered the dreamlike world of what was officially called the Great Northern & City Railway, but which would come to be nicknamed, with a mixture of awe and pity, as with the kid at school who has a glandular problem, ‘The Big Tube’. And that is how I will refer to it, since its official name is confusingly close to that of the overground railway company that spawned it, namely the Great Northern. It was another of the 1892 authorisations, and it was from the start a line that defied categorisation, although you might pin it down as being somewhere between white elephant and red herring.
The line was conceived by our old friend James Henry Greathead, armed with his amazing tunnelling shield. As authorised by an Act of 1892, the plan was for a line running from the main-line station of the Great Northern Railway at Finsbury Park to Drayton Park, where it would delve underground before running in twin tunnels to Moorgate. Yes, another line aiming for the City.
The idea was to provide an alternative to the congested Widened Lines, which had themselves been intended to ease the congestion on the Metropolitan Line, the aim in both cases being to bring commuters from the north London suburbs into the heart of the City. The particular aim of the Big Tube was to enable commuters from such Great Northern stations as Edgware, High Barnet and Enfield to bypass the parent company’s main line station at King’s Cross, and to gain direct access to the City in the very trains which they’d boarded at Edgware, High Barnet or Enfield, albeit with different engines attached at Finsbury Park prior to the descent into the tunnel: electrical ones in place of steam-powered. To accommodate these trains, the tunnels of the Big Tube would be 16 foot in diameter, bigger by about a third than the Tube tunnels already built, and for that matter the ones that would be built subsequently.
The Great Northern would build the Big Tube, and guarantee that a certain number of its trains would be run along it to Moorgate. But there was a delay in raising the money, and by the time work started in 1898 the Great Northern had got into bed with a new Underground partner: the Great Northern & Strand R
ailway, Parliamentary approval for which was given in 1899, and which would achieve fame under a different name as part of the Piccadilly Line. Its original proposal was for a Tube line running from Alexandra Palace into Finsbury Park, King’s Cross and the West End, thus easing the pressure on the latter two stations, although the idea of connecting Alexandra Palace would be quickly abandoned.
In 1901 the Great Northern cancelled its agreement with the backers of the Big Tube, by which time the latter was half-built, and its big tunnels looked like grandiose folly, since it would now not be allowed running rights into Finsbury Park main-line station. Instead, the Big Tube company was allowed to build a station under the main-line one, so that the line, when it opened in 1904, started as a Tube (albeit a big one) at Finsbury Park. It emerged into the open soon afterwards, then went below ground again at Drayton Park, from where it proceeded to Highbury (later ‘Highbury & Islington’), Essex Road and Old Street before finally arriving at Moorgate, where it – a line whose tunnels were far too big – met the City & South London Railway, a line whose tunnels were far too small, and the Metropolitan, a line whose tunnels were at that point still filled with smoke.
Underground, Overground Page 12