The Subterranean Railway
Page 36
NOTES
Introduction: THE PHANTOM RAILWAY
1
Peter Ackroyd’s picaresque London, an 800-page book, has barely half a dozen references to the system. Even Roy Porter’s superb A Social History of London, for example, only gives a brief history of the construction of the Underground railways and mentions their stimulus on the growth of the city, and does not really dwell on the long-term effects or successes or put the scale of the achievement in context.
Chapter One: MIDWIFE TO THE UNDERGROUND
1
Quoted in T.C. Barker and Michael Robbins, A History of London Transport, Vol. 1, George Allen & Unwin, 1963, p. 102.
2
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.
3
Simon Jenkins, Landlords to London, Constable, 1975, p. 100.
4
Hugh Douglas, The Underground Story, Robert Hale, 1963, p. 13.
5
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.
6
F.M.L. Thompson, Victorian England, The horse drawn society, pamphlet.
7
Gavin Weightman and Steve Humphries, The Making of Modern London, 1815–1914, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1983, p. 99.
8
Jenkins, pp. 100–102.
9
John Kellett, The Impact of Railways on Victorian Cities, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969, p. 25.
10
Ibid., p. 26.
11
House of Commons, Royal Commission on Metropolis Railway Termini, 1846, Q 2192, p. 283.
12
Ibid., p. 5.
13
Quoted in Kellett, p. 5.
14
Commons Select Committee on Metropolitan Communications, 1854–5, question 1345.
15
Kellett, p. 48.
16
The best description is to be found in B.G. Wilson and J.R. Day, Unusual Railways, Muller, 1958, pp. 58–61.
17
Henry Mayhew, The Shops and Companies of London and the trades and manufactories of Great Britain, Strand, 1865, p. 144.
18
Ibid., p. 145.
Chapter Two: THE UNDERGROUND ARRIVES
1
The terminus was originally called Farringdon Street, and did not assume its present name, Farringdon, until 1936.
2
Jack Simmons, The Railway in Town and Country, 1830–1914, David & Charles, 1986, p. 32.
3
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.
4
It was not until 1874 that railway companies were obliged to rehouse displaced residents.
5
George Godwin, Another blow for life, 1864.
6
Reverend William Denton, Observations on the displacement of the poor by Metropolitan railways and other public improvements, quoted in Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman, London under London, John Murray, 1985, p. 139.
7
Nicholas Faith, The world the railways made, Bodley Head, 1990, p. 89.
8
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.
9
F.S. Williams, Our Iron Roads, Bemrose and Son, 1884.
10
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 was principally concerned with roads, bridges and sewers. The absence of a London-wide authority, until the creation of the London County Council in 1889, was a constant problem for those seeking to provide infrastructure like the Underground.
11
London Journal, January 1862.
12
Trench and Hillman, p. 132.
13
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.
14
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.
15
Quoted in Trench and Hillman, p. 138.
Chapter Three: LONDON GOES UNDERGROUND
1
The Times, 30 November 1861.
2
Illustrated London News, 17 January 1863.
3
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.
4
Daily Telegraph, 12 January 1863.
5
Morning Advertiser, 12 January 1863.
6
Daily Telegraph, 16 January 1863.
7
William J. Pinks, History of Clerkenwell, London, 1865.
8
A name normally associated with the Waterloo & City line built more than thirty years later.
9
S.M. Ellis, A mid-Victorian Pepys, 1923, p. 246.
10
As reported to Henry Mayhew in The Shops and Companies of London and the trades and manufactories of Great Britain, Strand, 1865, p. 146.
11
E.L. Ahrons, quoted in O.S. Nock, Underground Railways of the World, A. & C. Black, 1973, p. 113.
12
The Times, 14 October 1879.
13
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.
14
Quoted in Hugh Douglas, The Underground Story, Robert Hale, 1963, p. 115.
15
Mayhew, p. 146.
16
Quoted in Alan A. Jackson, London’s Metropolitan Railway, David & Charles, 1986, p. 53.
17
Pinks.
18
T.C. Barker and Michael Robbins, A History of London Transport, Vol. 1, George Allen & Unwin, 1963, p. 135.
19
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.
20
&nbs
p; Barker and Robbins, p. 118.
21
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.
22
This quote and all the following are taken from Mayhew, pp. 144–9.
23
Douglas, 1963, p. 111.
24
J.M. Wilson, The Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales, 1869, ii, p. 167, quoted in Jack Simmons, The Victorian Railway, Thames & Hudson, 1991, p. 165.
25
Commercially, it was probably a nonsense, illustrative of the railway companies’ tendency to run trains for the sake of them.
26
Nock, p. 27.
27
Ibid.
28
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.
29
Roy Porter, London: a social history, Penguin, 1994, p. 216.
30
Quoted in Barker and Robbins, p. 127.
Chapter Four: THE LINE TO NOWHERE
1
Piers Connor, The District Line, Capital Transport, 1993, p. 10.
2
The Times, 24 August 1866.
3
Where it can still be heard on a rainy day.
4
Most of these examples are cited in Simon Jenkins, Landlords to London, Constable, 1975, p. 107.
5
The Times, 24 August 1866.
6
Now the site of the headquarters of London Underground and St James’s Park station.
7
The Times, 24 August 1866.
8
Ibid.
9
Connor, p. 12.
10
Illustrated London News, 18 June 1870.
11
O.S. Nock, The Railway Enthusiast’s Encyclopedia, Hutchinson, 1968, p. 288.
12
At which the famous accident that caused the death of the statesman William Huskisson took place.
13
Clive Foxell, The story of the Met and the GC joint line, self-published, 2001, p. 19.
14
Stephen Halliday, Making the Metropolis, Creators of Victoria’s London, Breedon Books, 2003, p. 42.
15
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 Times recalled, ‘The little overlapping companies were always good for a laugh, ribald every now and then and sardonic. The London, Chatham & Dover became the Undone, Smash’em and Turn’em over. The South Eastern & Chatham main line was the scene of the fictitious tragedy in which a would-be suicide laid his neck on the line and died of starvation.’
16
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.
17
The track layout was also developed so that trains could connect from Earls Court with the putative Circle line, both eastwards and westwards.
18
Something which today would be illegal, and even at the time various court cases tried to put a stop to the practice.
19
T.C. Barker and Michael Robbins, A History of London Transport, Vol. 1, George Allen & Unwin, 1963, p. 159.
20
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.
21
From the company minutes, 23 October 1872, quoted in Barker and Robbins, p. 161.
22
From the company minutes, 23 October 1872, quoted in Barker and Robbins, p. 162.
23
Barker and Robbins, p. 165.
24
Hugh Douglas, The Underground Story, Robert Hale, 1963, p. 100.
25
Benjamin Baker, The Metropolitan and Metropolitan District Railway, The Institution of Civil Engineers, 1885.
26
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.
27
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.
28
The Times, 7 October 1884.
29
The Times, 16 October 1884.
30
At least they did not have to cope with the electrified third rail which would make such action far more dangerous today.
31
West London Advertiser, 30 August 1884, quoted in Barker and Robbins, p. 232.
32
O.S. Nock, Underground Railways of the World, A & C Black, 1973, p. 33.
33
Quoted from Herapath’s Railway Journal in Barker and Robbins, p. 237.
34
Railway Times, 18 October 1884.
Chapter Five: SPREADING OUT
1
Charles E. Lee, The Metropolitan Line, a brief history, London Transport, 1972, p. 22.
2
Parliamentary Papers, Correspondence with reference to the proposed construction of a Channel Tunnel, C3358, Accounts and papers, 17 (1882).
3
Clive Foxell, The story of the Met and GC joint line, Clive Foxell, 2000, p. 22.
4
Except at stations where there were two tracks.
5
Quoted in Dennis Edwards and Ron Pigram, The Romance of Metroland, Baton Transport, 1986, p. 16.
6
Now called Harrow on the Hill.
7
Quoted in Edwards and Pigram, p. 16.
8
Quoted in ibid., p. 18.
9
Quoted in ibid., p. 18.
10
Quoted in Foxell, p. 32.
11
Indeed, a century later, a similar idea was put forward to build a cheap version of Crossrail, the new underground railway between Paddington and Liverpool, using that same section of line. This was briefly and foolishly considered by the Labour government of 1997 but quickly rejected as unworkable as there are too many trains using it.
12
While that still remains true today, the development in London of many major shopping centres, often with associated leisure facilities, on the fringe of the metropolis means that the major source of traffic growth now is of such radial journeys. Croydon Tramlink, for example, a light railway which skirts around the fringes of south London from Wimbledon to Beckenham via Croydon, has been highly successful in terms of attracting large numbers of passengers; and many new bus routes have been introduced to serve this market.
13
Hugh Douglas, The Underground Story, Robert Hale, 1963, p. 98.
14
These are the modern names – all three, curiously, started off with different ones: Acton Green, Mill Hill Park and Ealing Common & West Acton.
Chapter Six: THE SEWER RATS
1
Fred T. Jane, ‘Round the Underground on an Engine’, English Illustrated Magazine, August 1893.
2
R.D. Blumenthal, Diary 1887–1914, Heinemann, 1930.
3
Quoted in Roy Porter, London, a social history, Penguin, 1994, p. 213, from a contemporary but unspecified source.
4
Porter, p. 225.
5
O.S. Nock, Underground Railways of the World, A & C Black, 1973, p. 34.
6
The District briefly later tried a parcels service in East London using tricycles to
carry the goods off the train to their final destination, but it was not a success as it did not really have a competitive edge over rival road services.