Underground, Overground

by Andrew Martin

  Anyway, the Epping–Ongar had always been marginal. Even when it was part of the LNER its short trains had been emphatically ‘Third Class Only’. By the early 1990s the shuttle was being used by about eighty people a day, and it was said – to me, by a man slightly inebriated in a pub in Leytonstone – that the line was only kept open so that, in the event of a nuclear attack, members of the Cabinet could be evacuated by rail to the nuclear bunker at Doddinghurst. The argument against this theory is that any government entrusting its fate to the Central Line would have to have been pretty naive. The argument in favour is that the Ministry of Defence did de-commission the bunker at about the same time that London Underground closed the Epping–Ongar line, which happened in 1994. In 1998 the line was sold to a private company who intended to operate a peak-hour commuter service, and did so for a while. (The nuclear bunker, meanwhile, was bought by a local farmer, who advertised it widely as ‘The Secret Nuclear Bunker!’) The line has since changed hands several times, and is now to re-open as a preserved railway (a railway for leisure only), running vintage diesels and electrics, but with the aim of restoring steam.

  THE RED TRAINS (THE 38s)

  Experts on the Underground abandon their normally pedagogic kindliness when it comes to rolling stock. It’s for your own good, they’ll tell you: the subject is too complicated. Stock may be designated by a date, or sometimes a letter. Today those who name stock are sometimes good enough to make the letter stand for something, as in ‘S stock’, to denote the sub-surface stock being introduced on the cut-and-cover lines, but in the past a letter might just represent a point reached in a wayward alphabetical progress, and some idea of the number of stocks that have existed is given by the fact that on the District Line alone, ‘N stock’ had been reached by 1935.

  Even though the so-called Standard Stock built between 1923 and 1934 brought a measure of uniformity to the deep-level Tube stocks, it was not quite a single train type. In fact, a man who knows about these things once infuriatingly reflected in my presence, ‘Each year brought new variations. In fact, the whole thing about the Standard Stock was that it was not standard.’ But Standard Stock trains, as mentioned earlier, were the first to look like Tube trains. They dispensed with the end platforms and had automated air doors set into the carriage sides. The gatemen were thus out of a job, but guards survived, mainly to operate the doors and – it seemed – to prevent people from boarding via the guard’s own door. (I would become tense, on trains with guards, as I watched another tourist lumbering up to the guard’s door, knowing he’d just turned away three others in quick succession. This fourth idiot was really going to be in for it.) The days of the guards were numbered after the introduction of O.P.O. – that is ‘one-person-operated’ – trains on the Victoria Line from 1967, and the last of the breed were seen – usually looking suitably glum – on the 1959 stock on the Northern Line, until it was replaced, in a neat inversion, by the 1995 stock, which did not require guards.

  It would be fair to say that seats have become smaller – and an Underground manager once told me that the ideal train would have no seats, and the whole platform-side of it would roll up and down like a venetian blind. It would be a cattle truck, in other words. It would also be fair to say that the only type of stock to have been universally loved is the 1938 Tube stock, introduced as part of the New Works programme. This stock was used on the Northern, Piccadilly and Bakerloo, on which latter line they lasted in regular service until the mid-1980s, although five 1938 stock trains also returned for a brief encore on the Northern Line in 1986–7. Whenever a picture of a 1938 stock train is shown at the meetings of the London Underground Railway Society, the ferociously technical analysis breaks down for a moment and someone utters, ‘Ah … lovely little trains!’ It is also the stock favoured by Tube modellers, as we shall see.

  The 1938s were the first type of Electrical Multiple Units to have the motors secreted entirely below the carriage bodies, thus leaving more space for passenger seats. But that wasn’t the reason people loved the ’38s. No, they loved them because they were red. The cars were cherry-red with grey roofs which seemed to have eaves, making the trains reminiscent of a cosy little bungalow on the move. The interiors were of louche dark red, green and cream, and every carriage looked like the smoking carriage – an invitation to decadence. In short, the 1938 stock was the Routemaster of the Underground. Not that their colour (formally known as ‘Train Red’) was the same red as the Routemaster (Pantone 485), which is in turn not the same red as the pillar boxes and old telephone booths, which shared a colour originally, and exuberantly, designated Vermillion Giant. There is no ‘London red’, although the architect Jean Nouvel tried to imply there was when he created a temporary pavilion outside the Serpentine Gallery in 2008, the main point of which was its vibrant redness. It’s just that London takes to redness in general, probably as an antidote to the greyness of the city.

  The ’38s were not the first Underground trains to be red. Most Underground trains before them had been red, or reddish. The Standard stock had been red, for example. The appeal of the ’38s lay in the fact that they were the last trains to be red, and the new Tube trains that succeeded them over the next forty years would be grey – the colour of the aluminium from which they were made, steel being in short supply after the war. Aluminium also had the virtue of being lighter than steel, and it was ‘Space Age’. The first aluminium Tube carriage, romantically named R49NDM23231, was exhibited at the Festival of Britain in 1951, and the first aluminium trains ran on the District in the following year. The last all-grey trains – London Underground prefers to say ‘silver’ – ran, also on the District, until February 2008. The novelty had worn off, and it was increasingly apparent that the tags of the graffiti artists did not do so. They left a ghostly trace when cleaned off. If only you could paint over them … and so red has crept back, together with white and blue. Patriotic, I suppose.

  But why can’t we still have warm red and green interiors? A couple of years ago I interviewed Mike Ashworth, Design and Heritage Manager of Transport for London. I told him how much I liked the mellow interiors of the ’38s. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘tungsten lighting … beloved of women of a certain age.’ I indignantly pointed out that I was not a woman of a certain age, and demanded to know why train interiors can’t be cosy again. He conceded that there had been a reaction against the grey and pale blue that had predominated on the post-war Underground trains and stations, and bolder shades were making a return. He cited a seat moquette of mid-blue with an element of red that he himself had designed for the new Victoria Line trains. It is called Christian Barman, after the colleague and biographer of Frank Pick (a posthumous compliment of sorts, I suppose, to be sat on by millions of Londoners). But he added that ‘a thirty-point colour contrast’ was required by disability discrimination legislation – and that wouldn’t be possible with moody hues I favoured. Also: ‘The modern trains are so crowded that dark colours throughout would make them intolerably claustrophobic. Even you wouldn’t like them,’ he said, ‘believe me.’

  BY THE WAY: PASSENGER FLOW

  There was warmth, humour and glamour in Frank Pick’s underground publicity, but there was also a mechanistic aspect to the Underground, whose tunnels operated as giant pistons pushing the ‘commuters’ – the term was common by 1940 – inwards in the morning and outwards in the evening. In the stations and on the trains human beings were marshalled – streamlined – according to the new discipline: ‘passenger flow’. It was the science of station design, exit placement, signage, train dispatching and announcements, and it is well expressed in the name, and concept, of the ticket booth called a passimeter.

  Passengers were meant to flow past a passimeter on either side, as when the water of a fast-flowing river meets a rock. They usually had the choice of two queues, which must have been agonising because of course the one you pick is always the slowest. The queues were slowed down by the turnstiles that frequently operated in conjunction with the
ticket booths, but these would give way to automatic ticket gates, first introduced on the Victoria Line from 1969, and refined in the 1980s. Automatic gates would speed flow, as did the growing prevalence of automatic ticket-dispensing machines, which had first been introduced in the 1930s, and the wrong placement of which in Holden stations caused Frank Pick to expend a lot of green ink.

  But the raw material that the Underground had to work on – Londoners themselves – was possibly not of the best. In 1905 Charles Yerkes had said:

  Londoners are the worst people to get a move on I ever knew. To see them board and get off a train one thinks they had a thousand years to do it in; still they are doing better, and in the end I shall work them down to an allowance of thirty seconds.

  In 1919 ‘hustlers’ were employed on the District platforms at Victoria to co-ordinate the boarding of busy trains. After thirty seconds the hustler sounded a siren that dispatched the train no matter what the state of play on the platform. Unlike in Tokyo, there have never been platform guards whose job it was actually to push people onto crowded trains, but there is a cartoon from the 1930s in which a guard does push a fat bowler-hatted commuter through the end door of a crowded train, only to cause another one to pop out through the middle door.

  It is unlikely that Londoners have sped up very much since Yerkes’s day. There aren’t many more trains per hour at peak times than there were then, so they haven’t had to. Also, those trains are more crowded than ever, a situation that can be mitigated by ‘letting them off first’, but that practice is not universally observed. A poster of 1918 by George Morrow commanded, ‘Passengers Off The Car First, Please’, with the addition of the patronising rationale: ‘First – when one gets out another can get in. Second – Those that would get in before block the way of those that would get out. So to secure room and save seconds there can be no other rule.’

  In 1927 a poster by Lunt Roberts called Behave Yourself began to be displayed:

  I entered the Tube station and took my place in the queue

  I had the exact fare ready

  I passed across the lift

  I stood clear of the gates

  I bewared of pick-pockets

  I passed down to the other end of the platform

  I let them off the car first …

  And so on, down to:

  I had my ticket ready

  I emerged by the ‘Exit Only’

  I walked smartly to the office

  Why?

  Because I do it every day.

  Why?

  Because I’m, unfortunately, that sort of chap.

  The ‘unfortunately’ was meant to draw the sting, but in Underground Writing, David Welsh chronicles the bad press that the inter-war Tube – the ‘machine’ – received from novelists, their reaction ranging ‘from alienation to fear to anger and frustration’. The critic-in-chief was George Orwell. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying the social drop-out Gordon Comstock observes the Tube, that enabler of capitalism, with increasing bitterness: ‘Something deep below made the stone street shiver. The tube-train, sliding through middle earth. He had a vision of London, of the western world; he saw a thousand million slaves toiling and grovelling about the throne of money.’ Welsh makes the point that Comstock’s girlfriend, Rosemary, can afford the Tube while he can’t. She is liberated by the thing he rejects; the Tube is emasculating.

  Comstock inhabits a London containing ‘seven million people, sliding to and fro, avoiding contact’. He ‘avoided and was avoided’. People attempted the same on the Tube. The Tube Train, a woodcut of 1934 by Cyril Edward Power, shows a carriage packed with commuters, and every single one is reading the newspaper – apparently the same newspaper. And so the atomisation the novelists complained of is voluntarily reinforced. Today you can insulate yourself doubly, with newspaper and iPod.

  And while more and more Tube riders are listening to their own soundtracks, London Underground is ever keener to make announcements.

  For a long time the Underground communicated with its passengers largely by signage, or by occasional shouting – as in the case of the gatemen calling out the station names – and I liked it better like that because the shouts were intermittent. You could surrender your body to the machine but keep your mind independent. In 1938 loudspeakers were installed at 120 of the busiest stations, enabling news of delays to be broadcast to passengers from line control centres. The driver was given the ability to communicate with all his passengers when the first one-person-operated trains were introduced on the Victoria Line in the 1960s, and today the communications are incessant. This is partly determined by disability discrimination legislation, partly because about 20 per cent of the Tube’s customers are from outside London and genuinely don’t know where to alight for London Zoo. Also, between 2003 and 2009 London Underground had a managing director – an otherwise charming Irish-American called Tim O’Toole – who was messianic about ‘passenger information’, regardless of the consideration that the most beautiful thing about the off-peak Tube used to be its dreaminess. And so regular announcements are made ‘in real time’ by staff at particular stations, or recorded by them for regular use. Announcements can also be made ‘long line’ – that is, from the control centre of the line. And the drivers have a menu of automated announcements that they can trigger. (I prefer the ones who address the passengers themselves, but in a low-key way, with the mumbling modesty of indie rockers: ‘Right … this one’s via Bank.’)

  The operation of the first escalators provided an early excuse for shouting at passengers. The very first escalator had been installed at Earl’s Court in 1911, and may or may not have been demonstrated to the public by a one-legged man called Bumper Harris. In the early 1920s Charing Cross (now Embankment), where the Hampstead Tube, the Bakerloo and the District coincided, was the busiest station on the network, and its escalators operated in conjunction with a scratchy, wheedling voice endlessly saying ‘Please keep moving. If you must stand, stand on the right. Some are in a hurry, don’t impede them.’ The voice came from a shellac disc played on a machine called a Stentorphone, which was a gramophone with a primitive amplifier. Note: (a) the use of the word ‘impede’, too rarefied for modern London; and (b) ‘stand on the right.’ Why on the right? Possibly because the early escalators ended in a diagonal, the stairway terminating sooner for the right foot than the left, and you’d better be ready for that, hence standing. A silent film of 1928 called Underground shows a drunken soldier frowning as he descends over signs reading ‘Step off: right foot first’, and he falls over at the bottom.

  My dad once had a fist-fight at King’s Cross with a man who was standing on the left and refused to move after polite requests. But in a way that man was correct. It would be better if we didn’t walk on escalators; the swaying and bouncing motion is bad for them. This was explained to me in 1993 by a London Underground escalator engineer who had been part of a campaign called the Key Asset Plan, which had started in 1989, with the aim of fixing the hundred or so escalators on the system (about a third) that were then designated ‘non-goers’ – in other words, they were broken and had remained broken because of under-funding. The Underground escalators had been installed over the twenty years after that first one at Earl’s Court, mostly by the American firm Otis (‘escalator’ was a trade name of Otis until 1949), and they were meant to last about thirty years. The majority worked with minimal maintenance until the mid-Eighties, when, rather in the same way that all your light bulbs go at once, lots of them stopped working. The ones fixed under the Key Asset Plan, or KAP, were said to have been ‘Kapped’, but this could take up to take six months, causing passenger flow to cease altogether at the stations concerned, an escalator being far more efficient than a lift (the rule of thumb is that one escalator does the work of five lifts).

  The art of moving people in and out of stations is called ‘passenger flow’. Yet walking on escalators damages them, as most of these passengers seem well aware (or perhaps they’re just pos
ing for the photographer). Hence the injunction: ‘Stand on the right’.

  We have two more passenger injunctions to deal with. First, ‘Keep Feet Off Seats’, a command introduced on notices from 1984, but now that most seats are longitudinal it is increasingly impossible to put your feet on the opposite seat. Secondly, there is ‘Mind the Gap’.

  Gaps occur because a train cannot be as curved as a curved platform. I once asked a London Underground official whether many people had been injured by stepping into the gap. ‘Oh God yes,’ he said, ‘thousands.’ The very charming Brian Hardy, who is now retired but used to be the Duty Manager of London Underground’s Network Control Centre, has a sort of party piece wherein he names all the gaps on the system. He started doing this for me once, and after a while I intervened, asking, ‘How long is this likely to take?’ ‘About twenty minutes,’ he said, so I asked him just to confine himself to the Northern Line, which he did: ‘… Woodside Park has a very slight curvature, and West Finchley a bigger one, but I don’t think there’s a “Mind the Gap” announcement because the station’s in a built-up area and it would annoy the neighbours. Kentish has a slight curve, so does Belsize and Chalk Farm. Euston on the Charing Cross branch has a very definite gap. Leicester Square has a slight one …’ And so on.

  I once interviewed the man who made the first ‘Mind the Gap’ announcement: the one that reverberated for about thirty years on the Central Line at Bank, on the Bakerloo at Waterloo and on the northbound Northern Line at Embankment. It was a stentorian command, with that patrician, 1950s’ way of saying ‘gap’ – ‘gep’. The speaker was Peter Lodge, who in the late Sixties was a sound engineer running his own recording studio in Bayswater, a too provincial location for Michael Winner, who complained ‘it’s practically in the country’ after an arrangement had been made for one of his films to be dubbed there. So Mr Lodge was spared that, but he did work on soundtracks for The Goodies, Emergency Ward 10 and much else. In 1968 or 1969 – Mr Lodge can’t quite recall – he received a call from a Scotsman employed by Telefunken, who had been awarded the contract to provide the equipment for playing the first automated ‘Mind the Gap’ announcements. It was the advent of digital technology that had made these a workable proposition.