The Subterranean Railway

by Christian Wolmar

  The task of electrifying the existing lines on the inner Circle had been completed remarkably quickly. Just as today engineering has to be carried out while the system is closed between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m., work to install the equipment was limited to those hours. By early 1903 there were 400 men on the track working overnight laying the new conductor rails, and the number increased to 1,000 a year later. It is another tribute to the efficiency of organization in those days of little mechanization. Today, hamstrung by much more stringent safety requirements, expensive labour and heavy equipment, such a task would take far longer and cost much more.8

  The Metropolitan had managed to complete its section of line rather more quickly than the District and was pressing to introduce trains on the inner Circle, but Yerkes insisted on waiting until through services could operate all the way to Whitechapel. When they did, however, it was a disaster. On the first day of the electric service, 1 July 1905, a cloudburst flooded Hammersmith station and a train was derailed at Mill Hill Park (now Acton Town). Then the dreaded lack of coordination between the District and the Metropolitan came into play. The latter’s electrical equipment had not been properly integrated with the District’s conductor rails and therefore the collector shoes – the metal blocks which run along the third rail to pick up the current – on the Metropolitan’s trains, which were intended to operate all the inner Circle services, were knocked out of their mountings as soon as they reached the other company’s tracks. It does seem remarkable that, even given the appalling relationship between the two companies, the Metropolitan equipment had not been tested on the District’s tracks. Humiliatingly, steam engines had to be called back into service and the Metropolitan’s electrical equipment redesigned. Consequently, it was not until nearly three months later, in late September 1905, that a full electric service was run around the inner Circle. The rest of the District network was electrified remarkably quickly, with all steam trains removed by 5 November 1905. The Metropolitan retained steam locomotive services until 1963 on lines which extended furthest from London, such as Rickmansworth to Aylesbury from Baker Street, but all its services underground were soon using either electric locomotives or powered coaches, known as electric multiple units. That still left a few steam trains on the other services operated through the underground section of the network, but these were gradually phased out over the next couple of years and either replaced by electric trains or, in the case of the Hammersmith to New Cross service, withdrawn because the lessees of the East London line refused to meet the bill for the electrification, which was eventually carried out just before the outbreak of the First World War. The Great Western trains which ran from various suburban destinations through Paddington to Aldgate were the last to go, being replaced by electric locomotives from 2 September 1907 – which, of course, necessitated a quick engine change at Paddington.

  At last, apart from a few Great Western steam-hauled freight trains which continued to run through to Smithfield goods depot near Farringdon until the 1960s, Londoners no longer had to endure the smoky tunnels that had characterized trips on the Underground since its opening in 1863. The achievement of changing from steam to electric power in barely six years since Judge Lyttleton’s decision was yet another remarkable and largely unsung success of those running the system, made all the more amazing in that they worked for rival companies which were ever eager to pinch each other’s market.

  To provide the power for the trains, both the District and the Met set about creating their own separate power-generation plants. Cooperation, of course, would have been unthinkable! The District built an enormous power station at Lots Road on the Fulham and Chelsea border, a site chosen for ease of access for the barges bringing coal along the Thames. Given that it was big enough to power several lines, this was a deliberate and powerful statement of Yerkes’s intention to unite the underground network. The Metropolitan obtained most of its electricity from a plant at Neasden in north-west London, where the coal could be delivered easily by rail. While, for Londoners, the advent of electricity on the Underground must have come as a great relief, the fact that locomotives driven by burning coal in red-hot furnaces, and hauling wooden coaches, had operated with no major mishap for forty-four years in the cramped tunnels was in itself a cause for celebration.

  It was only by the early years of the twentieth century that urban underground systems had begun to be built across the world in any number, and all were operated using electricity. A couple of minor exceptions were Glasgow where the underground system opened in 1896 using steam power but provided by fixed engines which hauled a cable to pull the trains, the tunnels were smoke-free; and Liverpool, where the trains of the Mersey Railway were steam-hauled from its opening in 1886 until electrification in 1903, but this was a four-mile-long line in a tunnel whose main function was linking Liverpool with Birkenhead, rather than a busy underground railway used by millions of passengers annually.

  It was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire that the most impressive underground nineteenth century railway system on mainland Europe was built. The government had announced plans for a major exhibition to be held in the main city park in 1896 and realized that transporting people there on the crowded streets would be difficult. The solution, decided upon in 1894, was a two and a half mile underground railway built using the cut and cover method mainly under the main Andrássy Avenue. Planning permission was obtained remarkably quickly and construction was equally rapid – helped by an unprecedented special dispensation to work on Sundays – given the scale of the task. The line was completed in just twenty months, in time for the exhibition and was opened in May 1896 by the Kaiser, Franz Joseph, whose name it was duly given. The trains, which were in fact single carriage trams, were powered by an overhead electrification system and could run at intervals of just two minutes and the line, extended of course, remains in use today. Vienna, too, where the idea of an underground railway had been mooted as early as 1843, opened its Stadtbahn (town railway) in the late 1890s (the precise date is unclear with different sources contradicting each other) in a ceremony also attended by the Kaiser. While there were some tunnel sections on the three lines most of this steam operated railway was at street level or above.

  In Paris, the system which opened in 1900 was electrically powered, as was the new subway in New York. There, elevated railways built above roads had proliferated from 1872, being preferred to underground railways on the grounds of cheapness and because of the lack of historic buildings whose aspect would be ruined by unsightly railways. Certainly, the City of London would never have countenanced them. New Yorkers finally tired of the noisy, steam-hauled trains passing their second-floor windows at all times of the day, and work on a subway system, using electric trains to replace some of them, started in 1901. Britain, therefore, was the only country in the world to operate an underground train service using steam locomotives, an intuitively crazy idea necessitated by the particular history and circumstances of the city and created by the foresight and vision of its pioneers, notably Charles Pearson.

  Surprisingly, despite the cleaner atmosphere, electrification did not attract the extra numbers which the railway companies had expected and on which their financial fate depended. The District had been so desperate for new business that in July 1903 it finally did away with the church interval (which like the Met, as mentioned in Chapter 3, it had felt compelled to obey) on Sunday mornings, which meant that at last trains were allowed to operate between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. on the Sabbath. Neither the District nor the Metropolitan was in a healthy financial state. Both had been hit hard by growing competition: not so much, now, from the horse omnibuses as from the new tramways springing up in the suburbs and, in west London, the new Central London Railway, known as the Twopenny Tube because there was only one fare for any length of journey (see next chapter). Using a combination of tram and tube, it was possible to travel, for example, from Ealing to the City for just fourpence, half the third-class fare on the District. Hammersmith, served b
y both railways, was also reachable by trams which were cheaper. The Metropolitan had actually lost passengers, numbers falling from 96 million in 1899 to 88 million three years later, and it was only by slashing prices – the single third-class fare from Hammersmith or Shepherd’s Bush to Aldgate was cut from sixpence to threepence – in 1902 that the number of passengers increased to 94 million in 1903. The District followed suit in 1904, cutting fares from Kensington or Earls Court to the City from fivepence to fourpence for third class, and while numbers grew modestly in response, it was electrification on which the two railways pinned their hopes.

  A new signalling system had been installed, allowing for a closer interval between trains. Yerkes had proposed to run forty trains per hour, instead of the existing eighteen, a challenging target both technically and commercially. His chairman, Robert Perks, optimistically forecast a doubling of traffic. It was not to be. Admittedly, the District did a bit better, attracting 55 million people in 1906 (the first full year of electric running), representing growth of 10 per cent, but it was nowhere near Yerkes’s aspirations. Financial trouble was inevitable.

  So, by the early years of the century, London had an extensive, mostly electrified overground network linking in with the Underground, which had contributed to the rapid development of large sections of the metropolis. But the real task was to improve services in central London, given its rapidly growing employment, and this could only be done through the new tunnelling techniques that had, at last, been developed, thanks to the heroic efforts of the Brunels, father and son. A decade before the start of the twentieth century, much was happening underground.

  SEVEN

  DEEP UNDER

  LONDON

  If it is scarcely believable that the concept of trains running under cities began to be considered in the early years of the nineteenth century, then it is even more incredible that the first deep tube line, powered by that newfangled invention, electricity, should have opened as early as 1890. Up till now, the story of the Underground had really been about a railway which happened to cross London in tunnels but which, in essence, was not very different from the network of suburban services springing up to serve London’s burgeoning population. Now the focus changed completely, with not only the use of electricity but also the advent of tunnelling techniques that enabled deep level tube lines to be carved out of London’s clay.

  Just as the underground railway, particularly one operated by steam trains, was a concept that might never have taken root had it not been for the fortuitous juxtaposition of technological progress, government transport policies and the drive of its promoters, the deep tube lines would not have happened without an equally improbable set of circumstances. And Britain, again, was the pioneer. The appropriate technology came through at just the right time; rival forms of transport such as the motor bus were not sufficiently developed; and there were entrepreneurs ready to put forward schemes, though persuading investors to back them was always tough. Indeed, this part of the story has a strong American flavour, as not only did many of those putting up the money come from the USA, but so did one of the key players, Charles Yerkes, and much of the equipment and technology also originated across the Atlantic.

  Like many Victorian inventions, the new type of railway relied heavily on previous failed experiments and errors. The key invention was the shield which the Brunels had developed to build the first tunnel under the Thames. While the tunnel itself was a financial failure, the engineering lessons derived from its construction were to be the basis of the creation of London’s deep tube network. Another unsuccessful enterprise had taken Brunel’s idea of a shield a step further. This was the Tower Subway, opened in 1870, which was built by an engineer called Peter Barlow beneath the Thames near the site of the present City Hall, downriver of London Bridge which was then the lowest bridge crossing. Barlow had used vertical cast-iron cylinders, which were driven down into the earth for the foundations for a suspension bridge further upriver at Lambeth, and had, in one of those brilliant bits of lateral thinking for which the Victorians were renowned, realized that the same technique could be used to bore horizontally through the ground to create a tunnel. Barlow adopted and improved Brunel’s concept of a circular shield. It was pushed through the ground with jacks, allowing men to carve out and dispose of the earth with great efficiency. The other clever innovation was cast-iron circular segments which were bolted together to form the tunnel as the shield moved forward.

  Barlow built an odd little railway with just a single carriage that was hauled through the tunnel by a cable powered by a fixed steam engine. The short journey must have been a pretty claustrophobic experience since the diameter of the tunnel was only 6ft 8ins, but at least lifts were provided to connect with the street level. There were slopes down at either end of the tunnel, partly to help the carriage gain momentum, with only a small flat section in the middle. Passengers, whose alternative was paying a bridge toll, were taken through for twopence first class and a penny second class. Having two classes was a bit of chutzpah on Barlow’s part since the accommodation for the short ride was actually identical for both, the only difference being that first-class ticket holders gained priority in the queue.

  It was to be a short-lived scheme. All the equipment proved unreliable and the venture was a commercial failure, going bankrupt in December 1870 a mere three months after opening. The train and other equipment, including the lifts, was removed and the fare slashed to a halfpenny for walking through the passage. Despite the fact that the pedestrians now had to tramp up and down timber staircases and through the tiny tunnel, lit by open gas jets perilously close to the handrail, a million people per year came through the turnstiles until the subway was put out of business by the opening of Tower Bridge in 1894. It survives, prosaically, as a conduit for power cables and water mains.

  The brave experiments of Brunel and Barlow were to demonstrate that it was possible to tunnel under London, making the construction of deep tube railways feasible. Cut and cover railways in the central area were no longer realistic propositions for private developers. Not only were there simply not enough straight roads under which they could be aligned, but the first dozen feet below ground were becoming cluttered with all kinds of pipes and conduits as London now had a sewer system and increasing numbers of buildings connected to gas, water and electricity. Tube lines, on the other hand, could be hewn out of the soil deep under this complex of sewers and pipes. Developers were now in a position to suggest building railways virtually anywhere with the potential of attracting lucrative traffic. And they did.

  The main difficulties encountered by Barlow with his subway had not been the failure of the tunnel technology but the cumbersome cable system of hauling trains. The solution, given that steam was out of the question in small deep tubes with no ventilation, was obvious: electricity. Nevertheless, it was to take twenty years after Barlow’s experiment for the first tube railway to be built and, oddly, it would have its roots in a scheme for a cable railway. A couple of projects for electric railways had been put forward and rejected in the early 1880s, but there was great scepticism about the ability of electricity to power a major underground system. Therefore, the promoters of the line that was to become the world’s first deep tube railway, the City & South London, originally envisaged a cable operated system. The route of the City & South London, now part of the Northern line, was to go from the City, near Monument, to Elephant & Castle a mile and a half away. The Parliamentary powers were obtained on the basis of a cable railway and, after the finance of £300,000 was raised with less difficulty than usual, work started in October 1886. The technology of Brunel and Barlow had now been further enhanced by a former pupil of the latter, James Greathead, who devised a shield which not only enabled the earth to be cut out, but also allowed for a layer of concrete to be poured as the earth was dug, preventing collapses.

  To the oft-asked question of why London has both the oldest and the most extensive network of deep level tube line
s in the world, the rather banal answer is that the city has the right geological conditions, a factor which outweighs social, economic and political considerations. Nearly all the tunnelling for London’s tubes has been driven through London clay, a yellow, brown or grey-green layer which lies above the chalk and sand that once formed a seabed. Most importantly, the tunnels burrow beneath the beds of gravel which, over thousands of years, the river has dumped on top of the clay. With the exception of a few parts of London where chalk is encountered, there is a thick layer of clay, up to 450 feet deep, which is relatively easy to cut through. Had there been rock, as under New York, London would not have had its tube network and, given the cost and disturbance of building low-level tunnels, the Underground map would be a much more sparse affair. Indeed, in south-east London the gravel goes deeper, which partly explains why no tube was cut there until the Jubilee Line Extension arrived in the late 1990s, by which time tunnelling techniques made it economically possible to dig through the more difficult geological terrain.

  Even though the tunnels were bored at a depth of between forty-five and 105 feet, the promoters felt it was safest to follow the lines of streets wherever possible in order to avoid any potential conflicts with basements or old foundations. However, this was ultimately shortsighted since it meant that the line was designed with complicated curves and difficult gradients because, at times, the two tunnels were built on top of one another to avoid incursions under private property. That is why today’s tube system has so many curves and climbs when, given the geological conditions, the routing should have been largely straight. While this did not pose any great problems for Greathead’s brilliant shield during construction, it was to prove operationally difficult and, although the worst aspects have been rectified, continues to bedevil the running of the tube lines today. One far-sighted decision, however, was to use the standard 4ft 8½ins gauge for the track, the same as had been universally adopted on the main line railway. Had earlier suggestions for a smaller gauge been accepted, today’s tube passengers would be travelling in even more cramped trains.