The Subterranean Railway (11 page)

One example of Watkin’s skulduggery was that he opposed the 1878 extension of time bill for the Completion Company, claiming
it contained a clause about the underpinning of buildings that was ‘unusual and onerous’. Yet, according to one historian, ‘the same clause appeared in the Metropolitan and Regent Circus Bill he was promoting in the same Parliament’.
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The District, on the other hand, realizing it could never raise the money to complete the circle, supported the Completion Company’s efforts.

But to no avail. Despite being offered £370,000 from the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) to support the building of a new street linking Fenchurch Street and another £130,000 by the Commission of Sewers, the Completion Company could not raise the cash to build the link. So at last, after several wasted years, the only realistic outcome emerged – the Metropolitan and the District decided to cooperate. After the failure of the Completion Company scheme, a contractor, Charles Lucas, persuaded the two enemies, Forbes and Watkin, to meet and agree a short-term peace agreement in order at last to complete the Circle. They managed to persuade the Commissioners of Sewers to raise their offer to £250,000 and the MBW’s to £500,000. Even then, it took an outsider to knock the heads of the two companies together. With several other schemes being put forward by promoters, there was an inquiry chaired by Sir John Hawkshaw who, arbitrating, recommended that the joint scheme by the two existing railways should be selected, presumably on the basis that the involvement of a third party would have led to chaos. As we see below, it was bad enough trying to run an integrated service like the inner Circle line with two players, let alone three.

At last, in August 1879 a joint act was passed granting powers to the two railways to complete not only the Circle but also a spur to Whitechapel and a connection with the East London which ran between Whitechapel and New Cross. For its part, the Metropolitan, which was more affluent than the District, started work on the Aldgate–Trinity Square (now Tower Hill) extension which opened in September 1882. At this stage, the line ended abruptly at Tower of London station, then a rickety wooden construction which had been jerry-built in just three days but which lasted until it was bombed in 1940.

After yet more bickering between the District and the Metropolitan, the two started working together almost immediately on the last section of the circle, between Tower Hill and Mansion House. The Metropolitan initially financed the work, with the proviso that the District would become a financial partner at a later date. The cost was a severe burden for the Metropolitan. As the engineer and railway writer O.S. Nock put it, ‘all constructional difficulties experienced in earlier underground lines in London were accentuated on this extraordinary 2¼ miles of railway and the ultimate cost worked out at a million pounds a mile’. The main cost was labour: to build the circle extension, 850 men were employed by day and 500 at night for two years. Of course, even if translated in to 2012 money, making say £80m per mile, that is very cheap compared with the cost of the Crossrail scheme under construction between Paddington and Liverpool Street which is reckoned to cost £15bn for a tunnel of less than four miles (but which also includes extensive works on the surface beyond the two main line stations). An estimate soon after construction
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reckoned that the thirteen-mile-long circular railway cost about £11m, including almost another five miles of spurs and early extensions. London had got a bargain but the expected financial bonanza for the two underground companies never materialized.

Any hopes that operating a line together would finally make the two companies, and, in particular, their bosses, behave in a grown-up way were quickly dashed. But first there was the opening ceremony, on 17 September 1884, to be got over with. Forbes and Watkin reportedly sat in the same train as it ran round the Circle, but unfortunately there is no photograph to record their discomfiture. At the inevitable banquet, Forbes rose at the end of the meal to tell the assembled VIPs that differences between himself and Watkin were slight and only on the surface. It was pure cant. There was an immediate series of disputes which continued until the end of the century. Far from peace breaking out, it was the lawyers who enjoyed a field day as innumerable suits and countersuits were filed by the two rivals.

Public services started on October 6 and there was turmoil, caused partly by the two companies’ mistrust of one another. They had agreed that the Metropolitan trains should run clockwise around the outer track, while the District operated in the opposite direction on the inside line.
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Of the fifteen route miles (which included a few spurs and sections of four-track which counted double) of the Circle, seven were owned by the Metropolitan, just under six miles by the District, and slightly more than two were jointly owned. While this could, with goodwill and sensible management, have been an effective way of operating the seventy or eighty-minute round trip covering twenty-seven stations, the hostility and antipathy between the two ensured that it was a recipe for chaos.

According to the initial timetable, the companies attempted to run eight trains per hour in each direction but underestimated the difference between operating on a horseshoe, with a terminus at each end, and a continuous circle. The locomotives had to be watered which took place during a two-minute stop at Aldgate where a special drain had to be fitted to run the hot water, a colossal 218,000 gallons daily, into the Thames. The longer servicing and inspection involved taking the locomotive off the train and replacing it at one of the Kensington stations – High Street for the District, South for the Metropolitan. Spare engines were left wherever there was space in odd corners of the railway, of which there was little, putting extra pressure on running a punctual service.

In addition to the 140 trains scheduled on the inner Circle in each direction, a further 684 were timetabled to use part of the line, entering at Cromwell Road from the west, Praed Street (near Paddington) from the north-west and Whitechapel from the east. That meant a total of 964, around a hundred more than the line could cope with. The financial arrangements between the Metropolitan and the District were at the root of this attempt to run too many trains as the District essentially paid a fixed fee irrespective of the number of trains it operated.
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Oddly, the very first day seems to have passed off without trouble, at least according to the man from
The Times
. The reporter describes
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how the first morning service which left New Cross for Mansion House was a workmen’s train soon after 5 a.m. and that the first westward Circle service was at 5.35 a.m., revealing a service pattern which is not much different from that of the early twenty-first century: ‘The trains run at frequent intervals from before 6 o’clock in the morning until about midnight’. He also offers a possible explanation for some of the higher costs of the new section, as he mentions that ‘the new tunnel and the new stations are great improvements upon the tunnels and stations of the older underground railways. The platforms are wide and the stations are airy.’ But the rolling stock and its lighting was no better than when the Metropolitan first opened two decades previously. The reporter, too, was a bit grumpy about the prospect of the cost of fares: ‘The joint companies promise a reduction of fares, but these have not been issued.’ Nevertheless, he concluded that ‘the traffic worked smoothly yesterday, and many of the public made a trial trip of a run around London’.

But the service soon deteriorated. According to one ‘young man’, writing to the paper ten days after the start of the service,
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his job was at risk because he could ‘never feel safe as to what time we shall arrive at our destination. As a daily traveller between Turnham Green and Sloane Square, I can assure you that the best time our morning train has kept since the opening of the Inner Circle completion has been 9 min late and the general time 15 min and 20 min late, and before this our train used to keep admirable time.’ His problem was that his train was often held at Earls Court to allow the Circle line trains from Kensington High Street to pass. No wonder, as mentioned previously, that control over this section of line, the Cromwell curve, was to be the subject of a legal dispute between the two companies for so long.

The disruption was so bad that several trains came to a standstill for many hours and on at least one occasion, near Kensington High Street on 16 October, the passengers abandoned the carriages to walk
along the track to escape by the nearest station.
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Even without such outright failures – which were eventually rectified by cutting services back to six per hour on the inner Circle – passengers were much put upon, largely because of the silly rivalry. For instance, they were supposed to be encouraged to travel by the shortest route, their tickets bearing either the letter I for the inner, largely District, services, or O for the outer Metropolitan-run trains. Each company had its own booking office at joint stations and inevitably there were disputes about what route should be recommended between two stations that were broadly opposite each other on the Circle. Worse, however, was that when relations between the two companies went through one of the regular bad patches in 1886, both companies began issuing tickets for their own trains to hapless passengers irrespective of the fact that it might involve a journey of, say, twenty-two stops instead of five. Tickets bearing the wrong letter were not accepted for travel by the rival company and they ran fierce advertising campaigns against each other. ‘Metropolitan Railway, the best cheapest most convenient and expeditious route’ boasted one, listing fares to various stations, ‘note the fares and time occupied … save your time’.

The rivalry was undoubtedly exacerbated by the financial pressures of the two railway companies. Both had promised to pay dividends of 4 per cent on their respective shares of the £2.5m capital raised to build the line and therefore there was great pressure to maximize revenue through intense usage and, when that proved impossible, by trying to screw as much as possible out of the other company. The Metropolitan was always the senior partner, able to run more through trains and generally being able to call the shots over the District. There were disputes over sharing the cost of construction, over the amounts of interest that should be paid, about an agreement over the Cromwell curve and, inevitably, about fares.

The most ridiculous row led to the chaining of a locomotive to a disputed siding at South Kensington. As the
West London Advertiser
reported, ‘The right to a siding is disputed by the respective
companies … The District, in order to enforce their right, have run an engine and train into a siding and have actually chained it to the spot, notwithstanding the fact that the engine fires are kept alight, steam kept up and night and day, a driver and stoker are in charge. A day or two ago, the Metropolitan sent three engines to pull away the train and a tug of war ensued in which the chained train came off the victor …’
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In between these arguments, there were attempts to do the obvious and amalgamate the two railways, something both Watkin and Forbes supported, but they could never agree on the terms.

The financial problems were mostly a result of the high cost of construction but were exacerbated by the fact that the route, as we have seen, was largely chosen at the instigation of a Parliamentary commission rather than by entrepreneurs assessing the needs of the market. Though the line was fairly well patronized, it was not very useful until a broader network of Underground lines was connected with it. Whereas two decades previously, when there was only a small section of the Metropolitan line, just under 9.5 million people had travelled on the Underground, bringing in receipts of £101,000, in the first year of full operation of the Circle there were 114.5 million passengers. However, that was still not enough to pay adequate dividends given the expenditure on the Circle’s construction and the cost of operating the line.

Compounding these problems was an unexpected revival in the fortunes of the horse omnibus. Intuitively, one would have expected the omnibus to have been on a declining curve since the start of suburban train services fifty years previously. However, several factors combined to make omnibuses cheaper and, while still slower than the train, at least faster and more reliable than hitherto. Their finances had been helped by the scrapping of turnpike tolls and mileage duties. Moreover, they paid low rates for their stables and depots while the railways had to pay the full amount on their stations and yards. Ironically, the underground railways even paid more towards the upkeep of the roads than their omnibus rivals as they frequently had to pay a ransom
towards improvements in the thoroughfares under which they built their lines. Interviewed just before the end of the nineteenth century, the general manager of the District, Albert Powell, complained: ‘The omnibuses are practically free from taxation; do absolutely nothing to maintain the roads over which they run; and while their expenses … are thereby kept down to the lowest figure, enabling them to charge fares out of all proportion to the service rendered, the District Railway is not only compelled to construct, at its own expense, the railways over which it runs … but is forced to contribute £32,000 per annum in rates and taxes towards the roads over which its competitors – the omnibuses – run.’
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While railway operators the world over are in the habit of making similar complaints, Powell had a point. The railways even had to pay a passenger tax (on fares above a penny a mile) for which there was no equivalent for the omnibuses.

Secondly, these road improvements were part of a London-wide project to create wider and better streets. There were several new highways such as Northumberland Avenue, Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road built in the 1870s and 1880s that did much to unblock the constant congestion on the London streets and make it easier for the clumsy omnibuses to thread their way through them.