The Subterranean Railway (16 page)

Despite the Underground’s success in attracting custom, until electrification travelling on it remained an experience which ranged from broadly acceptable to downright awful, depending on the passengers’ stoicism. There was growing pressure from the passengers for better conditions. It was noticeable that the numbers using the Underground fell away in the summer because even the vagaries of the slower horse omnibuses were preferable to the unpleasantly stuffy atmosphere in the underground tunnels. While there had been some improvements, such as heaters on trains and station indicators on platforms, during the last few years of the nineteenth century there was a growing clamour for a major improvement of the system. There were suggestions of doubling the District line on its busy section between Earls Court and Mansion House, possibly through a deep tube railway, but this expensive project was never really feasible. Instead, electrification was seen as the only way of making the required modernization.

In spite of this, and the fact that the tube railway, the City & South London (which opened in 1890), was electrically powered, the Metropolitan and District railways were slow to embrace the new technology – known variously as electrolysation and electrization – and it was not until fifteen years later that steam was finally dispensed
with. While the rival companies, which were still in a puerile state of permanent dispute with each other, at least concurred over the principle that electrification was essential to their success, they could not agree over what method to use. Understandably, the boards of both companies argued that it was much harder to electrify an existing railway than to build a new one such as the City & South London. At every annual general meeting the subject would be raised and then dismissed, with supposedly insuperable technical barriers given as the reason for the lack of progress. In fact, that excuse was mostly a cover for the lack of available finance.

The construction of the second deep tube railway, the Central, which ran parallel to the two main east–west sections of the Circle, together with increased competition from horse buses and the rising price of the high-quality coal which the Underground companies were forced to use in order to limit pollution in the tunnels, meant that by the turn of the century electrification could be put off no longer. The more affluent Metropolitan braved the issue first, installing two conductor rails as test track on a long siding in Wembley Park in 1897. More substantially, in 1898, the District and the Metropolitan made an agreement to conduct an experiment by electrifying the short section of track between High Street Kensington and Earls Court with power being supplied from a third rail. The line was opened to the public in May 1900, offering the chance to ride in the large and very heavy purpose-built six-car electric trains for a shilling. That was not a great bargain since for the past decade Londoners had been able to ride on the City & South London for a mere twopence and the following month the Central opened with the same fares. Perhaps the attraction was that the journey was in the open air, but it was unlikely there were many takers and the fares were quickly cut to the normal rates which prevailed until the service was withdrawn in November.

The District and the Metropolitan were still in a permanent state of conflict and therefore it was hardly surprising that they differed over the choice of means of electrification. London very nearly got an overhead
system of electricity supply, a system that had been used on several early electric railways on the Continent. Overhead electrification had the advantage of being easier to install on an existing busy railway compared with the extra conductor rails otherwise needed for the transmission of current. Moreover, Londoners would have been saved from the hazard of live rails which, over the years, has cost thousands of passengers and track workers their lives.

In 1901, James Forbes, still in control of the District, announced that he had raised £500,000 from shareholders for electrification without specifying what method was to be used. (The District, in fact, spent a total of £1.7m – say around £85m in today’s money – in electrifying its lines over the following five years.) The Metropolitan, also cash-strapped but a little better-off, had the funds to proceed, and had selected a Hungarian system using overhead equipment. However, the Metropolitan was to be prevented from ever implementing its scheme by developments at the District.

Within weeks of Forbes announcing that he had the money for the District’s electrification, the ageing magnate was finally ousted from his position as chairman when Charles Yerkes, an American businessman of dubious reputation, took over control of the company. Yerkes, who had experience of third rail systems in the USA, announced that he would have nothing to do with the overhead method of electrification. Now, after years of being the underdog, the District, under the control of brash American financiers, was calling the shots over the Metropolitan which was still seeking to press ahead with overhead line electrification. Clearly, even though competition rather than cooperation remained the driving ethic of the railway companies, no one was daft enough to suggest that two incompatible electrification systems could be built simultaneously. As Yerkes put it in a letter to
The Times
, ‘Quarrelling over this matter will not build railroads.’ With the railways, as ever, more interested in bickering than solving the problem at hand, the Board of Trade had to arbitrate through a judge who, in December 1901, pronounced in favour of the District.

So London got its electrification system using a third rail (and fourth, for the return current, allowing the track rails to be used for signalling circuits) thanks to the deliberations of the judiciary. And for once the Metropolitan got a bloody nose from its upstart rival, though the judge, Alfred Lyttleton, berated the District for the high-handed manner in which the company had treated the issue in simply announcing its intentions on electrification to the Metropolitan. In reality, overhead line equipment presented other sorts of problems that were at best costly and at worst insuperable. Principally, overhead lines were impractical for the relatively small tunnels of the District and the Metropolitan, let alone for the tiny deep tube tunnels of the City & South London, which would have been prohibitively expensive to enlarge. Moreover, there would have been the fear of overhead lines falling down on top of the trains in tunnels, a prospect so terrifying that it could well have deterred people from travelling on the system had it been used. Ultimately, the judge plumped for the third rail system because it had already proved itself on the City & South London while the overhead method was perceived as being more experimental.

Not surprisingly, the resolution of this issue did nothing to improve relations between the two railways, which were to remain as separate concerns for another three decades. While the District used a new stretch of line between Ealing and South Harrow to test the electrification equipment, it was the Metropolitan which managed to get electric trains in use on the existing railway a few months before its rival. After a number of trial runs, there was a press trip between Baker Street and Uxbridge in an electric train on 13 December 1904, about which
The Times
, pompous and banal as ever, wrote: ‘Everything which took place conveyed the impression that those present were celebrating the beginning of a new era in the history of the old underground railways from which smoke, dirt and discomfort will be nearly banished.’
⁷
‘Nearly’ was right. The first three electric trains which went into service on New Year’s Day 1905 offered reasonable
accommodation but were little different from their predecessors. Oddly, there was a first and third class but no second: the passengers in first sat upon green moquette in the non-smoking carriages but on green leather in smoking, because that was harder to damage with ash. The third class had to put up with sitting on buffalo hide, presumably because the Metropolitan had obtained a cheap consignment since this was the time when the poor beasts were being slaughtered in vast numbers in America.

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.