The Subterranean Railway (17 page)

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 by 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 lines 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.

In 1887, a scheme to extend the City & South London line to Stockwell via Kennington was given Parliamentary sanction, representing a doubling of the length of the line as the promoters sought to tap into the relatively affluent suburbs of inner south London. An extra £300,000 was raised, which, together with borrowing of £175,000, meant that the total available to the promoters was £775,000, an amount on which it would always be difficult to obtain a decent return.
¹
The other advantage of running further out was that it solved the thorny problem of how to get equipment and stock in and out of the railway. An inclined plane was built at Stockwell to connect the railway with the depot and workshops on the surface, where the power plant was also situated, but after an accident when the tow rope broke, allowing a carriage to escape down the main line, a lift was used despite the inconvenience.

It was only after construction had started that doubts began to be raised about the viability of using cables, especially as the line was now planned to be three miles long. The idea had been to have a cable travelling at ten mph on which the trains would clamp and unclamp at stations, but it was recognized that this would be impossible over the extended length. Having two separate cables each covering half the length was also briefly considered but then, mercifully, the cable contractor went broke. The obvious solution was to use electricity despite the earlier concerns about unreliability. After various experiments, a third rail system was adopted, a sensible decision given that the two separate tunnels were only a mere 10ft 6ins in diameter
²
and could not have accommodated overhead wires. Locomotives rather than powered coaches were purchased, and, to carry out test running, an engine and two carriages were dismantled and manhandled down one of the lift shafts because the tunnel to Stockwell had not yet been completed.

Despite the novel techniques being used, the digging proceeded without any major mishap and the work was completed on time. The line, which was the world’s first major electric railway and the first deep tube line, was formally opened in November 1890, a month before the public was let in, by the Prince of Wales who switched on the current with a golden key. According to the
Daily News
, the Prince was a bit bemused by the ride in the large lift, capable of taking fifty people, which took him down at King William Street station and made a typically bad royal joke: ‘It was quite pardonable that his Royal Highness should ask [whether he] was going down or the world going up.’
³
The reporter, too, found the experience strange and reveals just how innovatory the whole thing was: ‘The sensation, indeed, of descending this lift of fifty feet to get below the level of the Thames is somewhat similar to a balloon experience. In a balloon, the earth seems to be sinking below you. In the King William Street lift, the world seems to be gently rising, the passenger all the while being pleasantly stationary.’ The Prince, who would become Edward VII on
the death of Victoria, was clearly an enthusiast for the railway and recognized its primary purpose of trying to clear traffic off the roads, as ever a forlorn hope:

This railway today, this first electric railway which has been started in England will, I hope, do much to alleviate the congestion of the traffic which now exists, so that business men who have a great distance to go will find easy means of getting away from this great city and enjoying the fresh air of the country and I hope that it will also be a great boon to working men who are obliged to work in an unpleasant atmosphere, and who by its means will be able to get away for a little fresh air.

Clearly, the future king was not a frequent visitor to Stockwell which, at the time, was already a substantial suburb rather than the bucolic idyll he suggests.

The trains, each consisting of a little electric locomotive hauling three carriages with just thirty-two seats apiece, were short and designed with a fundamental flaw – they had no windows out of which passengers could see, merely narrow strips of glass above head height. This was based on the mistaken notion that the passengers would not mind since only the inside of tunnels and featureless stations would be visible. But that was to go against basic human psychology and not surprisingly the carriages quickly became known as the ‘padded cells’ and the line as the ‘sardine box railway’, a name quickly applied by
Punch
magazine. The passengers sat on benches running the whole length of the carriage which were indeed pleasantly padded, rather a luxury for the working men who travelled in the same carriages as their supposed superiors because, uniquely of any Victorian railway, there was only one class. In truth, the soft furnishings were a necessity since the ride was rough and bumpy, given the sharp curves and gradients and a track that was difficult to maintain. People were frequently hurled against each other, especially the standing passengers, who
filled up every available space at rush hours but were not provided with any straps to grab. The small long windows above the seats were little more than ventilators but at least allayed the feeling of claustrophobia sufficiently to ensure that people were not completely deterred from using the line. The lack of visibility outside meant that the conductor on each platform between the carriages had to shout out loudly the names of each station. His job was also to open and shut the gated door at the end of each carriage and to help passengers on and off the trains.