The Subterranean Railway (18 page)

One pleasant innovation was the installation of electric lighting in the trains, though as there was merely a handful of low-powered bulbs per carriage, only passengers fortunate enough to be sitting directly underneath them received enough light to read their newspapers. Nevertheless, it must have been an improvement on the gas lighting still endured by travellers on the Metropolitan and District, whose benches, too, were not so comfortably furnished. The stations, though, retained the dark gloomy atmosphere of their counterparts on the older underground lines because they were gas-lit: all the available electricity was needed to power the trains. That also explains why the huge lifts which transported the passengers to and from the platforms, and which the Prince of Wales found so odd, were hydraulically operated. The escalator had not yet been invented.

As well having only one class, another revolutionary innovation was the setting of a single fare, with no issuing of tickets. Passengers simply went through a turnstile after paying their twopence.
The Times
, having noted that the opening of the line marked ‘an epoch in the development of the internal communications of London which may, perhaps, hereafter prove to have been even more important than the opening of the Metropolitan Railway in 1863’, continued: ‘All the complicated apparatus of booking clerks and tickets, first, second and third class, single and return and season, is swept away.’
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There was one remaining form of discrimination: each train had a smoking car from which ladies were excluded. There was, too, a measure of
dissent stirred up by this new classless system. Some labourers were embarrassed about having to share carriages in their soiled work apparel with more affluent passengers whose clothes they might inadvertently dirty. A writer in the
Railway Times
suggested that ‘we have scarcely yet been educated up to that condition of social equality when lords and ladies will be content to ride side by side with Billinsgate “fish fags” and Smithfield butchers’.
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In a way, that missed the point. The fact that even for ‘lords and ladies’ the line was the quickest form of travel ensured that it would be well patronized. Strangely, those who made up the by-laws for this new system did not, perhaps, quite understand its nature. They had ensured that people travelling on the roof would be subject to a £2 fine, a penalty that clearly would only ever be levied posthumously.

On this occasion
The Times
was enthusiastic about the innovation even though its reporter was somewhat apprehensive when, coming out of the lift, he saw his train emerging from the tunnel ‘with a roar, emitting sparks from the region of the wheels’. The new subway, he wrote, ‘might be described … as a gigantic iron drainpipe, thrust by main force through the solid London clay, much in the fashion in which the cheesemonger thrusts a scoop into his Cheddar or Gloucester’. The journey from Stockwell to the terminus at King William Street, in the City, took about eighteen minutes, an average speed including stops of 11.5 mph, over twice as fast as the speediest surface transport.

The Times
also dealt with the practical issue of fear about the newfangled invention. Would people fry to death if they had to disembark between stations in an emergency? No, came the answer which may seem obvious today, but must have been greatly reassuring for those Victorians who had not previously encountered electricity:

Will they have to walk through the tunnel with the knowledge that, if at any moment they should come into contact with the electric conductor, they will meet the gruesome fate which, to judge from American newspapers, seems to be the common lot
of those who have to do with electric wires in the States? The authorities reply that, in the first place, directly a train breaks down the current will be cut off from the section entirely, and secondly, that even if any one did ‘short circuit’ the current through his own body, he would take no harm, beyond receiving a smart and confessedly disagreeable shock.

Hmm – while the first part of the answer was completely accurate, the second seems to be a bit of clever company propaganda swallowed by the gullible journalist. Given that the 450-volt system would have required around 160 amps to deliver the power to the locomotives, anyone rash enough to touch the rail would have been ‘killed very dead’ according to an electrical engineer.
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Indeed, there was an early death when a foolish passenger persuaded one of the conductors to allow him to ride on the front platform of the coach immediately behind the locomotive and promptly fell off; but there are few reports of any subsequent mishaps, suggesting the system was very safe right from the outset.

As with the earlier underground projects, the line was a success in terms of transport, if not commercially, though there were all the problems associated with being a pioneer. The electricity supply was not sufficient to cope with several trains accelerating at once and the tiny tunnels proved inadequate for the demand. The locomotives, which had not been built to haul the weight of so many passengers as well as carriages which were heavier than originally designed, frequently suffered burnt-out engines. The trains struggled up the gradient to the terminus in King William Street, which also happened to be furthest away from the source of power, and consequently a maximum of a train every four minutes, rather than three, could be run. On occasion, the trains did not actually make it up the hill, and had to be allowed to roll back down again for a second attempt, an experience that must have been terrifying for the passengers. The City terminus had originally been designed for a cable railway which meant
that only one train could be accommodated at a time.

On the first day, 10,000 people flocked to the line, again a tribute to Victorian hardiness given that descending deep under London into a gloomy tunnel to take a train operated by a little-understood method of traction would have taken more than a modicum of courage. But the regular use of the Metropolitan and the District must have inured most travellers to such considerations. Within weeks there were 15,000 per day using the line but the authors
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of the standard work on the history of London’s transport suggest that the line was a failure in relation to the early days of the Metropolitan.
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That judgement, however, seems a bit harsh. If the line did not have quite the impact of the first underground railway, the reason was partly geographical. The City & South London was only connecting a small section of south London with the City, a route on which there were many rival omnibus and tram services. In contrast, the Metropolitan had been designed as a link between major main line termini and the City. In fact, the City & South London was, from the outset, so crowded that initially the owners feared extending it southwards out of concern that the City terminus could not cope. There were certainly enough passengers to convince the owners that it was worth investing to make the line more viable. More locomotives and coaches were soon ordered, and the layout at the City end improved, but all of this was expensive, putting further strain on the benighted shareholders, who had not received any dividend in 1891 despite the high passenger numbers. Extensions were mooted, and eventually constructed in both directions, just as with the earlier underground lines, in the perpetual but forlorn hope that they would make the railway more viable. The shareholders of the City & South London remained long-suffering, with dividends rising slowly to a maximum of just 2
⅛
per cent by 1898 but falling after that.

Despite its financial difficulties, the City & South London attracted a host of imitators promoting schemes for tube railways powered by either electricity or cable, though the latter all soon fell away. The first, the railway that was to become the Central Line, obtained approval
in the summer of 1891. The Central London was to be a six-mile tube railway originally intended to run between Shepherd’s Bush and Cornhill, in the City, but the plans were soon extended to reach Bank and Liverpool Street, giving it useful connections with the City & South London and the Great Eastern main line railway. A further spate of schemes was put forward in what became something of a tube mania. No fewer than six tube railway bills were put to Parliament in 1892 and, in a throwback to the early days of the development of the Metropolitan, a joint select committee was appointed to set out some principles for this type of development. Crucially, it agreed that tube railways could use the subsoil under public property without having to pay compensation, which made future developments economically feasible. Several schemes which were to form the basis of London’s tube network were given the go-ahead following the committee’s deliberations but all struggled to find money, notably the lines that were to become the Bakerloo and the Northern line’s Charing Cross branch. As Hugh Douglas put it, ‘Acts, acts, acts. They were everywhere in the nineties but where was the cash to implement them? … Commercial enterprises offered far greater returns to investors than railways.’
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There were all sorts of other barriers thrown in the way of promoters, which made it even more incredible that schemes ever managed to get off – or rather under – the ground. During the Parliamentary process, the promoters had to make concessions to the proprietors, both public and private, under whose land they were digging. Typically, the sewer authorities had to be kept happy with detailed plans while landlords had to be assured that there would be no deviation from the agreed path and be paid compensation for the slightest mishap. The bills were pushed through in a climate of antipathy to rail companies, engendered by their half-century-long domination of the transport market, and thus the parliamentarians were always ready to side with the objectors and doubters. All this created a bureaucratic minefield and a lack of flexibility which inevitably had the effect of pushing up the costs of schemes and deterring investors.

There was another barrier to attracting backers. The left-leaning Progressive members, who were in control of the newly created London County Council (LCC), lobbied hard and successfully for any new lines to be forced to guarantee that cheap working men’s trains, like those pioneered on the Metropolitan and by then standard on suburban services, would be provided. This was perceived, possibly wrongly, by prospective investors as further reducing potential dividends. A greater deterrent was the fear that the radical LCC, which was quite hostile to private enterprise, might eventually succeed in municipalizing the underground network, something that would not in fact happen until well into the twentieth century. Given all this uncertainty, it was hardly surprising that it would take a decade before the next major deep tube line, the Central, was opened.

The difficulties encountered by the pioneering City & South London were another deterrent to potential investors. In addition to the operational difficulties caused by the insufficient power, the worst problem was the bottleneck at the King William Street station with its single platform. This was such a constraint on increasing usage of the line that the owners decided almost immediately to remedy the situation, but it took a decade before the work could be completed. They combined the construction of a northward extension to Moorgate with a realignment of the line, which included the abandonment of the troublesome King William Street terminus. It was replaced by Bank where the ticket hall was sited in an enlarged section of the crypt of St Mary Woolnoth church, necessitating the payment of a whopping £170,000 compensation to the church authorities. With King William Street closed and extra power from Stockwell, trains could now be extended to four cars, which helped solve the rush-hour overcrowding. New stations, such as London Bridge, a strange omission in the original line, were built in cast iron like the tunnels, rather than brick which had occasionally been found to leak or partly cave in. The new lifts were electric instead of hydraulic, and therefore, as early as 1900, the system was beginning to contain almost all the features familiar
to today’s users. In most stations, the individual tracks ran parallel or above each other, although there were island platforms
¹⁰
at Angel and at the two new Clapham stations on the southern extension, also completed in 1900. At Moorgate the line was connected with the Metropolitan, the first interchange between two underground lines on a different level, a feature that was to become both common and essential for the creation of a network, rather than a haphazard spread of lines. The City & South London reached Angel in 1901 and was eventually extended to King’s Cross and Euston in 1907.

The first line to receive Parliamentary consent following the partial success of the City & South London was to become London’s only underground line that could accommodate full-size main line trains. Such large tunnels had been ruled out on cost grounds but the Great Northern & City from Moorgate to Finsbury Park was conceived as a bypass of King’s Cross for the Great Northern’s suburban trains and therefore it had to accommodate main line carriages. The line was authorized by Parliament as early as June 1892 but actually took a dozen years to build. Indeed, it was amazing that it was ever completed. Once the Bill had been passed, the Great Northern lost interest and became quite hostile to the idea because it was more interested in embryonic plans for the Piccadilly Line. The ball was picked up by the contractor, Sir Weetman Pearson, whose firm, S. Pearson, bought many of the shares and underwrote a 3 per cent dividend to get the railway built. By then, the Great Northern was so antagonistic that it would not even allow its abandoned fledgling to share Finsbury Park Station. Passengers had to use an inconvenient separate little underground station with a poor interchange and the line could not be used for its intended purpose of relieving pressure on Great Northern’s suburban network. Here again the emphasis on competition rather than cooperation meant that valuable resources had been wasted. It was such a contrast to Paris where the first Métro lines were being built as a network of six lines conceived by the local municipal council.