The Subterranean Railway (19 page)

The lack of any strategic planning for London’s transport meant that the Great Northern & City was never continued through to south London from Moorgate and, as a result what could have been a major railway for London is merely a footnote in its history. Pearson
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ran the line for three years but never made a profit. The railway subsequently passed first to the Metropolitan, which never knew what to do with it, and later it became part of the Northern Line.
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The Great Northern & City’s story is one of those ‘if only’ tales with which London’s transport history is so replete. If a couple of full-size tube lines had been built under the centre of London linking the suburban networks of south and north London, or indeed those of the east and west, as the RER does in Paris today, the whole of the capital’s transport system and indeed the very nature of many of London’s outlying areas would have been transformed. But such an enterprise was impossible to carry out with private capital. In Edwardian times, the estimated cost per mile of building a tube line was reckoned to be £370,000 (say, £18.5m in 2004 prices) for the little 11ft 6in tunnels that became standard; and nearly double that, £650,000 (say, £32.5m) per mile for a full 16ft tunnel able to take a main line train. The finances, therefore, simply did not make sense without state support, and the concept of a mixed economy blending public and private capital had not yet been devised. It was only in the 1920s and 1930s, when cheap government loans or subsidies became available for job creation schemes, that underground railways would be built with state support – and even then only relatively cheap extensions into the suburbs rather than new through routes under London.

The other new tube railway which obtained Parliamentary permission quickly was the Waterloo & City, another little stub of a line which, like the Great Northern & City, has never reached its potential. This was London’s second tube railway to be built and was the realization of a long-term aim of the London & South Western Railway to run services into the City from its terminus at Waterloo. Over the years,
there had been various plans to connect the two which had come to nothing. Instead, passengers were forced onto a heavily overburdened omnibus service, or had to transfer to a separate Waterloo station run by the rival South Eastern Railway to reach London Bridge and Cannon Street, necessitating the hassle of a walk and the purchase of a second ticket. Originally, the London & South Western had hoped to extend its main line across the Thames and into the City, but the success of the City & South London suggested a simpler and much cheaper solution, a direct underground connection.

The backing of the London & South Western, which was so desperate to see the line built that it guaranteed returns of 3 per cent, ensured that raising the capital of £540,000 for construction of the one and a half mile line was easy and work started in 1894. The line has no intermediate stops, being a simple shuttle between Waterloo and Bank, near the Bank of England, and thus is aimed almost exclusively at the commuter market of people working in the City. Unusually, therefore, it only operated during the week and was shut in the evenings and at weekends. As on the City & South London, a turnstile system was used for the twopence fare, with tickets only being issued to those making the return journey which cost threepence. After 1900, conductors with bell punches sold the tickets on the trains, a task that must have been nigh impossible in the rush hour.

With tunnels that were slightly bigger than those of the City & South London, the Waterloo & City was built to a high standard, except for the way those using it had to enter and leave the system. For reasons of economy lifts were not built and, instead, passengers had to walk up to ground level. This required a considerable effort, particularly at Bank where the line was nearly sixty feet below the surface and the poor passengers had to negotiate a steep incline which was fitted later with several sets of five steps to make the climb a bit easier, rather like the alleys one often finds in hill towns in France and Italy. This lasted until 1960 when a flat escalator, a novel idea called a Trav-o-lator, was installed to relieve the feet of the City gents. There was, though,
right from the beginning a huge hydraulic lift at Waterloo to haul the coaches in and out of the system for maintenance.

The most innovatory aspect of the Waterloo & City was that the trains were operated by powered motor coaches at each end, a system that was common in the USA rather than a separate locomotive. There were four, later five, cars, including the two powered coaches which, apart from the section occupied by the motors, could be used by passengers. This was the first use of such electric multiple units in the UK and it meant that the trains were much lighter, and consequently cheaper to operate. Painted in a chocolate and salmon livery, they looked elegant and were so robust that they lasted forty years. Another innovation was sliding doors which gave access to platforms between the coaches that were protected by folding iron gates. The lessons of the padded cells had been learnt, too, as there were windows despite the lack of views; but the seats were wooden, perfectly reasonable given the shortness of the journey.

The trains had been designed to travel at a maximum of thirty-five mph, far faster than the City & South London, but the Board of Trade, then responsible for safety, would only allow the trains to go round the curves at fifteen mph, which increased the journey time to more than six minutes, rather than the originally planned four. Trains were frequent, though, every five minutes and later four.

Despite the hassle of the inclines and steps, passengers took to the line (which soon became known as The Drain, a name it retains today) in large numbers because it fulfilled such an obvious need. Daily ridership quickly reached 17,000, most of it at peak time, and, cleverly, the company bought single-carriage motor coaches to run during the quieter midday hours.

As mentioned above, the most important schemes to emerge from the Parliamentary committee in 1892–3 were the routes of the embryonic Bakerloo and Northern (Charing Cross branch) lines but these would take some time to get under way. It was the Central which made the most rapid progress, because it had obtained the support of various
Establishment figures who managed to raise the capital quickly – or at least faster than any of the rival schemes – albeit not without the usual difficulties. The railway clearly filled a major need since it would provide an efficient route along London’s main east–west artery. According to evidence given in support of the Bill, 6 million people annually travelled along that transport corridor on the 239 omnibuses which worked it. The Central had a much grander feel to it than its predecessor, with longer and heavier trains – though they were still smaller than those on the Metropolitan, which partly ran in parallel with the new line and consequently objected to the Central’s plans.

The funding was obtained through a complex mechanism which enabled the promoters to tap into the huge pool of capital available in the USA. Indeed, this was to be repeated with the funding of the tube lines built by Yerkes a few years later and it is no exaggeration to say that London’s tube system owes its existence almost entirely to American finance. A syndicate to promote the Central London railway was formed and included such luminaries as Ernest Cassel (later Sir), one of a group of bankers who helped manage the finances of the Prince of Wales and later went on to become an adviser to the King; Henry Oppenheim, another well-connected banker; and the American philanthropist and banker Darius Ogden Mills. The promoters worked through the Exploration Company, which was backed by the Rothschilds. Once a second Bill, allowing the extension to Bank and Liverpool Street, had been passed in 1892, Cassel spent a long time persuading Henry Tennant, the former general manager of the North Eastern Railway, to became chairman in June 1895 of a revamped board, which included more members of the Prince of Wales’s circle. When the company sought to raise nearly £3m in shares soon afterwards, the public, having had their fingers burnt with these schemes once too often, only took up 14 per cent of the stock – although this time they were wrong: uniquely of major new underground lines, the investment would have earned them a good rate of return. Instead the Exploration Company, thanks to Cassel
and his rich friends, bought most of the rest of the shares. As well as Americans, the major shareholders included many prominent Europeans and a few notable British investors from outside London. Among the smaller shareholders with at least one £10 share, there was a plumber from West Hampstead, a signalman from Northants, a pig keeper from Berkhamsted, a piano tuner from London and ‘a great number of clerks in holy orders’ who must have been rather more affluent than their peers today.
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The remainder went to the contractor, the Electric Traction Company, a financing method that was becoming almost the norm for underground lines. In fact, the contractor was also owned by Cassel and his associates and it was able to start work in the spring of 1896.

As with the City & South London, huge shafts were dug down to where tunnelling using the Greathead shield method could begin. The Central had the advantage of being straight for long stretches but, as with its predecessor, at various places the tunnels were routed to run on top of each other – at Notting Hill Gate and Chancery Lane, for example – in order to keep the line under roadways and therefore avoid having to pay compensation to private landowners. In a way, this was ridiculous. The tubes were being dug out at such a deep level that it did not really matter what was above them in those days long before skyscrapers, and in any case the Parliamentary Committee had recommended that compensation need not be paid. However, the promoters were worried about causing damage and they put in far more curves and gradients than necessary, which greatly reduces operational efficiency to this day. One clever innovation did, however, save considerably on energy and running costs. Stations were built at the top of slight inclines which meant that trains automatically were slowed down by the gradient as they approached the station and sent faster on their way on departure.

The original completion date was to have been 1896 but inevitably delays over obtaining the finance meant that it was only by the end of 1898 that the tunnelling, nearly all through London clay, was
complete. Extensions for the work had to be sought from Parliament but, in retrospect, it is not the fact that there were delays which is remarkable but rather that the line was finished within four years.

At Bank, the City had insisted on a major piece of planning gain. The railway was forced to build a complex system of seven interconnected subways which not only gave access to the booking hall but also had to be accessible to the public seeking to cross the congested roads around the Bank and Mansion House. It was one of the trickiest parts of building the railway, involving twenty-four-hour working by teams of labourers, and nearly bankrupted the company, helping to push up the eventual cost of completion to nearly £4m. As a result, Bank was to become the first major interchange of the Tube system as it was the terminus of the Waterloo & City and also became an intermediate station on the City & South London after its extension was completed in 1900. However, passengers had to buy separate tickets for each part of the journey as the two companies did not allow through bookings, yet another consequence of the emphasis on competition rather than cooperation.

To fulfil the conditions of the latest Extension granted by Parliament, the Central had to be completed by the end of June 1900; but only a ceremonial opening was possible by that date. The Prince of Wales, who had taken a personal interest in the scheme as a result of the involvement of his advisers, headed a glittering guest list which included all the bankers who had made the project possible and the author and journalist Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), then a London resident. The Prince’s train went all the way to Shepherd’s Bush where, just beyond the station, the line surfaced and ran into the depot. There, after brief speeches, the Prince returned on the train for lunch in Mayfair, while the waiters apparently snaffled all the food and were found lying around drunk by the poor staff of the Central who had been promised the leftovers themselves.

The Central was opened to the public in August and caught the imagination of Londoners to a much greater extent than the City & South London a decade earlier. It was fitting that the Central,
the first modern tube railway, should open at the start of 1900, the dawn of the twentieth century. The long stations, each with platforms over 100 yards long, were Spartan but smart affairs with white tiling throughout – a brave decision given the dust – and lit by electricity. Initially the platform floors consisted of wooden planks, but these were replaced by stone slabs after the disastrous fire on the Paris Métro in August 1903. The Central served fourteen stations between Shepherd’s Bush and Bank, a journey that according to the early publicity was supposed to last twenty-one minutes, the same as today’s schedule, but seems to have taken around four minutes longer because of the difficulties of getting people on and off the trains. The
Railway Times
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blamed the passengers: ‘The prevailing impression seems to be that they are walking slowly out of church or assisting at a funeral,’ it wrote. To ensure that the trains were ready for departure, the seven-car trains had a crew of six to operate the gates between each pair of cars, in addition to the driver and his assistant. At every station, there was a procedure which required ‘each gateman facing the front of his car [to hold] up his hand when his gates were shut. When the front guard saw the correct number of hands, he showed a green light to the rear, to which the rear guard responded by showing a green light forward to the driver or his assistant, and the train could start.’
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With this complicated rigmarole, it seems amazing that the trains ever left on time. The crew, incidentally, worked ten-hour shifts without a meal break. The driver and his mate brought sandwiches and left supplies of tea and sugar with the signalmen (there were seventeen signal boxes, mostly at the end of platforms), collecting their brewed beverage when they next passed. Working all day in the tunnels was harsh and by the end of the day the crew’s faces were black from the metal dust given off by the motors and brake blocks. Indeed, the conditions were so onerous that the Central employed ‘call boys’ to knock on the doors of the crew in the Shepherd’s Bush area to ensure that the men woke up in time for their shifts, a practice that was otherwise confined to main line railways. Despite the hardships, the workers received just thirty shillings for a sixty-hour week.