Looking back over more than a century during which it has often appeared that the United Kingdom has been in decline and all too often been overtaken by the United States and Germany, and as far as railways are concerned, France and Japan, it is difficult to envisage just how dynamic our Victorian forefathers were. While there were railways before Queen Victoria acceded to the throne, and the network was not completely finished at her death, the fact remains that more than 90 per cent of a railway network that was at its peak twice the size of that today, was completed during her reign. All of this was achieved without the intervention of central government or the application of taxpayers’ money. Indeed, in some places, such as Carlisle, the city imposed its ancient right to charge a duty on everything entering its boundaries, and then again on everything leaving.
Local authority rates were another matter, and the railways were rated very heavily for the amount of land that they occupied, as local authorities saw the railway as a cash cow to be milked. One of the best examples of this was at Huyton, near Liverpool, where in 1849 the London & North Western Railway provided 35 per cent of the rates paid to the parish council, despite occupying less than 1 per cent of the land.
The system of rating for the railways had to evolve, and it took case law to decide on a fair basis, with the rental value of stations and other premises used as a basis for the rates, but for the actual length of line, the local authorities based their charges on the companies’ receipts, making it more of a local tax or duty than rates. In the end, the railways paid more than twenty times as much per employee as any other kind of business, and this was only affected to a degree by the Local Government Act 1858 that limited rating assessments for railway property to a quarter of the net value. Even so, this did not stop local authority valuers arguing that a major through line was worth more than a secondary route because it carried a greater volume of traffic and earned the railway greater revenue, but usually this approach was unsuccessful on appeal.
While one can deplore the boom and bust fluctuations that caused so much difficulty, one can see that they would have been difficult to avoid. Everyone felt that they should share in the boom, no one saw the dangers. The country in return gained a massive railway network without public expense, so much so that during the Second World War, even though on occasions the London termini were closed by bombing, routes created in the days of competition were always available between London and the Channel coast. Today, despite the massive cuts of the post-war period, many of which pre-dated the famous, or infamous, Dr (later Lord) Beeching, and the UK having only 44 per cent of the land area of France, it still has seven per cent more railway miles, even after the closure of half the system, and 24 per cent more railway than Japan, despite that country being 54 per cent larger.
Expanding the tube network
The City & South London might not have met the dividend promises of its prospectus, but it was a success by every other measure. It was clear that the deep level tube railway was the way to ease the congestion on the streets of the capital, and provide sheltered all-weather transport at a time when the bus and the tram were still open top, and the former would remain so for some decades to come. It was also a case of this proving to be the best means of ending the isolation of those main line termini that were not fortunate enough to be in the City or the West End, or at least on the fringes. Paddington and King’s Cross had already been relieved by the Metropolitan, while London Bridge had the lines to Cannon Street and Charing Cross for the onward conveyance of those arriving there on the Brighton line. The station in most need of relief at this time was, of course, Waterloo, whose shortcomings for the City-bound commuter had already, as we have seen, caused the creation of a new horse omnibus operator.
Once again, we find the Victorian attitude in evidence: a belief that everything could be resolved and that within every problem lay an opportunity.
A City connection for Waterloo came with the building of the Waterloo & City Line, running from the main line terminus to a station outside the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange, appropriately named ‘Bank’. The line opened in 1898 and, although independently-owned, it was worked by the London & South Western Railway, which finally acquired it in 1907. Initially, specially-built four-car trains were used. The line ran for 1½ miles under the Thames without intermediate stations. An electric hoist at Waterloo enabled vehicles to be removed for overhaul.
The legislation authorising the Waterloo & City allowed either cable working or electric traction, and the latter was chosen. This was in fact one of the few underground lines in London on which cable working would have been practical, because of its short length, and it was in any case a unique line having nothing in common with the rest of the LSWR or later SR system, other than the use of third rail traction. The only tube line to be shorter was the Aldwych branch of the Piccadilly Line.
At least twice in its history, once during the Second World War, the line has had to be closed due to flooding from burst or damaged water mains. This was a cruel trick of fate as the line had already become known to its regular users as the ‘Drain’.
Next was the Central London Railway, which also ran to the Bank, and was authorised in 1892. When opened in 1900, it linked Shepherd’s Bush with the Bank, a distance of 5¾ miles, running under London’s West End to the City. Initially, trains were drawn by electric locomotives, but there were complaints from those living or working in buildings along the line about vibration and in 1903, the locomotives and trailer carriages were replaced by the more practical self-propelled trains, the first multiple unit trains in the United Kingdom. The stations were slightly higher than the running tube, so that braking was assisted by trains climbing a short slope to the platforms, and acceleration helped by the corresponding downward slope.
Until 1907, a flat fare of 2d was charged.
In 1908, the western end of the line was extended by a loop to Wood Lane, close to the exhibition centre at White City, and then extended eastwards to Liverpool Street in 1912. The line was badly affected by competition from motor buses after 1910, and in 1913, it was acquired by the Underground Group. A further westward extension followed in 1920, running over Great Western tracks to Ealing Broadway.
One line that avoided the Bank altogether, but which nevertheless provided a vital cross-London link, was the Great Northern Piccadilly & Brompton Railway. When opened in 1906, this was the longest deep level tube line in London, running 8½ miles from Finsbury Park to Hammersmith, with no less than 7¾ miles of it below ground. Its origins lay in a deep level scheme planned by the Metropolitan District, the Brompton & Piccadilly Circus and the Great Northern & Strand Railways, which were merged in 1902. Rolling stock was bought from France and from Hungary, believed to have been the only Hungarian stock used on Britain’s railways. One innovation that never saw public service was a double spiral escalator installed at Holloway Road in 1906, but the company provided London’s first railway escalator, also in 1906, at Earl’s Court, linking the Piccadilly platforms with those of the Metropolitan District, while those installed later at Leicester Square remain the longest on the London underground system. The GNPB became the London Electric Railway in 1910 on acquiring both the Bakerloo and Hampstead tube railways.
The other cross-London route in the first stage of tube development was the Baker Street & Waterloo Railway. Incorporated in 1893, little happened until 1897 when Whitaker Wright’s London & Globe Finance Corporation took over the project. While work began in 1898 with a tunnel under the River Thames, the project stopped when LGFC collapsed in 1901, but the following year the American CT Yerkes Underground Electric Railways Group took over, and the line eventually opened in 1906, going beyond Waterloo to Elephant & Castle, over 3.6 route miles. Initially, there was a flat fare of just 2d. The Baker Street & Waterloo Railway was nicknamed the ‘Bakerloo’ by the journalist GHF Nichols because it linked the two, but there was some dismay when the title was adopted officially. The Railway Magazine sniffly declared that ‘…for a railway itself to adopt its gutter title is not what we expect from a railway company’.
In 1910, the company passed to the recently formed London Electric Railway, along with the Charing Cross Euston & Hampstead Railway, predecessor of the Northern Line. Steady extension then followed, with the line reaching Paddington in 1913, and in 1915 it reached Queen’s Park where it connected to the London & North Western Railway, and in 1917 used the LNWR tracks to reach Watford.
The final deep level tube line to be built until the Victoria Line opened in the 1960s was the Charing Cross Euston & Hampstead Railway, more usually known as the ‘Hampstead Line’ or the ‘Hampstead & Highgate’. This replaced an ambition once held by the South Eastern Railway and the London & North Western Railway to have a link between Charing Cross and Euston. It is highly unlikely that Parliament would have authorised the Charing Cross and Euston line as this would have called for considerable heavy engineering works at both termini and space was short at both, but especially at Charing Cross. While the CCEHR was seen as the answer, and engineering works were far less as the line was already deep underground, the lack of a second mainline link across the centre of London has been a weakness. The ability to run trains through from Kent, and even Sussex, to the Midlands and the North would have been one advantage, but it could also have enabled regional expresses to ease some of the pressure on the existing termini and on the underground system. That said, the approaches to Charing Cross and Euston are amongst the most congested today and substantial widening would have been required. The revitalised link, Thameslink, between Blackfriars and King’s Cross shows what could be done, but even this suffers under the strain of meeting demand.
The CCEHR was authorised in 1893, and after many variations opened in 1907 as part of the Underground Electric Railway tube lines. At the time, it was known as ‘The Last Link’. It was to run from Charing Cross to Hampstead via Euston, with a branch to the Midland Railway’s suburban station at Kentish Town but before opening it was extended to Golders Green, then nothing more than a muddy country cross roads, and Highgate. In 1914, it was extended southwards to the Metropolitan Railway’s Charing Cross station, on the bank of the Thames, to provide a loop that avoided the need to reverse trains.
Legislation in 1912 and 1913 permitted further extensions, and between 1923 and 1924, it was extended from Golders Green to Edgware, including a London County Council housing estate being built at Burnt Oak, and after this through trains were operated over the City & South London Railway south of Camden Town. To the south, the line was extended to Kennington to connect with the southern extension of the CSLR to Morden in 1926. The southward extension meant another tube link for Waterloo, with passengers for the West End having a choice of two lines, with the Northern Line, as it became, running to Tottenham Court Road at the eastern end of Oxford Street, and the Bakerloo to Oxford Circus, in the middle of Oxford Street. Both lines linked Waterloo with Charing Cross, but Waterloo also had a link along the Northern Line with Euston and, with just one change, King’s Cross and St Pancras, and along the Bakerloo with Paddington. The latter was less important for, although the Great Western served the Midlands and South Wales, the London & South Western competed with the GWR on services to Exeter and Plymouth, while one could also travel from Waterloo to Reading, albeit somewhat more slowly than on the GWR.
The platforms at Hampstead remain the deepest on the London tube network at 192 ft below ground level, while the tunnel between East Finchley and Morden via the CLSR line at 17¼ miles was for many years the longest railway tunnel in the world.
Going overhead
By the outbreak of the First World War, London had the densest railway service in the world, both on the ground and under it. With the exception of the Metropolitan, the underground railways all provided single-class accommodation, but the ‘Met’ provided first-class and even had two Pullman carriages, until these were withdrawn during the Second World War, while first-class was also abolished on inner suburban and underground lines, never to return.
Despite many of the lines from the south approaching London on viaducts, there were no overhead railways as such. Liverpool had a railway that ran along the dock front, overhead so that it did not obstruct the dock entrances. There was nothing like this in London, but one reason for this was probably the fact that the London Docks were carved out of the land, while those in Liverpool were built out into the River Mersey, so that their landward end was straighter and more consistent than that of London, where there were docks on both sides of the river.
But, earlier, there had been two plans for central overhead lines.
One of the ideas put to the House of Commons Parliamentary Select Committee on Metropolitan Communications in 1855 was one from Joseph Paxton, the genius behind the Crystal Palace, and which reflected the by now unbounded confidence of the Victorians. Paxton’s Crystal Palace had by this time been moved from Kensington to Sydenham, generating considerable volumes of off-peak suburban traffic for the London Brighton & South Coast Railway. For his next great achievement, Paxton favoured an inner circle railway, the Great Victorian Way, incorporating a shopping arcade no less than 72ft-wide, stretching all the way from Regent Street to the City, all of it under glass. Within this arcade, communication would be enhanced by a railway running 24ft above the pavement. The press did not like it, as the Daily Telegraph epigram at the beginning of this chapter shows. The newspaper went on to propose that instead of putting shopping arcades under railways, the railways themselves should be put underground. This was the same conclusion that the members of the Select Committee reached, also proposing that the main London termini should be connected with each other, with the River Thames, which still carried passengers at the time, with the docks and with the Post Office, at the time taken to mean the main establishment at St Martins-Le-Grand.
Later, in 1882, and then again in 1891, plans were laid to build an extension from Waterloo into the City, and which was dropped on grounds of cost and likely objections from the City and even the Port of London Authority. The route such a line might have taken could also have caused problems. It would have had to go under or over the line from London Bridge to Charing Cross, and then there were the bridges for Blackfriars and Cannon Street to overcome. The extension of the London and South Western from Nine Elms to Waterloo had already caused problems, as at one stage a bridge over a road had to be built on the skew with the then unprecedented length for the time of 90 feet.
TRAIN’S TRAMS:
George Francis Train, 1829-1904
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1829, Train was orphaned when just four years old when yellow fever killed his family after they had moved to New Orleans. He returned to Boston to be raised by his strict Methodist grandparents, who hoped he would become a minister, but instead he went into business as a merchant, first in Boston and then in Australia.
Eventually, he arrived in England 1860, where he formed a horse tramway company in Birkenhead before moving to London where he soon met opposition. His trams were popular with passengers, but the rails stood above the road surface and were an obstacle to other traffic. Indeed, the following year he was arrested and tried for ‘breaking and injuring’ a London street. He left London for the United States, where he was involved in the formation of the Union Pacific Railroad, before returning to England in 1864.
He is sometimes considered as the inspiration for Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, although Train managed to go round the world in just sixty-seven days in 1870, and followed this with two further trips. He called himself ‘Citizen Train’, and became a shipping magnate, a prolific writer, an unsuccessful presidential candidate, and associated with French and Australian revolutionaries, with the latter offering him the presidency of a proposed Australian republic, which he wisely declined. Indeed, he also associated with European royalty.
He seems to have learnt from the mistakes of his original tramway systems as he later promoted and built new tramways in Britain, overcoming opposition by offering to run the rails level with the street. Back in the USA, he became an eccentric, to the extent that in 1873 he was arrested and threatened with being sent to an asylum for the insane.
In 1903, he became ill with smallpox and died in New York, early in 1904.
Another objection to an overhead railway was the infamous London fog, or even smog, which could be so thick that engine drivers on the lines between Charing Cross, Cannon Street and London Bridge had such difficulty in seeing signals that the service fell apart on such occasions. There was nothing romantic about ‘a foggy day in London town’. Street urchins with flares used to guide carriage and omnibus drivers, but this was impractical for the railways as it was the need to see signals that was so important.
Nevertheless, by this time London’s growth had meant that the way the city was run had to change. As early as 1855, the Metropolitan Board of Works took control of and standardised many public services across London, which now meant not just the City or even the City and Westminster, but many other boroughs as well. In 1889, the London County Council was formed, replacing the MBW and with its members being directly elected rather than appointed. Although it initially used the MBW premises, it was not long before the LCC had built its own County Hall, and it was not in ‘old’ London but across the Thames in Lambeth, by this time part of London. The offices were almost equidistant from the Houses of Parliament and Waterloo. The LCC started to acquire the tramways that operated in its area, creating the LCC Tramways that, by 1933, was to be the largest in the country with 167 route miles (269 route kilometres) and 1,700 tramcars. The railways had taken a hand in creating the conditions for the new political entity, having created the inner suburbs and then pulled them together.
Yet, even at the zenith of Victorian railway achievement, with ever faster, longer and heavier trains on the main lines, on suburban routes, the railways were facing a threat to their very existence. Nowhere was this problem more serious than in London. As the century drew to a close, the railway suburban services were suffering from growing competition from the electric street tramways that had grown up out of the original horse-drawn tramways that had posed little threat to the railways.