The Subterranean Railway Read online

  From an engineering point of view, the new railway involved a myriad of technical problems that had not been previously encountered. Shallow tunnels had never been built under city streets that contained all kinds of sewers, drains and pipes, many of which had to be diverted. Little was known about how the particular stresses and strains of an ‘under the streets’ railway would affect the brick arches used for the tunnels. And how to avoid undermining the foundations of nearby buildings was another novel challenge. Carving a railway line under a city was such a pioneering concept that it is impossible to exaggerate the courage of all concerned in pushing through and building the Underground.

  Of course, the thousands of ‘navvies’ who supplied the brawn took the most risk, as construction methods were primitive. With labour incredibly cheap and a seemingly endless pool of men who had left agriculture to try their luck in the cities, there was little problem in finding workers to build railways such as the Metropolitan. The term ‘navvy’ derived from the word navigator, first used to describe the workers who built the navigation canals in the eighteenth century, and the nickname stuck when they went on to build docks and the railways. They had a fiercesome reputation for drinking and brawling and while they were not quite the wild men so often portrayed, their lives were tough and frequently cut short by accident or disease. Usually most of the navvies came from local agricultural areas through which the railway lines were being laid but, obviously, the Metropolitan was forced to look for labour further afield and men were drawn from across the nation, including Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland.

  There were two shifts of navvies on the building of the Metropolitan and men worked through the night by the light of blazing flares. Despite this, the schedule of two years proved optimistic and construction dragged into a third year, much to the consternation of the residents and the traders who were affected by the building work. The building created an awful mess of mud and muck in the streets along the route and this affected tradesmen, who called meetings to fight against the threat to their livelihood. One group even formed the Euston Road Trade Protection Association to try to obtain reparations for the damage caused by the diggings and, as ever, the lawyers did well. The Metropolitan made some efforts to limit the damage it caused, particularly in wealthy areas. The best example occurred when, a little later, the railway expanded westwards: the Metropolitan built a fake façade in Leinster Gardens, near Bayswater, complete with windows and doors to cover the fact that this elegant terrace now had a big gap where numbers 23–24 had once stood. The mock houses, which remain a tourist curiosity today, were, reportedly, frequently used to play practical jokes on rookie messengers and post office boys.

  Despite these efforts at mitigation, the disruption created by the building of the line must have been unbearable, as little consideration seems to have been paid to the needs of the local residents and businesses affected by the construction. A Victorian observer was rather understated in his perception:

  The work of constructing this remarkable railway eventually became … somewhat wearisome to the inhabitants of the New Road [now Euston Road]. A few wooden houses on wheels first made their appearance, and planted themselves by the gutter; then came some wagons loaded with timber, and accompanied by sundry gravel-coloured men with picks and shovels. A day or two afterwards, a few hundred yards of roadway were enclosed, the ordinary traffic being, of course, driven into the side streets; then followed troops of navvies, horses and engines arrived, who soon disappeared within the enclosure and down the shafts. The exact operations could be but dimly seen or heard from the street … but paterfamilias, from his house hard by, could look down on an infinite chaos of timber, shaft holes, ascending and descending chains and iron buckets which brought rubbish from below to be carted away; or perhaps one morning he found workmen had been kindly shoring up his family abode with huge timbers to make it safer. A wet week comes, and the gravel in his front garden turns to clay; the tradespeople tread it backwards and forwards to and from the street door; he can hardly get out to business or home to supper without slipping, and he strongly objects to a temporary way of wet planks, erected for his use and the use of the passers-by, over a yawning cavern underneath the pavement.9

  Although – through both legitimate and illegitimate means – the Metropolitan did not have to pay much in compensation to landowners whose property was affected by its construction, the railway company faced all kinds of other legal claims for loss of business or disruption. There is no doubt that there was considerable hardship caused to businesses along the New Road when the railway works made the street impassable, and many went broke. One unlikely set of claimants given the hard-drinking habits of the navvies were local publicans who argued that their buildings, and trade, were affected. The first to try his luck was a man called Hart, publican of 1 Chapel Street just off the Marylebone Road, who complained that railway workmen had torn down part of an outer wall and nearly caused the house to collapse, forcing his lodgers out. He was given £120. The owner of another pub, the Pickled Egg in Clerkenwell, was granted £100 because the railway had put up a hoarding outside the house which had apparently shaken the foundations of the hostelry. The courts, though, tended to view claims, particularly large ones, with suspicion. The landlord of the Rising Sun in the New Road claimed £1,100, arguing that cracks had appeared in his wall, but the jury only awarded him £20. Others got nothing for their pains. Numerous households obtained small sums while Clerkenwell Vestry sought unsuccessfully to stop the company making excavations, arguing that they would endanger its workhouse.

  The work was speeded up by a remarkable wooden contraption, some forty feet high, an early version of a conveyor belt, which hoisted excavated earth from the vast holes being dug by the teams of navigators. The spoil went to a site off the Fulham Road in West London called Stamford Bridge, which forty years later became home to Chelsea football club, whose fans unknowingly stood on embankments carved out of the extra soil dumped there by the Metropolitan. Not surprisingly, given the novel nature of the undertaking, there were several mishaps during construction which contributed to the delay in completion beyond the very ambitious target of mid 1862.

  The first occurred quite soon after the start of work, in May 1860, when an excursion train on the main line with a guard who was too drunk to apply the brake overshot the platform at King’s Cross and ended up in the Metropolitan workings. There was much damage but remarkably no one was killed. A few months later, the boiler of an engine pulling wagons exploded, a regular hazard of the primitive steam locomotives of the time, killing the driver and his lineman. Most seriously, in May 1861 there was a collapse of the earthworks in the Euston Road which destroyed the pavement, gardens, telegraph wires and gas and water mains. Fortunately, creaking in the wood supports had alerted the workers, who fled, and no one was injured; but the damage to the frontages of the houses gave further succour to the compensation-hungry lawyers.

  The worst accident during construction was the bursting, following a torrential storm, of the Fleet sewer, which crossed the line between King’s Cross and Farringdon three times. The foul ‘black river’ of London was largely enclosed in a brick sewer the top of which, in June 1862, had been weakened by construction of the railway and eventually broke. After an unsuccessful two-day battle to prevent flooding, water poured out, breaking up the network of scaffolding and beams which was being used to build the tunnel walls, and flooded the works to a depth of ten feet. Amazingly, the railway, together with the Metropolitan Board of Works,10 managed to set up a diversion for the water into the Thames and the old sewer was quickly rebuilt, causing a delay of only a few months to the scheme. Inevitably, the difficulties encountered by the builders meant that costs overran, as ever with large projects, and a further £300,000 had to be raised through the offer of shares, this time with a guaranteed 5 per cent dividend to ensure that the subscription was taken up.

  But within a couple of months of this disaster, which fortunately cl
aimed no lives, the railway’s directors ran a special train for shareholders and other grandees. The Metropolitan, ever conscious that it had to overcome basic fears of going underground in order to attract sufficient custom to make a profit, was very adept at public relations. It had first run trial trips in November 1861 when it still expected the line to be open on time the following year. The inaugural trial over the whole line, with a distinguished group of guests including William Gladstone, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was made in May 1862. This was part of the company’s policy of regularly inviting journalists and illustrators onto the worksites in order to help allay fears about travelling on the railway. Its efforts were well rewarded with favourable coverage like this report from an optimistic and presumably well-lunched scribe on the Illustrated London News:

  Although this curious and unique Metropolitan Railway has been termed underground, or subterranean, for nearly half its length it is open to the light and air of heaven, and where it does pass for various lengths beneath the surface, it is so well lighted and ventilated that the tunnels, instead of being close, dark, damp and offensive, are wide, spacious, clean and luminous, and more like a well-kept street at night, than a subterranean passage through the very heart of the metropolis.11

  This would not be the experience of many travellers when the line opened a year later.

  Another VIPs’ ride was organized for August 1862 after the repairs had been completed following the Fleet sewer collapse. These trials are immortalized in a series of well-known engravings of men travelling in top hats in open wagons, which are often wrongly taken to show the service on the day of the opening of the line. In fact, such open freight wagons were never used in service and the well-dressed guests were generally only taken for a short run along an outdoor section of track. Another well-used image, of Baker Street station looking extremely spacious and wide, with a few relaxed and well-dressed passengers, is also inaccurate in that the perspective taken by the artist is illusory, suggesting far more room than there is in reality – as visitors to the station today can testify. These examples of the Victorians’ tendency to present their world in the best possible light demonstrate the difficulty of trying to convey what it was really like on the Underground for these early pioneers. While it is hard to imagine the smoky and damp atmosphere caused by the steam engines, there are some contemporary descriptions, more of which later, to help us. Certainly the experience of those who went on these carefully stage-managed trips was atypical, not least because they were hauled by ‘smokeless’ engines that were eventually found to be too unreliable and consequently were never used in service.

  While the technical problems of tunnelling in towns seemed like a sufficient obstacle to progress, probably the most intractable problem in those pre-electricity days was for the Underground’s engineers to devise a way of operating trains that did not choke their passengers. As one account puts it, ‘Pearson’s main problem was finding an engine suitable for use underground. The users’ problem was managing to breathe’.12 In fact it was more Fowler’s problem than Pearson’s and, canny engineer though he was, not all his ideas were sensible. He had originally envisaged that trains should be blown through an airtight container using giant compressors at each terminal but, as we saw in Chapter 1, the problem with such ‘atmospheric railways’ was the difficulty of keeping a tight seal.13

  The search for alternatives to conventional steam engines was prompted by the pollution caused by their smoke and, to a lesser extent, steam emissions. An engine developed by Robert Stephenson at Fowler’s behest – known as Fowler’s Ghost – which used bricks as heat storage when in tunnels and operated normally outside, proved to be too unreliable, and was rejected after trials.14 Instead, the Great Western’s engineer, Daniel Gooch, was asked to design a conventional engine which prevented steam escaping by diverting it into a cold water tank and used coke rather than coal. However, while coke emitted less smoke than coal, it was even more toxic and the Metropolitan later reverted to coal.

  Despite the flood, the problems with locomotives and smoke, and the innovatory engineering techniques used to build the line, the railway was ready for testing by the end of 1862 – late, of course, as the Metropolitan’s directors had hoped it would be open in time for the International Exhibition of that year, but in hindsight commendably fast for such a groundbreaking project. The commissioning of the railway was achieved with impressive speed by today’s standards. After the test runs of August, there was an official Board of Trade inspection on 22 December, which found that some modifications needed to be made to the signalling. These glitches were resolved remarkably quickly and, following official inspections on 30 December 1862 and 3 January 1863, there were further trials for just five days until the official opening ceremony on 9 January.

  In keeping with the Metropolitan’s sophisticated campaign to win over the public to its novel railway, it was a grand occasion attended by around 600 shareholders and VIPs. The timing was a bit odd, though, as the directors and the guests set off at 1 p.m. to travel down the line from Bishop’s Road, Paddington, the initial terminus, to Farringdon Street, taking time off to view the intermediate stations which, while pleasant, were not, with the possible exception of the one at King’s Cross, of great architectural merit. By the time they reached a specially created temporary hall at the other end of the line, well after 3 p.m., they must have been ravenous and it is to be hoped that they did not have to suffer the interminable speeches until after the food was served.

  There were two absentees. Lord Palmerston, the prime minister, then seventy-nine, had excused himself, stating that at his age he wanted to remain above ground for as long as possible; in fact he died two years later. More importantly, poor old Charles Pearson, to whom a toast was drunk at the banquet, had died in September 1862: late enough, at least, to know that the line would become a reality. Dominated by his sense of duty to the end, when Pearson was offered a reward by the Metropolitan he refused it, saying: ‘I am the servant of the Corporation; they are my masters and are entitled to all my time and service. If you have any return to make, you must make it to them.’15

  But thanks to Pearson and his fellow pioneers, London had the world’s first underground railway and gave English, and many other languages, a new word: the metro.

  THREE

  LONDON GOES

  UNDERGROUND

  London had its new railway, but would anyone use it? The Times had been certain that Londoners would take the same view as Lord Palmerston and seek to stay on the surface. A year before the opening, the paper had concluded that the railway would never pay because of people’s reluctance to venture underground:

  A subterranean railway under London was awfully suggestive of dark, noisome tunnels, buried many fathoms deep beyond the reach of light or life; passages inhabited by rats, soaked with sewer drippings, and poisoned by the escape of gas mains. It seemed an insult to common sense to suppose that people who could travel as cheaply to the city on the outside of a Paddington ’bus would ever prefer, as a merely quicker medium, to be driven amid palpable darkness through the foul subsoil of London …1

  But they did. Londoners had few concerns about trying out their new invention, the world’s first subterranean railway. Right from its opening, the Metropolitan was extremely popular. On the first day, Saturday 10 January 1863, 30,000 people journeyed on the line, many travelling out of sheer curiosity and clearly oblivious to the horrors of the London subsoil described in The Times. They travelled in three different classes, paying threepence, fourpence and sixpence for a single journey and fivepence, sixpence and ninepence return, bringing in impressive receipts of £850. The fares were high compared with those charged by subsequent lines – notably the Twopenny Tube, the Central Railway which, when it opened at the turn of the century, demanded just twopence for any journey on its five and three-quarter-mile length.

  The 120 trains in both directions that day suffered no serious breakdowns and the only major del
ays were caused by the crush of people trying to get on the trains, each of which only had four carriages in addition to the locomotives. The scheduled fifteen-minute interval service, therefore, proved wholly inadequate to meet the demand and, according to the Illustrated London News,2 the Great Western quickly had to lend some of its locomotives and carriages to cope with the numbers.3 The Daily Telegraph described how people at King’s Cross seeking to go east to Farringdon Street bought tickets to travel in the opposite direction towards Paddington so that they could pick up a train further down the track,4 a ploy with which many of today’s Londoners living on the busier lines will be familiar.

  It might not have been luxury, but the Daily Telegraph commented that of ‘the general comfort in travelling on the line, there can be no question, and the novel introduction of gas into the carriages is calculated to dispel any unpleasant feeling which passengers, especially ladies, might entertain against riding for so long a distance through a tunnel.’ The paper was particularly enthusiastic about the gas lighting, a radical innovation: ‘On Saturday, throughout every journey the gas burnt brightly and in some instances was turned on so strong in the first class carriages, in each of which there are two burners, that newspapers might be read with ease. The second class carriages are nicely fitted with leathered seats, and are very commodious, and the compartments and arms in the first class render overcrowding impossible.’ The mode of lighting was, indeed, innovative and was an essential part of winning over the public to this new form of transport by making them feel safe when they ventured into the cellarlike tunnels. The gas was carried in long India rubber bags within wooden boxes on top of the carriages and was piped through to the lights. There were gauges on each carriage to ensure that the gas was replenished as soon as the reservoir was low. ‘Gas will supply the place of the sun’ was the proud boast of the company.