The Little Book of the London Underground (eBook)

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TRAINS IN DRAINS:DEAD ENDS & DAFT IDEAS

With nearly 2.4 million people calling London home, some 250,000 horses – with billions of flies feasting on the one million tons of dung they produce annually – and tens of thousands of barely regulated carts, cabs and carriages crowding onto the narrow streets of the mid-Victorian city, by the second half of the nineteenth century the heart of the world’s most powerful Empire was literally grinding to a halt.

In 1855 Sir Joseph Paxton summed up the problem perfectly when he told a group of MPs that for the average traveller it actually took longer ‘to go from the London & Brighton station at London Bridge to the Great Western station at Paddington than from London Bridge to Brighton.’ Clearly something had to be done – and to the technologically obsessed Victorians, trains of some sort seemed to suggest the best answer – but as the following list of complete or semi- non-starters shows, it was to take literally decades to determine precisely what was most likely to succeed.

1836: HIGH ABOVE THE THRONG

Choosing to rise above the traffic rather than tunnel beneath it, London’s first ever railway, the London & Greenwich, ran almost its entire length along an elevated, Roman-style viaduct with a southern terminus modelled on a monument of the Acropolis. This enabled the trains to avoid the usual congestion down at ground level, and must have improved the view out for passengers. Doing it this way was extremely costly, however – the expensive and time-consuming construction of no fewer than 878 separate brick arches making it the world’s longest viaduct.

Besides the cost there were other considerations too, and not long after the railway’s grand royal opening, letters started to appear in the press complaining about the infernal noise of ‘these thundering steam engines and omnibusters’.

Others objected on the grounds that it was a sin to travel on the Sabbath; nor did they enjoy the prospect of ladies of loose morals plying for trade beneath the arches. Men of science similarly lobbied the authorities to stop it, the Astronomer Royal eventually being given permission to stop the trains each evening in order that he could read his instruments at the Greenwich Observatory. Little wonder that plans to extend the line all the way to Gravesend were soon abandoned….

1839: RUNNING OUT OF PUFF

Samuel Clegg and marine engineers Jack and Joseph d’Aguilar Samuda obtained a patent for a so-called atmospheric railway. First tested in June 1840 at Wormwood Scrubs, this used air pressure in a pneumatic tube laid between conventional rails together with a piston suspended from the train and connected through a sealable slot in the top of the tube.

Using stationary pumping engines along the route, air was expelled from the tube leaving a vacuum ahead of the piston so that (with air admitted to the tube immediately behind it) mere atmospheric pressure would be sufficient to propel it forward together with the attached train. The theory was elegant to say the least, and explained in Joseph Samuda’s A Treatise on the Adaptation of Atmospheric Pressure to the Purposes of Locomotion on Railways – but unfortunately putting it into practice proved far from straightforward.

The first to have a go in the capital was the London & Croydon Railway which went into regular service in January 1846 only to close under 16 months later when the brothers were unable to fix several problems with the pumping equipment and leaking seals in the delivery pipes. Undeterred, the great Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a self-confessed workaholic who acknowledged that he had been bitten by the bug, tried a similar system on the South Devon Railway – only to have the local rats eat through the leather seals designed to keep the pipes airtight.

Eventually the Samuda brothers gave up too and went back to shipbuilding on the Isle of Dogs. After constructing a number of ships for the Royal Navy and the Prussian, Japanese, Egyptian, Argentine and Brazilian navies, they are today commemorated in the name of the Samuda housing estate at Cubitt Town.

1840: LONDON’S OWN PUSHMI-PULLYU

The Commercial Railway, later renamed the London and Blackwall, was conceived by Sir John Rennie – the knighthood was granted in recognition of his work on a new London Bridge – but the project itself was handed on to Robert Stephenson.

Keen to try a new means of propulsion, and drawing on his own experience with the Camden Incline on the London and Birmingham Railway, he decided upon cable-haulage system powered by powerful stationary steam engines mounted at either end of the 3.5-mile line.

With two tracks operating independently of each other, and running from Blackwall to the Minories and Fenchurch Street, the system required some 14 miles of hemp rope. As one engine wound this in from one end, an equivalent length would be paid out at the other with metal swivels inserted at intervals in order to resist entanglements. Individual carriages were despatched in groups of two, three or four, with an electric telegraph system linking the stations and the power supplied from eight marine steam engines manufactured by Maudslay, Sons and Field.

With four steam engines in use at any one time (and four more undergoing repairs or routine maintenance) the available power varied from 75hp to 110hp with the more powerful units being needed at the City end in order to pull the carriages up a slight incline from the east. Unsurprisingly rope wear was considerable and when replacement hawsers of steel proved too prone to kink, the experiment was halted. In 1848 the line was converted to conventional steam locomotives, and today (with admirable economy) the DLR still runs over part of the same route.

1861: FOWLER’S GHOST

By the 1860s, with plans well underway for parts of the railway in London to dive underground, a need existed to find an alternative to conventional steam engines. Clearly Stephenson’s cables and stationary engines were not the answer but ‘Fowler’s Ghost’ – the nickname given to a prototype designed by London railway engineer Sir John Fowler Bt. – was soon being heralded as one possible solution to the pressing problem of smoke in the tunnels.

As the world’s first experimental fireless locomotive, the Ghost was designed to store energy using heated bricks in a manner not dissimilar to that later employed by domestic night-storage heaters. The locomotive itself looked pretty conventional, a broad gauge 2–4–0 tender with a normal firebox connected to a large combustion chamber containing the aforementioned bricks. It was designed to operate as an ordinary coal-fired engine on open stretches of track before switching to stored heat from the firebricks as it approached a tunnel. It was put to the test only once, however, but straight away deemed a failure and after two years in mothballs it was broken up and sold.

1863: SMOKING ROOM ONLY

With the Metropolitan Railway’s new underground section up and running by 1863, and Fowler’s Ghost now firmly exorcised, the directors still needed to find a practical means of propelling the trains. Ejecting the smoke from conventional steam engines into these early, much shallower cut-and-cover tunnels simply wasn’t an option if they wished to avoid suffocating the crew and their passengers with a toxic mixture of steam and sulphurous smoke. Instead it was decided to commission special ‘condensing engines’ which emitted less steam and smoke than conventional locomotives. This could then be routed into large tanks fitted behind each locomotive, tanks which could then be discharged or vented off each time one of the new underground steam trains broke cover.

As a solution it was far from ideal, but as a temporary solution it seemed to work well enough and a century and a half later visitors to West London can still see evidence of it in Leinster Gardens, W2. At first glance Nos 23 and 24 look like real houses, and indeed in the 1930s a successful hoax scammed hundreds of guests out of 10 guineas a head for a ticket to a charity ball advertised at this address.

The reality, however, was that in 1867, when the line was being extended to Paddington, both houses had been dismantled leaving just their 5ft-deep façades. The space behind was left vacant, somewhere for the trains to empty their smoke boxes before disappearing into the next tunnel, and today District Line trains can still be seen rattling along directly beneath the houses before re-entering the tunnel.

The aforementioned condensing engine which made this possible was designed and built by one Daniel Gooch who had sprung from a family of notable railway engineers and trained under both Stephenson and Brunel. His early triumphs had included driving Queen Victoria at a heady 44mph in his locomotive Phlegothon, although he was subsequently ticked off by Prince Albert and informed that the experience had badly frightened Her Majesty who did not wish to travel at such a pace again (nor did she ever.)

Things didn’t always go his way, however. After rescuing the Great Western Railway from bankruptcy in 1865, his attention turned to international telegraphy and, after buying Brunel’s old ship Great Eastern, he attempted to lay the world’s first submarine cable across the Atlantic. On board to observe the proceedings he suffered the agonising experience of seeing the cable break and sink without a trace after more than 1,200...