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How the world's first metro system was built - Ted.Ed

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How the world's first metro system was built - Ted.Ed

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The building of subway systems, often known as metros, should be viewed in the wider context of the development of railroads across the world. The first lines, including the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in the UK and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in the United States, were developed in 1830. Within a few years, many other nations followed suit.

Until then, no one had traveled faster than a galloping horse. Now, whole states-and nations-could be crossed in less than a day. The changes this brought about affected every aspect of life in the second half of the 19 th century. On an economic level, industries grew into much larger enterprises. On a social and cultural level, people were now able to travel long distances for vacation. The railways ruled the world for about a century until they were displaced by the motor car and, later, the airplane. But they still play a vital role in the 21 st century, such as carrying a large proportion of America's freight, which continues to help cities function efficiently.

To learn more about the London Underground, check out the Subterranean Railway, written by the educator. Other publications about the evolution of transportations systems include Blood, Iron, and Gold and The Great Railroad Revolution.

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How the world's first metro system was built - Christian Wolmar

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It was the dawn of 1863, and London's not-yet-opened subway system - the first of its kind in the world - had the city in an uproar. Most people thought the project, which cost more than 100 million dollars in today's money, would never work. So how did they do it?

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Video by the Institution of civil Engineers

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Hywel Williams

[13th October 2019] London Transport Museum have just launched an Exhibition entitled Hidden London: The Exhibition. I went there to see it this weekend and I was most impressed! This is my My first review of someone else's work on a similar interest of my own.

When I moved to live near London a few years ago, one of my interests became the London Underground, the oldest and one of the busiest underground railway networks in the world. I'm not a train spotter by any means, but I find the history and background of London's subterranean railway fascinating.

One of the things I find most interesting is the changing history of the railway, of which there is still much hidden evidence. For example, look through the window as you travel between Tottenham Court Road and Holborn on the Central Line and you'll see a station - where no passengers have alighted since 1932. This used to be British Museum station. Or perhaps you may notice the tunnel wall change from cast iron tubing to bricks as you travel on the Piccadilly Line between Green Park and Hyde Park Corner. This also used to be a station. Down Street, closed in the same year as British Museum. These stations are often referred to as ghost stations.

There are about 40 abandoned or relocated stations on the Underground network along its entire 249 miles (402Km) of trackway - some subsurface and some above ground. Some have vanished without trace whereas others are almost intact, grimey time capsules of the era when they were closed.

There are 1 visitors reading these pages at the moment including yourself.

One point to note is that in these pages, all lines are referred by their contemporary names. Many if not all of the lines have however had different names during their existence.

Site Navigation

You can navigate this site in a number of ways. You can get to key pages by clicking on the menu bar at the top left of the page. Alternatively, at the bottom of most pages you'll also find a series of links to the main pages in text form.

You may also decide to navigate the site by following the links within the nariative - indeed, many pages have been broken down into a series of smaller pages so that each individual page isn't too large for people browsing with a modem connection.

The site has been designed with a resolution of 1024x768 or more in mind. It has however been designed to also work well in 800x600.

In order to better understand the location of these stations on today's network, you may wish to download a copy of the world famous underground map (well, technically it's a diagram not a map), originally designed by Harry Beck in 1931 and first seen by the public in January 1933. This can be found in several formats on the Transport for London web site.

Click here to visit their page.

Some people have asked me why I don't have a copy of the Underground map here, or more to the point, why I don't have a version of the map that shows the closed stations. I've explained this in more detail here.

1929 Map of the London Underground

Since the majority of the stations that closed in central London were abandoned after 1930, a map of the railways as they existed in 1929, that's been annotated to show which Underground stations have closed or changed their name since that time is available. This page also includes some advertisements from the publication from where the map came from, showing how advertising style and standards have changed.

Your Monitor Settings

Some people have had difficulty reading or seeing images on these pages. Admittedly some of the images are dark but all look presentable if the monitor is correctly set up. Here, you can find some test patterns I've generated to help you see these pages as I see them on my monitor!

Fun

Several of the images found on these pages can also be found as interactive jigsaws! Click on the jigsaw pieces to have a try.

Two major types of tunnels can be found on the London Underground.

In the 19th century, digging deep level tunnels, especially under water was a dangerous and tricky business. Several attempts to cross the Thames had ended in failure, even with lives being lost. Brunell's Thames Tunnel (used today by the East London Line) was the first successful tunnel under the Thames but its construction was costly and very difficult. When it was discovered that steam traction could be replaced with electricity, tunnels could be dug that were much deeper. James Henry Greathead had devised a new method of tunnelling which employed compressed air to prevent leaking in conjunction with a circular drilling shield to bore circular tunnels (about 3 metres in diameter) much deeper into the ground, which were then lined with cast iron rings. When mining the soft north London clay however, the air pressure was hardly ever needed, as the clay is waterproof.

Due to the speed at which these tunnels could be mined, many stations were envisaged on each of the lines that were created and most of these stations are still in use today. A small number however have fallen into disuse over the years.

Take Aldwych for example, at the end of a disused railway siding right in the heart of London. Or Down Street, where the Railways Executive Committee were based and on rare occasions some of Winston Churchill's World War Two cabinet meetings were held when the Cabinet War Rooms were unavailable... or Brompton Road, used as a World War 2 anti aircraft Ack Ack command centre, with maps from this era still on the walls today! Evidence of these stations remains both on the surface and also beneath the ground if you know where to look.

Before the Greathead Shield was invented, most subterranean railways in London were built using the Cut and Cover technique. In many cases, this involved digging a deep cutting along the path of a road. The railway was laid in the trench and was then covered up with the road being re-laid above. These underground railways started out as extensions of some of the existing outlying railways and were initially served by steam locomotives and so many places were required where steam could be safely vented.

Over the years, the need and use for some of these stations have changed with the result that some were closed. A careful observer can still see some today whereas others have completely vanished without trace.

There are other parts of the Underground network that are in use today, but also contain abandoned tunnels and shafts. Click Here to find out what some of those disused passageways you see at some main stations are about.

This final section deals with some other interesting disused underground tunnels and stations which though never having formed part of London's underground system, nevertheless have had an important role to play in the city's transport infrastructure in the past...

Although not strictly part of the Underground System, the Tower Subway was the world's first underground tube railway. Constructed using the revolutionary Greathead Shield invented by James Henry Greathead (used subsequently for many of the other tubes), the train (actually a single carriage) was cable operated and was effectively used as a shuttle service between the two banks of the Thames. The railway unfortunately was only open from August 2nd 1870 until November the same year due to very poor patronage.

The tunnels were resurrected as foot tunnels but even this was short lived as they were again made redundant by the building of the nearby Tower Bridge in 1894 and were permanently closed to the public and the tunnels were equipped with pipes to provide hydraulic power. Today the tunnels are used as a conduit for water mains pipes and also for the transmission of fibre optic cables for computer networks across the Thames.

The photograph above shows the small structure built over the northern shaft next to the Tower of London. Written around it are the words "A.D. 1868 LONDON HYDRAULIC POWER COMPANY", though this was not the original structure - the building seen today was built in 1926. You can click on the picture to see a bigger version.

Approximate subterranean route of Tower Subway

The aerial photograph shows the approximate location of Tower Subway's crossing of the Thames. The close proximity of Tower Bridge, the source of its eventual demise can clearly be seen. The south entrance to the Subway (to the left of the photograph) is now surrounded by a large building development but access to the subway is maintained so that engineers can service the pipes and communication cables. This picture was taken in 1999, just before construction work started on the City Hall building to the left of the picture.

Kingsway Tram Underpass

Not all of the rail tunnels under London were used by trains! The Kingsway Underpass was a cut and cover tunnel that ran the length of Kingsway starting just north of Holborn through Aldwych and ending under Waterloo Bridge and was expressly designed for the blossoming tram network in the early 20th century London. Find out more here!

Well, not really a disused station at all of course, but Walford East is very familiar to viewers of a particular British television programme... Click here to find out more!

As some people have already mentioned by email, the stations covered on this site aren't the complete list of disused stations on the Underground network. My original aim was to cover all the subterranian Underground stations on the network, which I believe I now have (though some will no doubt be updated and added to in future). Stations that remain include:

Bakerloo Line

The Bakerloo line used to run beyond Harrow & Wealdstone until quite recently (date to follow!). Maps exist today on the network that still show the line serving Headstone Lane, Hatch End, Carpender's Park, Bushey & Oxhey, Watford (High Street) and Watford. They're not abandoned though - the mainline service that follows the Bakerloo Line along its northern stretch has now taken over the operation of these stations.

Metropolitan Line

The section of the Metropolitan Line beyond Amersham has now been covered on the Cut & Cover pages.

In the Scrap Book, I've included some of the photographs I took while researching the material found on these pages, but for one reason or another haven't found their way onto the final publication.

... Well, not quite. In What Can I See?, I've outlined how you can easily get to see some of the stations mentioned in these pages from the publicly accessible parts of the Underground. If you intend to try to see some of these places, this printer friendly page should prove useful.

Aldwych Station: Some facts about Aldwych.
Aldwych Tour: A description of a guided tour of Aldwych station.
Hidden Holborn: A first hand behind-the-scenes look at some of the disused platforms at Holborn station.
Down Street: Information about Down Street, used during World War 2 as a secret base.
Down Street Tour: A description of a guided tour around Down Street station.
Brompton Road: Brompton Road station - both a description of the station and of a visit.
Wood Lane: Wood Lane Station.
Bull & Bush: Bull & Bush station.
Northern Heights Photo Gallery: includes HIghgate High Level platforms.

Also, there are a couple of other minor pages about Deep Level locations:

Vauxhall Cross - the fictitious station in the James Bond film Die Another Day.
Broadcasting House - a discussion about the rumour of a platform on the Bakerloo Line for the BBC.

and also...

Kingsway Underpass: A tunnel designed for trams.
More Hidden Bits: Some information about some of the disused passages which can be observed in still active stations.
Scrap Book is where you can see some additional photographic material that didn't quite make it into the web pages.

Finally, if you're a regular visitor, you can see what's changed since you last visited by having a look at the Changes Page - or by clicking on the little blue icon at the top of this page.

Underground History is a living document that was started in March 2000. This means that over time more and more should be added to these pages. In other words, bear with me and visit now and again if you're interested in this subject matter, as more material will almost certainly be appearing over time!

Also - don't forget to have a go at one of the jigsaws of images found on this site!

Last Modified: December 17th 2009
Number of unique visits since March 27 2000:

Hywel's Home Page Note: My original email addresses (that were addressed to the starfury based accounts) have now been replaced by the contact page due to an increase in undesirable unsolicited and quite frankly offensive junk mail. If you send me a request or question, I will respond in due course via email if you provide a valid email address.
A brief explanation about the next three icons before I delete them shortly because they mean nothing at all these days... [13th October 2019]

... about 15 years ago, in the early 00's when this page was in its formation years, you could submit for (and were also given) awards for the web site! So noughties I know... but these were three I was awarded at the time and like the abandoned stations, they've lingered at the bottom of my front page like forgotten memories of the past!

Firstly - the Smokin' Award... this was by far the one I felt an achievement because the awarder would give you points for many different aspects of a rail based web site, from content to downloadability. He even invited you to re-submit after his cricisism to get a higher award. I got Bronze as you can see here and I only know one other rail site that got a Silver... I did mean to re-submit... but ... I don't know what happened but Smokin' disappeared off the scene really quickly along with the web site that hosted it, the kvrr.net, which was about a hairpin railway in the States.

Secondly, Demon Internet, who at the time were actually hosting this content allowing me a measly 20 Megabytes of homepage content... actually gave this award without even asking me. They featured the page in a 2 page spread in their magazine (given to Demon Internet ISP subsribers) and even gave me a video capture device as a prize (worth about £100)! Demon have subsequently been swallowed up into the big boy companies and even the original address of Underground History (starfury.demon.co.uk) would no longer be viable.

Thirdly... Yahoo... Who?! ;)

Disclaimer: Although dedicated to the history and background of the London Underground, these pages have no associations with London Underground, Transport for London or London Transport. I am not an employee of any of these companies and have no direct associations with them or any transport related company.

Tower Bridge aerial photograph © 1999 and is used with permission. The photograph was taken late 1999 just as building work was commencing on the south bank (left of the picture) of the Thames.

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London Underground History - Disused Stations on London's Underground

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Hywel Williams [13th October 2019] London Transport Museum have just launched an Exhibition entitled Hidden London: The Exhibition. I went there to see it this weekend and I was most impressed! This is my My first review of someone else's work on a similar interest of my own.

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The first day of the London tube

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Work on the world's first underground railway started in 1860 when the Metropolitan Railway began building a tunnel more than three miles long from Paddington to Farringdon Street. It was largely financed by the City of London, which was suffering badly from horse-drawn traffic congestion that was having a damaging effect on business. The idea of an underground system had originated with the City solicitor, Charles Pearson, who had pressed for it for years. It was he who persuaded the City Corporation to put up money and he was probably the most important single figure in the underground's creation. He died in 1862, only a few months before his brainchild came to life.

The first section linked the City with the railway stations at Paddington, Euston and King's Cross, which had been built in the previous 30 years. The chief engineer was John Fowler, the leading railway engineer of the day, who would go on to create the Forth Bridge in Scotland. He did not come cheap and his Metropolitan Railway salary of £137,700 would be worth about £10 million today.

A deep trench was excavated by the 'cut and cover' method along what are now the Marylebone Road and the Euston Road and turning south-east beside Farringdon Road. Brick walls were built along the sides, the railway tracks were laid at the bottom and then the trench was roofed over with brick arches and the roads were put back on top, though the last stretch to Farringdon was left in an open, brick-lined cutting. Stations lit by gas were created at Paddington, Edgware Road, Baker Street, Great Portland Street, Euston Road and King's Cross on the way to Farringdon, which was at ground level and was built, not entirely inappropriately as things turned out, on the former site of the City cattle market. W.E. Gladstone, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, and his wife Catherine were passengers on a trial trip in May 1862.

Built round the clock by shifts of navvies, the line had to avoid numerous water and gas pipes, drains and sewers. There was a problem when the noxious Fleet Ditch sewer flooded the works in Farringdon Road, but that was dealt with and on January 9th, 1863 the line's completion was celebrated at a gathering of railway executives, Members of Parliament and City grandees including the lord mayor. The prime minister, Lord Palmerston, had declined his invitation, saying that at 79 he wanted to stay above ground as long as he could. Starting from Paddington, some 600 guests were carried in two trains along the line to Farringdon Street station, where a banquet was held, speeches made and due tribute paid to the memory of Charles Pearson. Music was provided by the Metropolitan Police band.

The line was opened to the public on the following day, a Saturday, and people flocked to try it out. More than 30,000 passengers crowded the stations and pushed their way into packed trains. The underground had been mocked in the music halls and derisively nicknamed 'the Drain'. There were predictions that the tunnel's roof would give way and people would fall into it, while passengers would be asphyxiated by the fumes, and an evangelical minister had denounced the railway company for trying to break into Hell.

In fact the railway was a tremendous success and The Times hailed it as 'the great engineering triumph of the day'. In its first year it carried more than nine million passengers in gas-lit first-class, second-class and third-class carriages, drawn by steam locomotives that belched out choking quantities of smoke. The fact that the passengers were at first forbidden to smoke in the carriages was not much help.

Over the next two years the line was extended further east into the City to Moorgate and, in the other direction, to Hammersmith. Other lines were soon added to the growing network, deeper underground tunnelling was introduced and the steam trains were replaced by electric trains. The first underground electric railway, the City and South London, which ran from near the Bank of England under the Thames to the South Bank, opened in 1890. It was the first line to be called 'the tube' and the windowless carriages with their heavily upholstered interiors were popularly known as 'padded cells'.

As far as the City was concerned, the corporation was able to sell its shares in the Metropolitan Railway at a profit and the underground did ease congestion for a time. A more lasting consequence was to make commuting far easier and so cause London to sprawl out even more from its centre, while the number of people actually living in the City itself declined sharply.

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Work on the world's first underground railway started in 1860 when the Metropolitan Railway began building a tunnel more than three miles long from Paddington to Farringdon Street. It was largely financed by the City of London, which was suffering badly from horse-drawn traffic congestion that was having a damaging effect on business.

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Gilded mirrors and underground bars - the Tube as it used to look

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What the London Underground used to look like

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London has one of the oldest underground railway networks in the world – one which many people use every day

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Discover more about the history of the Tube map....

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26 November 2009: Tube maps have been part of London life since the birth of the Underground, and were initially as confusing as the city itself: a tangle of different lines woven around the curving River Thames. Enter Harry Beck, an LU engineer who in 1931 came up with the radical idea of presenting the ever-expanding network as a circuit diagram rather than a geographical map - so creating a modernist design icon that has never been bettered. But as the Oystercard zone expands, are its days numbered? Take a look back at the changing face of the tube over the last century

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Tunnel vision: a history of the London tube map

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26 November 2009: Tube maps have been part of London life since the birth of the Underground, and were initially as confusing as the city itself: a tangle of different lines woven around the curving River Thames.

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London Underground Vs New York City Subway

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London Underground Vs New York City Subway

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a brief comparison (Pinterest)

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BBC Website

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One was hand dug by an army of men bearing shovels and spades working deep underground in high-risk conditions.

The other boasts giant machines worth millions of pounds that bore deep below modern-day London.

Yet although 150 years separates them, the construction techniques used by the navvies and labourers who dug the Tube are at the heart of the capital's next-generation underground railway.

Work on Crossrail's 26 miles (42km) of tunnels, which will create a £15bn east-west underground link, began in March 2012.

Construction of the Metropolitan Railway - the world's first underground railway which later grew to be the Tube as we know it - represented a similar feat of engineering for its time.

Work began in March 1860 at a time when improvements in transport were desperately needed as the streets of the world's largest city had become congested with traffic.

'Enormous upheaval'

Early labour-intensive "cut and cover" techniques soon gave way to a technique named "the shield", as engineers looked to build tunnels deep beneath Victorian London.

Transport for London's design and heritage manager, Mike Ashworth, said: "The cut and cover method was to dig a trench, build back the side and roof it over."

It was a simplistic approach to tunnel building, with work happening just below the surface, Mr Ashworth said.

"There was so much disruption caused by demolition through a very crowded city.

"Most roads were already full of gas mains and other utilities and there would have been enormous upheaval as they had to shut roads."

When Tube engineers adopted the more successful shield method it heralded the transformation of London's transport network which now serves 270 stations on a service spanning 250 miles (402km).

Mr Ashworth said: "It is highly unlikely that our system would have developed to such an extent if it hadn't left cut and cover."

Life working on the shield

It was a dangerous job without the back-up of today's emergency services but surprisingly there were few recorded accidents.

There would have been the brick layer, carpenter and labourer digging a trench and they were paid per yard of progress so it was in nobody's interests to slow the job down.

Quite a lot of them were navvies so had come from building the canals. Some had come from Scotland and Ireland as new laws had pushed them out of small holdings, so they were used to labouring and hard work. Others came from tin mines in Cornwall.

There would have been a wide age range but essentially if you were physically fit then you could do the job.

They would have drunk a lot and been quite a bunch of characters but they were fairly expendable. Death was a serious issue but there were many more people available to do the job.

Tim Shields

Curator, London Museum of Transport

The shield, which was the technique used as the Underground expanded, was first successfully used in 1825 to excavate what is now the Wapping - Rotherhithe tunnel, which was one of the first underwater tunnels in the world.

Modifications by James Greathead and mechanised forms of the shield helped form the basis of Crossrail's tunnel boring machines (TBM).

At the front of the original design there was an iron frame and within each pocket was a man with a spade.

World's first underground railway

London's Metropolitan Railway became the world's first underground passenger line when it opened in January 1863.

Built by a private company, the 3.5 mile (5.6km) line linked Paddington, Euston and King's Cross with the business district of central London.

More than 2,000 workers built the line, mostly by hand. They dug a shallow cutting for the track before roofing it over to form a tunnel.

The original gas-lit carriages were pulled by steam engines before electrification was introduced in the early 1900s.

The noxious fumes from the engines left many passengers feeling ill and, despite ventilation efforts, prompted many complaints

Source: London Transport Museum
How Britain's booming railways powered the Victorian age Listen: The sounds of Britain's locomotives and stations from 1936
Once each section was dug out, timbers were put up to support the earth before hydraulic jacks pushed the frame forward and a row of bricks was built inside the tunnel they had created.

But Tim Shields, curator at London Transport Museum, said: "The shield offered the workers some protection but it would have been claustrophobic and very hot.

"They would often have been bare-chested but some pictures show them working in a jacket and shirt which is quite surprising."

Andy Alder, project manager at Crossrail for the western tunnels, explained: "It was called the shield because it shields the men from the ground.

"The story goes that it is based on observing how worms bore through wood and this was pretty much the foundation for the main tunnelling work we are doing.

"All we've done is put a steel rotating cutter head with a motor at the front.

"There's still then men digging, the jacks are still the same, then building the precast concrete sections behind and we have a railway that takes the ground out."

But technological advances mean eight TBMs worth about £10m each and a fully mechanised support system allows the construction of Crossrail, currently Europe's largest civil engineering project, to progress at an average rate of about 100m (328ft) every week.

In contrast, the Tower Subway was built to test out the Barlow/Greathead shield technique in 1869/70 at a rate of about 11m (40ft) a week.

Mr Alder said the men digging the Tube could make the same progress in a year that the team behind Crossrail make in a week.

"The technology has come through but what we have done is mechanised it, made it safer, faster and relatively cheaper."

While relatively cheap labour would have seen thousands working to build Tube tunnels, there are just 20 working in the Crossrail tunnel at any one time.

"Health and safety was radically different in extremes of how people worked and industrial injuries far more common and there was no NHS if you were injured," TfL's Mr Ashworth said.

Crossrail's Mr Alder said: "If a few people got killed on a construction site it was part of life but any minor injury is not acceptable for us."

Clay beneath London made for ideal tunnelling conditions, defining the boundary of the Tube, which mostly stays away from the south and east of the Thames.

While Crossrail's TBMs are able to forge ahead regardless of geology, they face the challenge of not being the first to dig beneath London.

Mr Alder said: "We are very much driven by the London Underground map.

"We have to tunnel underneath existing Tube lines, above the Jubilee Line and weave our way around the foundations of big buildings whereas 100 years ago that wasn't the case."

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One was hand dug by an army of men bearing shovels and spades working deep underground in high-risk conditions. The other boasts giant machines worth millions of pounds that bore deep below modern-day London. Yet although 150 years separates them, the construction techniques used by the navvies and labourers who dug the Tube are at the heart of the capital's next-generation underground railway.

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Come on .... take a look!

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With a Tube strike planned from tonight, we look back at more than 150 years of travel on the London Underground. * Tube strike: live travel updates 24 May 1862: Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Ewart Gladstone, and directors and engineers of the Metropolitan Railway Company, embark on an inspection tour of the world's first underground line. Built between Paddington and the City of London, it opened in January of the following year. Gladstone is seen in the front row, near right.

Read more
Image: 1 of 30

Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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With a Tube strike planned from tonight, we look back at more than 150 years of travel on the London Underground. * Tube strike: live travel updates 24 May 1862: Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Ewart Gladstone, and directors and engineers of the Metropolitan Railway Company, embark on an inspection tour of the world's first underground line.