ELECTRIC LOCOMOTION AND OUR NATIONAL LIFE 269
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FIG. PAGE
ELECTRICITY. BY H. L. SHINDLER _Frontispiece_
1. QUEEN VICTORIA’S TRAIN ON THE GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY 3
2. NINE WILLANS-SIEMENS DYNAMO SETS FOR ELECTRIC TRACTION,
700 H.P. EACH 7
3. THE GIANT’S CAUSEWAY 12
4. WATERLOO AND CITY RAILWAY’S NEW PATTERN CAR 25
5. THE LIVERPOOL OVERHEAD ELECTRIC RAILWAY 29
6. PLAN OF A BEHR MONO-RAILWAY CAR 35
7. INTERIOR OF A BEHR MONO-RAILWAY CAR 44
8. ELECTRICAL POWER HOUSE (THE LARGEST IN THE OLD WORLD),
LOT’S ROAD, CHELSEA, TO SUPPLY THE METROPOLITAN DISTRICT
AND OTHER RAILWAYS WITH CURRENT 53
9. A 2,000 H.P. WESTINGHOUSE STEAM TURBINE, RESEMBLING THE
TURBO-GENERATORS (EACH OF 7,500 H.P.) IN THE CHELSEA
POWER HOUSE 55
10. A NEW METROPOLITAN DISTRICT RAILWAY CAR 56
11. A TYPICAL ELECTRIC POWER GENERATOR--TWO DYNAMOS, EACH OF
ABOUT 1,600 H.P. 69
12. A 3,000 H.P. TRIPLE EXPANSION CENTRAL VALVE ELECTRICAL ENGINE 76
13. SHIELD AT WORK IN A TUBE RUNNING TUNNEL 79
14. THE WESTERN APPROACH TO PICCADILLY 123
15. TRAM-CAR IN PARIS EQUIPPED FOR COMBINED OVERHEAD TROLLEY
AND SURFACE CONTACT SYSTEM 133
16. CROSS LANE JUNCTION, SALFORD. THE LARGEST AND MOST COMPLICATED
OVERHEAD TROLLEY CROSSING IN THE KINGDOM 135
17. BOILER ROOM, LONDON UNITED TRAMWAYS CO.’S POWER HOUSE AT
CHISWICK, FITTED WITH VICARS’ AUTOMATIC STOKERS 157
18. A LONDON UNITED TRAMWAYS COMPANY TRAM-CAR 159
19. FAÇADE OF QUEEN’S ROAD CAR-SHED, MANCHESTER CORPORATION
TRAMWAYS 170
20. VIEW NEAR DUDLEY STATION, SOUTH STAFFORDSHIRE, SHOWING A
STEAM TRAM-CAR 175
21. VIEW AT CASTLE HILL, DUDLEY, SOUTH STAFFORDSHIRE, SHOWING
AN ELECTRIC TRAM-CAR 181
22. CAMPS BAY, CAPE TOWN, AND SEAPOINT TRAMWAYS 183
23. BOSTON SUBWAY, SHOWING ENTRANCE AT THE PUBLIC GARDENS 193
24. NEW YORK SUBWAY IN COURSE OF CONSTRUCTION. CAR TRAFFIC
MAINTAINED 195
25. NEW YORK SUBWAY, SHOWING HOW IT WAS BUILT 197
26. ELECTRIC CARRIAGE ENTIRELY OF BRITISH CONSTRUCTION 201
27. A “CROWDUS” ELECTRIC CARRIAGE 205
28. AN ELECTRIC VICTORIA WITH BRITISH STORAGE BATTERIES 207
29. A “FISCHER” COMBINATION OMNIBUS 211
30. THE “HERCULES” TRACTION ENGINE, AS USED DURING THE
CRIMEAN WAR 217
31. A TEN-TON ELECTRIC TROLLEY 219
32. AN ELECTRIC TRADESMAN’S-VAN 220
33. ANOTHER TYPE OF THE “FISCHER” COMBINATION OMNIBUS 222
34. ELECTRIC STORAGE BATTERIES 237
35. ELECTRIC LAUNCH ON THE THAMES 248
36. WHERE THE POOR LIVE 280
TUBE, TRAIN, TRAM, AND CAR
CHAPTER I
_THE OLD AND THE NEW ORDER OF RAILWAY LOCOMOTION_
“The thinking minds of all nations call for change.”--CARLYLE.
STEAM--THE OLD ORDER
An immutable law of nature has decreed that whatever attains to
perfection is doomed to perish, for
“The world exists by change, and but for that
All matter would to chaos back,
To form a pillow for a sleeping god.”
Thus it came to pass that in the period 1825 to 1835, when the main
roads of Great Britain were at their best, when the then mode of
travelling, though on a limited scale, had, as regards speed,
punctuality, and organisation, reached the highest possible pitch of
perfection, a little cloud like a man’s hand, presaging the new order of
locomotion, arose at the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway,
and overshadowed the old method. So effective was the competition of the
“iron horse,” that in lieu of the fifty-four splendidly equipped
vehicles which in 1835 carried His Majesty’s mails throughout England,
not a single coach left the General Post Office, St. Martin’s-le-Grand,
in the year 1844; while the kings highways had become almost deserted.
Though this was barely sixty years ago, railways have evolved themselves
out of their embryonic state into a condition approaching the fateful
one of perfect development.
In early days, first-class passengers were boxed up in replicas of old
stage-coaches, the second-class in open carriages exposed to the
weather, and the third-class huddled together in seatless cattle-trucks.
Contrast this with our luxurious Pullmans, and our corridor and
vestibule trains for all classes, warmed throughout, lighted by
electricity, and provided with lavatories, dining-saloons, buffets, and
sleeping-cars. “With what further improvements can we allure the
public?” ask anxious directors. One answer only is possible. “By
bringing the mode of locomotion up to date.”
This means, in the case of old-established railway companies, a complete
and costly transformation, or an independent mono-rail track for long
distances; under any circumstances entailing much hardship upon the
shareholders. For at the moment when railway-engineers--improving so
vastly upon George Stephenson’s venerable engine,[1] built in 1822, and
still at work for the Hutton Colliery, its weight only fifteen tons, its
speed ten miles an hour--have constructed such magnificent locomotives
as the “Greater Britain” for the London and North
[Illustration: FIG. 1. QUEEN VICTORIA’S TRAIN ON THE GREAT WESTERN
RAILWAY]
Western Railway, or the ten-wheeled giant[2] for the Great Northern
Railway, fifty-seven feet over all, weighing 100 tons, and capable of
reeling off its 65 miles an hour with ease, electricity steps into the
field, displaces the stately engine--resplendent in red, blue, green, or
chocolate paint, glossy as the coat of some highly trained racehorse,
and gleaming with polished brass and steel, finished in all its parts
with exquisite accuracy, the very embodiment of energy under perfect
control--and from some unpretentious-looking building afar off, drives
our trains with unseen but resistless force, at the rate, if desired, of
a hundred miles an hour!
The construction of an ordinary steam locomotive is an intricate
operation, necessitating machine-shops, erecting-shops, foundries,
forges, etc., covering acres of ground, as at Crewe, Doncaster, Derby,
or Swindon. Not a hundred engines are exactly alike in pattern, and each
one is supposed to be composed of over five thousand different parts,
all of which have to be stowed away in a necessarily limited space.
“How is steam utilised by the locomotive?” is a question asked again and
again (and not by children only) ever since Stephenson’s engine started
on its triumphant progress from Stockton to Darlington and back, and
which, I venture to affirm, only a small percentage of travellers, even
in 1903, can answer “right away,” as our American cousins would express
it.
Briefly, then, as follows: Raised up on high is the mighty boiler.
Remove its plates, and running through its entire length will be seen a
cluster of some two or three hundred brass tubes, in diameter that of a
penny-piece. At the rear of the boiler, on a lower level, is the fuel
fire-box, with its grate and ash-pan, while in front is the smoke-box,
surmounted by the familiar chimney or funnel, called in the United
States the “smoke-stack,” in British engines reduced to a minimum of
height. Water from the tender surrounds the brass tubes, and when the
fire is burning, flames, smoke, and heated gases rush through them,
escaping _viâ_ the chimney, but in their passage converting the boiling
water into expanding steam, which, when the regulator is opened, is
directed by valves into the hollow cylinders--sometimes placed below the
boiler, but generally visible outside--forcing by its pressure the
pistons backwards and forwards alternately, and, by means of
intermediate machinery, transferring its energy to the driving-wheels.
The exhausted steam, after accomplishing its work, joins the smoke in
the smoke-box, escaping up the funnel by jerks, which creates a forced
draught through the brass boiler-tubes, and hastens the generation of
steam.
ELECTRICITY--THE NEW ORDER
Contrast this with electricity, the definition of whose exact nature is
a task I must of necessity leave to others, but its adaptation to the
purposes of traction can be thus broadly explained:--
Dynamos or generators are situated at some fixed station, more or less
distant, generating electrical energy, whence the current is transmitted
along a central steel rail, or, in the case of some tramways, _viâ_
overhead wires, returning to its place of birth by another rail or
cable, and completing its circuit. It is “picked up” by a small
locomotive fitted with motors that work the driving-mechanism, and thus
propels the coaches or cars behind it at varying speeds.
The rotation of the dynamos is effected either by a torrent, waterfall,
or swift-flowing river, absorbed by turbines, or by steam supplied from
ordinary boilers.
In other words, we convert our water and coal into steam, and,
indirectly, the heat in the steam into electrical energy; and the heavy
locomotive that used to carry its own fuel, and manufacture its steam as
it tore along with the train behind it, now leaves tender and boiler at
home, and has its driving power, in the form of electric current,
forwarded to it per centre rail, to be drawn upon when wanted.
The system is beautifully simple, and the machinery compact and
uncomplicated. Smoke defilement is unknown, and the trains are
comparatively noiseless. In short, electric traction is the refinement
of mechanically applied power.
Now let us visit an electrical power station--a small one--and I have in
my mind that of the Waterloo and City Electric Railway.
Hidden away behind a bewildering labyrinth of railway arches, in a
_cul-de-sac_, approached from a back street, not a hundred miles from a
great railway station, is a plain, very plain brick building, wherein,
for aught one knows to the contrary, such prosaic articles as pots and
pans, or cardboard boxes, may be in course of manufacture. Pass through
a door, always on the swing, and an unpretending office is reached,
furnished in the usual manner, and occupied by clerks engaged upon the
ordinary duties of their vocation.
Access to the engineer-in-chief being granted, he courteously conducts
us to the power room, whence issues the energy that drives the trains.
Imagination had pictured a great hall, filled with ponderous machinery
whose component parts are cranks, steel rods, shafts, and toothed
wheels, a wilderness of metal, moving with bewildering rapidity and
thunderous power, in an atmosphere redolent of lubricating oil, a vision
of whirling wheels, an Ezekiel vision of wheels in the midst of wheels,
instinct with life, such as the prophet saw 600 years B.C., by the River
Chebar, in the land of the Chaldean.
[Illustration: FIG. 2. NINE WILLANS-SIEMENS DYNAMO SETS FOR ELECTRIC
TRACTION, 700 H.P. EACH.
_By permission of_ _Willans and Robinson, Ltd., Rugby_]
Nothing of the kind! One portion of a moderate-sized apartment is
devoted to the “fitting” of the motor locomotives, and at the other end,
enclosed within a low railing, resting upon a bed of great solidity,
and occupying but little space, is the machinery in duplicate, as a
safeguard against breakdowns.
It consists of a vertical compound engine, supplied with steam from an
adjoining boiler-house, whose cylinder is coupled direct to the
fly-wheels of the revolving dynamos that are partly sunk into the
flooring. These, with their electro-magnets, are so shut in, and so
little can be seen of the working, that it all looks very mysterious and
incomprehensible to the uninitiated.
In large power-producing machinery an iron staircase leads up to a
platform above the dynamos, giving access to the loftier parts of the
apparatus, which then, in its general appearance and compactness,
somewhat resembles a modern marine engine. On the walls are endless
dials, recording the amount of current generated, localising the exact
position of the trains on the line at any given moment, and checking the
quantity of current picked up by each engine. There is absolutely no
smell, no outward indication of resistless power, while almost Arcadian
quiet reigns in the neighbourhood of the machines.
That these small dynamos are capable of driving heavy cars filled with
passengers at the rate of many miles an hour seems incredible; but
faith, “the evidence of things not seen,” must come into play.
The craving for mere size, however, will be amply gratified when the
great power house at Chelsea, built to supply the Metropolitan,
District, and other railways, is completed (_vide_ Chapter V.).
But what on earth is a kilowatt, or a volt, an ohm, or an
ampère?--expressions that are rapidly becoming as familiar as the word
horse-power.
Well, “horse-power” was a term invented long ago by engineers, who
blandly asked one to imagine that an ordinary horse was capable of
lifting a weight of 33,000 lbs. (or some 14½ tons) one foot high per
minute. Now, electricity is a very exact science. There is no mere
theory about it; and a unit is a definite quantity of power, known in
that science as a “kilowatt hour.” Thus, a kilowatt, or 1,000 watts, is
the equivalent in measured work of 1⅓ horse-power, equal to the lifting
of 44,000 lbs. per minute, or the doing of so many units of work, either
electric lighting, heating, machinery driving, or traction.
VARIOUS FORMS OF ELECTRIC LOCOMOTION
Electricity as a locomotive force is being presented to the public in
various forms. There is the ordinary railway, like the Underground,
that, cleansing itself, amending its ways, and becoming converted to the
new order of traction, has been granted a new lease of life. Then there
are new lines laid down, intended from the first to be electrical, with
specially designed cars, diving beneath the Thames, and connecting the
north and south of London. These are our metropolitan pioneer electric
railways. There is also the system of railways specifically and
popularly known as Tubes, most important factors in the travelling world
of modern Babylon. Another division is the system known as Overhead
Electric Railways; that is to say, rails laid upon iron girders
supported by columns above the roadway, a notable example of which is
the Liverpool Overhead Electric Railway.
Electric tramways are with us in Greater London for good and all, with
their network of lines in every direction. Some are locally worked by
the various Borough Councils; others on a comprehensive scale by the
London County Council, who now strongly advocate also another system,
the Shallow-Underground, by which the cars run in a kind of open trench
just below the surface in the middle of the street.
Next we have endless provincial and urban council electric tramways,
including some very extensive systems for feeding the enormous traffic
of cities and large towns in the Midlands and North of England.
Electric Light Railways, originally intended to be worked on rails laid
down upon the ordinary highway, form a special class by themselves to
serve short-distance traffic in country districts; but to all intents
and purposes they are rural electric trams.
Lastly, we have motor-cars, carriages, omnibuses, cabs, vans, and
cycles, that with electricity as their means of propulsion, will
possibly ere long supersede every other form of traffic in our streets
and along our roads and lanes.
To individualise these various outcomes of electrical traction spread
over the length and breadth of Great Britain is impossible. Their names
and their statistics are enrolled in _Garcke’s Manual of Electrical
Undertakings_, a work that, like _Kelly’s London Directory_, grows
bigger and bigger every year.
I propose, therefore, only to notice some of the principal ones; and,
naturally, the pioneer railway lines should have the place of honour.
CHAPTER II
_SOME PIONEER ELECTRIC RAILWAYS_
“A worthy pioneer.”--SHAKESPEARE.
THE GIANT’S CAUSEWAY RAILWAY
In the month of March, 1883, by the opening of the Giant’s Causeway,
Portrush, and Bush Valley Railway, the sister island achieved the honour
and glory of showing the way to the “predominant partner” in the matter
of electrical traction enterprise; winning, however, only by a head, for
in August of the same year the Brighton Beach Electric Railway was
inaugurated.
Who amongst us can say they know Ireland well? To the average tourist it
still remains an unexplored country. The travelling American, however,
as a rule, does it from end to end. Commencing with Dublin, “doing”
Killarney, and working round the magnificent west coast, he returns
_viâ_ the North Channel, always taking _en route_ on the coast of Antrim
the Giant’s Causeway, thundered upon by storms from the wild Atlantic.
There, almost within hail of Britain, are those strange groups of
basaltic columns so familiar to geological students, intensely
interesting, invested with many an old and mystic Celtic legend, yet
until recently difficult of access, as other striking regions in
Ireland--an island abounding not only in awe-inspiring scenery, but in
sequestered spots of sylvan beauty; a fair land of mountains and hills,
lakes and waterfalls, crystal streams, and splendid harbours; truly
called the Emerald Isle; where the grass is greenest, and rare coniferæ
flourish; where the myrtle needs no shelter, and the arbutus blooms and
fruits to perfection, and flowers are everywhere, for every little
enclosure in due season glows with the brightest of flax and potato
blossom; and lanes and open country are gay with star-like marigolds,
shamrock, violets, honeysuckle, meadowsweet, catsear, scabious, large
purple bugle, and such-like lowly but welcome plants.
[Illustration: FIG. 3. THE GIANT’S CAUSEWAY.
_By permission of_ _Thos. Cook and Son, Ludgate Circus_]
From Portrush it is easy to reach the Causeway, though once there, one
often has to wait for favourable weather before proceeding to explore
its cavernous wonders by water.
The present length of the railway is 8½ miles of single line, its gauge
being 3 feet. It is worked partly by steam and partly by electricity on
the overhead system, the current being derived from a generating station
three-quarters of a mile away, where three hydraulic turbines, fed by an
adjoining waterfall, operate the dynamo. Although the railway is out of
the way and on a small scale, the attractions of the Causeway and the
surrounding district result in a respectable passenger traffic of over a
hundred thousand per annum.
THE BRIGHTON BEACH RAILWAY
Under the sanction of the Brighton Town Council, the Magnus Volk Co.,
Ltd., now work the Brighton Beach Electric Tram-railway, which at its
opening was regarded as a great novelty and curiosity, constituting an
additional attraction and amusement to “London by the sea,” and tens of
thousands must have taken a ride in its little open cars since it came
into existence twenty years ago. The gauge is but 2 feet 8½ inches, the
“feeders” are underground, the propelling system is electric, with a
third rail, and its speed is about 12 miles an hour. Starting from the
west pier, opposite the Royal Aquarium, it sets out on its one mile and
a half route of single line and dips beneath the level of the Marine
Parade to a level a little above the beach, passing _en route_, though
hidden from view, many landmarks of old Brighton, such as Park Place and
Gardens, Royal Crescent, Marine Square, and Lewes Crescent, and
terminating at a point near Black Rock.
This was the eastern end of Old Brighton, noted for many an original
character in the “twenties” and “thirties,” not the least interesting of
whom were old Martha Gunn, queen of the bathing-machines, and Sak Deen
Mahomed, a native of the East, who introduced the art of shampooing into
the town, and lived to become a centenarian, his fame being enshrined in
verse by James Smith, one of the authors of _Rejected Addresses_, who
humorously predicted his longevity as follows:--
“Sprung doubtless from Abdullah’s son,
Thy miracles thy sire’s outrun,
Thy cures his deaths outnumber;
His coffin soars ’twixt heav’n and earth,
But thou, within that narrow berth,
Immortal, ne’er shall slumber.”
Many have been the changes in Brighton since those days. Arundel
Terrace, Kemp Town, Ultima Thule in the east; Adelaide Crescent with
Palmyra Square, its western boundary. From the fields to the north of
that square could be seen, a mile or so off, the village of Hove, the
intervening space being dotted with farms. No one could have dreamt that
a great railway-station would be built there, with minor ones at Kemp
Town, West Brighton, and Hove. Old residents could not have pictured a
Grand Aquarium, a Western and Eastern Pier, nor the destruction of their
familiar Chain Pier. They would be amazed at the spread of Brighton in
every direction, the springing up of palatial hotels like the
“Métropole” and “Grand,” and the increase of the population to some
hundred and fifty thousand; while the coaching world, headed by the
popular Sir St. Vincent Cotton, prince of amateur whips, and all the
confraternity of coachmen and hackney-coach drivers, would have thought
anyone a lunatic who had dared to prophesy that one day a conveyance
drawn without horses or steam power would carry passengers along the
Brighton beach!
THE CITY AND SOUTH LONDON RAILWAY
For many years prior to 1890, in Gracechurch Street, at a point near its
junction with Eastcheap, could be seen every day of the week numerous
omnibuses arriving between nine and eleven a.m., and departing between
five and eight p.m., for the suburbs over the water. These ’buses
regularly plied between London and Kennington, Walworth, Camberwell,
Stockwell, Clapham, and Brixton (a few journeying to Dulwich and
Peckham), for the special accommodation of dwellers in those favourite
localities engaged in business during the day. Wealthy “principals” of
mercantile and brokers’ firms drove to and from their comfortable Surrey
villas in well-equipped carriages, the junior members in smart traps or
dog-carts; but the small merchants and smaller brokers, the head clerks
and the rank and file who do all the hard work, had to make use of these
omnibuses, and when exceptionally bad weather prevented the vehicles
running, they had to get to and from their offices as best they could on
foot. To the working man, living, say, at Brixton, and engaged upon a
City job, the fares--4_d._ to 8_d._--were prohibitive. The time wasted
in these conveyances was great, and at the best it was an unpleasant way
of travelling; overcrowding was common, and the “fight for the trams” in
1903 is as nothing compared to the frantic rush for those omnibus seats;
while on wet days the sight was piteous.
It is true that City men could use the London, Chatham, and Dover
Railway, to reach these suburbs, but this involved a walk to Blackfriars
Station, and the facing of the crush on its dangerous platforms. There
were also the alternatives of crossing Blackfriars Bridge and using the
London Tramway Company’s horse-cars, or of forcing one’s way over
London Bridge, tramping or “bussing” it along the Borough High Street,
and, emerging at the “Elephant and Castle,” there tapping the trams.
As a matter of fact, these ingenious alternative routes were seldom made
use of. At the close of business, men of all ranks want to get home as
fast as they can, and from some station not far from their
counting-houses. Therefore, in the days I am describing, how could any
of those gentlemen clad in irreproachable frock-coats and new glossy
hats, who each day of the week issued from snug offices in Austin
Friars, Drapers’ Gardens, or Copthall Court, whose business was
transacted over the way at the “House”; how could the brokers of Mark
Lane and Mincing Lane, the underwriters at Lloyd’s, the ship-brokers and
ship-owners round about Fenchurch Street and Leadenhall Street, the
flourishing bill-brokers of Broad Street, and the smaller mercantile
fry; how could any of these, if resident on the Surrey side, be expected
to go to and from business by way of Blackfriars?
However, this unsatisfactory means of communication was hardly likely to
escape the notice of such astute experts as Mr. J. C. Mott, doyen
director of the Great Western Railway, and his far-seeing friends. They
took counsel together, and, after the usual hard task of _persuading_
people, plans were matured, and in 1884 an enterprise was organised and
incorporated as the City of London and Southwark Subway Company, to
construct a line of railway from King William Street to the “Elephant
and Castle,” with an intermediate station at Marshalsea Road.
This was the initial stage of the present well-known railway.
At the outset, three points had to be considered. How was the subway to
be constructed? What motive power should be employed? And how was the
deep level to be reached by the passengers? A subway under the Thames
was no novelty. The directors of the new line were not the “first that
ever burst into that silent sea” of mud and gravel at the bottom of the
swift-flowing river. Brunel had been long before them with his costly
Thames Tunnel, and Barlow had years ago laid upon its oozy bed the Tower
Subway of iron.
It was decided that a tube, or, rather, two independent tunnels of
cast-iron rings, should be driven side by side beneath the bottom of the
stream, a little to the west of London Bridge, and continued on the
Surrey side.
On this system the work was begun by the contractors, Siemens Brothers
and Mather and Platt, and proceeded with quite out of public sight. It
was accompanied with many disheartening delays and seemingly
insurmountable difficulties; but they were all successfully overcome,
and the tubes were brought to a temporary end at the “Swan,” Stockwell,
to which charming retreat, by an Act of Parliament, 1887, an extension
of the line had been sanctioned, making its length a little over three
miles.
The motive power eventually selected was electricity, steam being
impracticable, and the funicular or cable system considered unreliable.
Access to and from the trains was to be obtained at the stations by
means of capacious twin-lifts capable of holding many people at a time.
Then the problem of how best to utilise the ample “power,” generated at
the Stockwell Station, for hauling the cars, had to be seriously
tackled. It was not a question of a toy line like that on the Brighton
beach, but of the driving at fair speed, say 15 miles an hour, of
comparatively heavy coaches laden with passengers, and at frequent
intervals. Altogether it was a new departure in electric traction.
How the motor locomotives were effectually to pick up the current was
the puzzle which had to be solved, or the enterprise might at the last
moment collapse and the subscribed capital be lost.
After an infinite amount of anxious experimenting on the part of Mr.
Mott and his scientific advisers--the narrative of which, as told me by
that veteran, sounded like a romance--by a happy inspiration _the_ way
was hit upon; and all other technical difficulties overcome, the line
was pronounced to be in working order (1890), after a series of trial
trips, at one of which the writer had the privilege of being present.
CHAPTER III
_SOME PIONEER ELECTRIC RAILWAYS_ (_continued_)
A TRIAL TRIP IN THE CITY AND SOUTH LONDON RAILWAY
One o’clock saw a large party of us, chiefly City men, amongst whom were
numerous civil engineers, waiting at King William Street booking-office
to descend into the bowels of the earth by one of the semicircular
lifts, a novelty in point of size. Our turn having come, we duly filed
into the elevator. The telescopic doors clashed upon us, and we stood
for a second or two silently expectant, feeling like a batch of
condemned criminals on a gigantic scaffold waiting for the hangman to
draw back the fatal lever that would launch them into the other world.
Noiselessly the lift descended to an apparently fathomless depth, but in
reality, I believe, some 90 or 100 feet. When released by the janitor,
we found ourselves in a small, well-lighted, cool, and spotlessly clean,
white-tiled station, whence was discernible a couple of small tunnels
side by side, leading to unknown regions, seemingly all too narrow to
accommodate even the miniature cars waiting for us at one of the narrow
platforms.
Inspecting the tunnels, the classical man of our party, a wag in his
way, who had hitherto made no remark, was heard to mutter something in
Latin, which, on being coerced, he admitted was out of Virgil, and was
translated thus: “This is the spot where the way divides in two
branches.” In vain we pointed out that the quotation was inappropriate,
as the ways were _parallel_. He was obdurate, so we left him to his own
reflections.
To most of us accustomed to roomy Pullmans and commodious railway
carriages, the cars, though comfortable, seemed cramped, especially in
height. The signal given, off we started, when we noticed that the cars
fitted the tube with such nicety and economy of space that, could the
windows have been let down, we could easily have touched the iron plates
of the tunnel. We realised, too, that although there was no smoke or
smell, the railway was by no means noiseless; neither, in the opinion of
several of the experts present, was the running as steady as on the
“Underground.”
A hint had been given us that at some point where the line dipped and
rose again the cars might come to a temporary standstill. As we rather
uneasily recalled this, the speed gradually slackened, and finally the
train stopped altogether, and simultaneously the incandescent lights
began to pale, and at last subsided into filaments of sickly red. The
situation was not a pleasant one. There we were; many of us with
important engagements awaiting us later in the day; most of us with
wives and children who would expect us home as usual when evening
arrived, and grow anxious at our absence. There we were sealed up in a
tube, for all we knew, at a point beneath the Thames. Not a sound
reached us from the locomotive, or, indeed, from anywhere. Were we thus
to remain indefinitely? For walk out we could not, there being no room
outside the carriages. Would some memorial tablet let into the side of
London Bridge, months hence, recall the fact that near it a goodly
company of highly respectable citizens had perished in a living tomb?
I don’t think we talked much. It was luncheon-time; we were hungry, and
we felt like the occupants of the snowed-up cars in one of Mark Twain’s
stories, who gloomily eyed one another as starvation threatened,
calculating upon whom, by an ingenious and complicated system of voting
previously agreed to, would next fall the lot of being sacrificed for
the benefit of the rest, and I believe I found myself unconsciously
speculating on the plumpness of a youthful stockbroker standing by my
side. But after a very few moments of suspense the train rattled on
again, the lights reappeared, and presently we drew up at the Borough,
the first station on the Surrey side.
Railway booking-offices are not usually things of beauty, least of all
those on the Metropolitan, District, and suburban lines. Here, however,
was a surprise, for we found quite a picturesque stone-and-brick
building on the ground-floor, a cupola surmounting the prettily designed
entrance, and a small dome with lantern by way of roof. And this was a
sample of all the stations along the line.
The Borough recalled the Marshalsea that once stood close by; and there
opposite was St. George’s, Southwark, where Little Dorrit, accidentally
locked out of the prison, was allowed by “the sexton, or the beadle, or
the verger, or whatever he was,” to take refuge in the vestry, where,
years afterwards, she signed the marriage register when wedded to Arthur
Clennam.
The next stoppage was at the Elephant and Castle--not the tavern of that
name, where in the past on Derby Day the superabundant holiday traffic
usually became hopelessly congested, but the City and South London’s new
station, close to Spurgeon’s Tabernacle, Rabbits’ great boot warehouse,
and Tarn’s vast emporium, that seems to occupy most of Newington
Causeway. Onwards to Kennington Common, once the place of public
executions for Surrey, now a well-kept miniature park. Beyond it,
Kennington Oval, associated with cricket all the world over; and finally
we arrived at Stockwell, the then terminus of the line, since extended
to Clapham, where Tom Hood used to go to school at a house “with ugly
windows ten in a row, its chimney in the rear,” a style of architecture
of which many specimens still exist round and about the Common.
At Stockwell we visited the generating station, recently much extended,
and provided with entirely new plant, and, wondering at and admiring all
we saw, learned from the chief engineer that the contretemps _en route_
was due to a slight defect in the new and untried power-machinery; and
thus at the point where the dip in the line was greatest, the cars
stopped.
An excellent luncheon restored us all to eloquence and equanimity,
extinguishing the cannibalistic feeling of half an hour ago, and,
returning without any incident worth recording, we emerged once more in
the City, to be greeted by the noise of the traffic that ever surges
around King William the Fourth’s statue.
Those were the “green salad” days of London’s Pioneer Electric Railway
Line. Now it runs without a hitch, and has been extended north as far as
the historic “Angel,” thus giving a direct route between Clapham and
Islington. It has powers to exchange traffic with the Great Northern and
the City Railway _viâ_ Old Street, and also to connect itself with the
Baker Street and Waterloo Electric Railway at the Elephant and Castle
Station; and in a new building at Finsbury Pavement it now has
commodious head offices.
At the last half-yearly general meeting the chairman, Mr. C. G. Mott, in
the course of his speech, stated that the Board aspired to have a
thoroughly first-class terminus in the City of London, and had deposited
plans with this view. They proposed to construct this station between
the present Bank Station and the King William Street statue.
That the City and South London Railway is most useful and popular is
shown by the number of passengers it has carried--some ninety millions
since its opening--the returns for last year showing about eighteen
millions, over a total route of about seven miles. For the convenience
of travellers, it eventually will have subways, connecting its Lombard
Street Station with the Bank Station of the Central London Railway, and
it already has them from its new London Bridge Station to the London,
Brighton, and South Coast Railway. Finally, it can boast of possessing a
station below a church--a unique position, I believe. St. Mary
Woolnoth’s foundations were completely removed, the vaults cleared out,
and the whole replaced by huge iron girders, whereon the sacred edifice
now rests, with the booking-office below.
THE WATERLOO AND CITY RAILWAY
The month of August, 1898, was unusually warm, and the heat was felt as
much in the City as anywhere. Straw hats were universal; the shady side
of the street, if there happened to be one, was thronged; secluded
alleys and courts were resorted to by the knowing ones who could afford
the time to linger there; and even highly respectable merchants were to
be found sitting in shirt-sleeves at their writing-tables and wishing,
with Sydney Smith, that they could “sit in their bones.”
At the junction of the Poultry with Victoria Street, shadowed by the
Mansion House, from each side of the road a mysterious hoarding had just
been removed, revealing an iron railing enclosing a small area with a
mysterious staircase bearing the announcement that it led to the subway
to the new electric railway, connecting the City with Waterloo Station.
Descending a few steps, and emerging into a tunnelled incline, the
perspiring pedestrian quickly found that here, if anywhere, was a refuge
from the heat, the coolest place in London, and that it was well worth
while, on the pretence of urgent business across the water, to pay
twopence each way, merely to drink in the refreshing air wafted
backwards and forwards along subway, platform, and tube.
This was the Waterloo and City Railway, a short deep-level line on the
tube principle, nearly 1¾ miles long, burrowing under the Thames’ bed.
At the terminus, by rather prolonged inclines and staircases, passengers
could walk to the main or suburban platforms of Waterloo Station and
catch the trains for Wimbledon, Hampton Court, Surbiton, etc.
Like the City and South London, this railway meets a great want. Before
its opening, City men living down the London and South Western line had
no alternative but to catch a South Eastern train from Cannon Street or
Charing Cross; to take an omnibus _viâ_ the Strand across to Waterloo
Bridge; or to cab it by devious routes _viâ_ Blackfriars Bridge. Now
they can reach Waterloo with ease, comfort, and economy.
Under agreement, the line is worked by the London and South Western
Railway Company. The electrical equipment is by the famous firm of
Siemens Brothers, the generating station being up a blind alley
adjoining
[Illustration: FIG. 4. WATERLOO AND CITY RAILWAY’S NEW PATTERN CAR
_By permission of the_ _“Tramway and Railway World” Publishing Co.,
London_]
the dismal arched entrance to Waterloo from York Road. Each train seats
208 passengers; the average speed is 18 miles an hour, and its
usefulness is proved by the fact that over two and a half million
ordinary passengers were carried by it in one half-year, _i.e._ to
December 31st, 1902 (not counting season-ticket holders), while the
receipts for that period were £17,400.
During the busy hours of morning and evening the large trains are used
and always fill up rapidly, but in the slack times of midday single
motor-cars, each carrying 50 passengers, are sufficient to cope with the
traffic. The cars are rather stuffy, and, like the train cars, are
narrow and low. At each end is a small partitioned-off “cab,” where sits
a motor-man. No tickets are issued from the booking-office; but, as in
an omnibus, the conductor comes round and collects the fares, giving a
punched voucher in return, which is retained by the traveller.
THE LIVERPOOL OVERHEAD ELECTRIC RAILWAY
There are few overhead, or, rather, elevated, railways in the world.
Somehow they do not seem to be popular, and the tendency, in England at
least, is rather towards burrowing like the mole, than soaring above the
street level.
In Germany there is a wonderful instance of electrically driven overhead
line between Elberfeld and Barmen, on the mono-rail principle, the
trains hanging from tracks suspended high above rivers and public roads.
At the great Beckton gas works there has been in use since 1894 an
iron-built miniature railway elevated on pillars, and it is a curious
sight to witness busy little engines incessantly hauling coal trucks
from the pier to the retort houses. An ingenious example of the
elevated principle is to be seen at the Victoria Station, Manchester,
where a railway on a very reduced scale conveys passengers’ luggage from
one platform to another, and idlers are never tired of watching it. The
track, a double one, is suspended from the roof and runs between
platforms five and six. The motive power is electricity, and the motor
is placed between the wheels and the track, and it lifts and lowers a
basket which holds about 15 cwt. of luggage.
A wonderful instance of a _very_ elevated railway existed at Beachy Head
while the new lighthouse was being built 600 feet distant from the base
of the cliff, at that point 400 feet high. It conveyed material to the
site, the descending load drawing up the ascending empty “skip” on the
overhead suspension principle.
Our New York cousins have, in their elevated steam railway, long been
familiarised with the system, but for Londoners it possesses the fatal
objection that the occupants of the cars as they pass along can look
into the front windows of the houses and spy upon the occupants. Running
along docks, however, elevated railways are not objectionable; and the
earliest example, in this or any other country, of electricity applied
to overhead traction is at Liverpool.
Extending along the Mersey--that noble river whose tidal movement is
said to be four times the outfall of the Mississippi--for a distance of
6½ miles are the Liverpool Docks, in importance undoubtedly the first in
the world, but, until the Overhead Railway was opened, exasperatingly
inaccessible to business men whose time was valuable, and bewildering to
strangers by reason of their immensity.
Along the line of dock, it is true, ran broad-wheeled omnibuses built to
run on the low-level dock railway, but so slow, in consequence of the
pressure of traffic and the necessity for frequent shuntings for the
passage of goods trains, that to reach the farthest dock usually
occupied over an hour. To improve upon this it was proposed, as far back
as 1852, to construct a high-level railway; but nothing practical came
of it until 1888, when the Liverpool Overhead Railway Company took over
the parliamentary powers obtained by the Dock Board, and setting
steadily to work, created their line for passengers only, and, from the
first, achieved a great success, the number of travellers amounting to
many millions annually.
On the 4th of February, 1893, the railway was appropriately opened by
the ex-Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, whose devotion to the science of
electricity is well known. Pressing a button at the base of a silver
inkstand (subsequently presented to the Marquis as a memento), the
engines that generated the electric current were set in motion, and by
special train his lordship was conveyed over the seven miles of line,
and afterwards entertained at a banquet by the Mayor, when, in an
excellent speech, he dilated upon the prospect of electricity becoming
the motive power of the age.
In the following month the railway was opened for public traffic, and,
with its thirteen stations, its five minutes’ service, and its cheap
fares, practically extinguished the omnibuses, light or heavy.
From the Overhead Railway a splendid view is obtained of the busiest
locality perhaps in the empire. Below are the railway trucks packed
close with imported merchandise of all kinds: cotton from America and
the East; grain from the ends of the earth; beef, bacon, cheese, butter,
flour, and fruit from the New World; wool and tallow from Australia and
Argentina. Waggons
[Illustration: FIG. 5. THE LIVERPOOL OVERHEAD ELECTRIC RAILWAY
_By permission of the_ _Liverpool Overhead Electric Railway Co._]
and carts filled with Manchester goods, hardware, machinery, chemicals,
and every imaginable kind of manufactured goods are alongside the big
liners that come into port, discharge their cargoes, load up, and are
out in the Mersey and off to sea again in a few days. Truly Liverpool is
a wonderful place, and although her greatness as a seaport has been
threatened by the opening of the Ship Canal to Manchester, it will be a
long day before she surrenders her claim to be the chief marine approach
to Great Britain.
CHAPTER IV
_REMARKABLE ELECTRIC RAILWAYS_
“Behold they shall come with speed swiftly.”--ISAIAH v. 26.
MONO-RAILWAYS
A one-rail railway! What kind of novelty can that be, emanating no doubt
from the prolific brain of some enthusiastic engineer possessed with an
idea, a fad, a craze--call it what you will! We are accustomed to highly
respectable trains running in an orthodox manner on double rails. A
projected, many-railed track we have also heard of to carry ships bodily
across the Isthmus of Panama. But the idea of a single-rail “Flying
Dutchman” or “Wild Irishman” seems chimerical.
It is not so, however, and the system has been solemnly and deliberately
sanctioned by Act of Parliament.
Nowadays one need not be astonished at anything. Take cycling, for
instance. Long ago, when velocipedes--three or four-wheeled, uncanny
machines--were mere toys wherewith youths loved to dislocate their
joints on the lower terraces of the Crystal Palace, no one dreamt that
bicycles, outraging all the laws of gravitation and practically
mono-wheeled, would ere long be used on road and field and moor, on
mountain-side, on steppe and desert, over barren Asiatic tundras and
snow-clad Yukon plains--in short, wherever adventurous mankind has
penetrated.
The mono-rail train, like a bicycle, runs on one linear track, but,
unlike that hopelessly collapsible machine, requires no balancing, and
cannot capsize, and under proper conditions is the safest known method
of travelling at very great speed.
“_Faire prose sans le savoir_” is a familiar aphorism of Molière, but
perhaps it would astonish most of us to be calmly told by modern
engineers that all our lives we have, _without knowing it_, been
travelling on mono-railways! They assert that although it is true that
the ordinary engine with its coaches rests on a _pair_ of rails, the
fact that the space between the rails is cut away is immaterial, as it
is rendered a single track by the rigidity of the carriage axles, and if
these were loose, of course the train would overturn.
Nature has no example of mono-railwayism (to coin an expression), unless
it be the gossamer or shooting spider, that upon a single invisible
thread spun from its body ascends to aerial heights on a kind of
self-manufactured mono-rail, Dame Nature being too lavish and too wise,
in the perfect freedom she accords to birds, beasts, fishes, and
insects, to restrict their movements to one undeviating path.
In the moral world there have always been mono-railists, men of one
fixed idea, from which they could not, or would not, budge--apostles of
an ambition, a creed, a theory, a political conviction. The world has
had its Alexander the Great, its Napoleon, Buddha, St. Paul, Mahomet,
Martin Luther, Ignatius Loyola, Wycliffe, its Palissy, George
Stephenson, Mungo Park, John Bright, and Cobden.
It has been left to the inventive mechanical genius of the nineteenth
century to develop the mono-rail system. Doubtless those inscrutable
people, the Chinese, knew of it, and applied it in some way long ago;
and perhaps the yet more mysterious dwellers in ancient Egypt--whence
all wisdom seems to have descended--utilised it after some unknown
fashion.
Blondin, in his marvellous feat of trundling a wheel-barrow containing
a man along the high-level rope, used a hempen mono-rail; and the wire
cables stretching across the Thames at the reconstructed bridges at Kew
and Vauxhall, acting as travelling ways to convey the excavated soil
from the coffer-dams in large iron “skips” or buckets, were another
species of mono-rail; while at home in brickfields, and in mines, and on
plantations in distant lands, miniature railways have been used for
years to carry clay, ore, and produce, over plain and hill and dale.
In India a peculiar kind of tramway truck has been in use for some time,
with two or three flanged wheels which run on a single rail, and a large
balance-wheel on one side of the truck to prevent it toppling over.
Produce of all kinds can easily be drawn upon it by a couple of coolies,
and its efficiency on country roads has been highly spoken of.
Germany presents us with a recent and curious example of the application
of the principle to locomotion. In the Wupper Valley near Dusseldorf and
Cologne there are two towns, Barmen and Elberfeld, about eight miles
apart, mutually engaged in chemical and textile industries, and this
separation of the sister-towns was an obvious disadvantage to both. But
now they are joined by a wonderful railway, constructed on an elevated
line running six miles of its course above the River Wupper, a tributary
of the Rhine, some sixty to a hundred feet wide. The carriages are
suspended, and work upon a single rail, a development of the travelling
cable-way system. This rail is rigidly fastened to an iron framework of
girders, and supports the cars hanging therefrom by means of two steel
“bogies” with two wheels. Thus they can pass round sharp curves without
slackening speed and with the greatest safety, its motive power,
electricity, being applied by two motors on each carriage which drive
both wheels with equal force at a speed fixed at thirty-one miles an
hour, and attainable fifteen seconds after starting.
As elevated railways of this type are somewhat costly, and a simpler and
cheaper form would be a desideratum, a short line across country was
built as an experiment at Cologne-Deutz. The stays, measuring from 9·6
feet to 28·5 feet, were made either of wood, or of iron tubes, and met
at the top in a cap, from which was jointed the sheet-iron supports that
carried the mono-rail. By means of this jointed connection, the strain
was always of a central character, and, therefore, more easily borne. At
intervals of about 660 feet a couple of stays were firmly braced
together, in order to give stability to the overhead structure and to
take up the longitudinal thrust. In consequence, even with light
locomotives, the traction power was very high, and on the line at Deutz
it was found that a locomotive drawing two carriages full of passengers
could ascend a gradient of 1 in 6 with perfect safety.
But a means of adapting a mono-rail to every condition had some time
before been thought out. In 1883-4 Charles Lartigue, the eminent French
engineer, developing the principle conceived by the great Telford,
constructed some small lines in Tunis and Algeria for carrying esparto
grass. The cars were drawn by animals in a special form of mono-rail,
the model upon which Mr. F. B. Behr, ASS. INST. C.E.--who modestly
disclaims all originality in the matter--has worked for years, greatly
improving in practical details the original design, and constructing for
the first time mono-rail trains that have been successful in the
carriage of both goods and passengers by steam and electricity.
[Illustration: FIG. 6. PLAN OF A BEHR MONO-RAILWAY CAR
_By permission of Mr. F. B. Behr, Ass. Inst. C.E._]
The Lartigue single-rail system, as perfected by Mr. Behr, is as
follows, but of necessity my description is a mere outline.
Dismissing all preconceived ideas of rails laid down upon the ground, we
must imagine a heavy double-headed steel rail firmly bolted on to the
summit of a girder supported by trestles, the whole rigidly framed upon
massive sleepers. We thus have a permanent way somewhat resembling a
continuous A-shaped metal viaduct, raised about five feet from the
surface, or a succession of iron barriers--such as road-menders make
use of to divert the traffic--set ends on, secured to each other and to
the ground. Now take an ordinary railway car with seats arranged as in
an omnibus, but with two additional rows back to back in the centre.
Remove the axles and wheels, extending the sides and ends of the car
almost down to the ground level, thus providing beneath the flooring an
enclosure with ample room for the locomotive machinery. All along the
bottom of this enclosure is an opening or space, about five feet
high--extending between the middle rows of seats--that fits the A-shaped
viaduct, so that the car is suspended, or, as it were, sits upon the
mono-rail, whereon roll six vertical grooved wheels that, when set in
motion by the electric current, propel the cars. Thus we have a train
apparently without wheels, these together with the apparatus being
completely hidden away between and beneath the passengers’ seats. On
each side of the A-shaped trestle are fixed two guide-rails fitting
close into horizontal grooved wheels effectually checking all
oscillation. In front is the bogie locomotive motor with a pointed bow,
the stern of the car also being pointed, so that the entire arrangement
resembles when seen from above a great stickless rocket with a sharp and
flexible snout.
As the sister isle was the first to adopt electricity to a railway
(_vide_ Chapter II.), so was she the pioneer of mono-railism. In County
Kerry, Munster, near the Shannon’s mouth, stands the little town of
Listowel, and 9½ miles distant is Ballybunion. To connect these a
mono-railway for passenger and goods traffic was opened on March 1st,
1888, and has worked ever since without any difficulty. The trains are
drawn by a steam locomotive divided in two, one on each side of the
mono-rail--a kind of twin-screw arrangement--and with their smoke-stacks
and giant lantern between them, present a strange and rather comical
appearance, while the track meandering at its own sweet will across
country without fencing of any kind, adds to the novelty of the little
line.
Its great safety has been amply demonstrated by the only mishap that has
occurred to it. Some miscreant had deliberately removed the fastenings
from over thirty yards of the line at a critical point where a reverse
curve began, and close to a bridge. At full speed, a train carrying 200
passengers came up to the loosened rail, which gave way, breaking the
coupling chains and, luckily, bringing into action the automatic
Westinghouse brake. The permanent way was ruined by the shock, but the
fall absorbed the force of the reaction, and deposited the carriages
quietly on the ground without injury to anyone, and without even
breaking a window. On an ordinary line the train would have been thrown
off the metals into the river with terrible consequences. Shortly after
the line was opened, the Lartigue system was adopted in France, from
Tours to Pannissieres in the Loire Department.
The Ballybunion and Listowel Railway is the indirect father of a
modified form of mono-rail which is expected to appear this year at the
Crystal Palace. It is called the Electric Mid-Railway, the invention of
Mr. W. R. Smith, and as the line is to connect the existing railway
station with various points in the grounds, it should be well patronised
at the modest penny fare which is to be charged. Being an entire
novelty, it has a specially good chance of success in this particular
situation. The single rail is placed below the carriage, the weight of
which is balanced upon it after the fashion of a bicycle. On each side
of this single track runs a trestle carrying a rail on a level with the
centre of gravity of each carriage. This rail serves the necessary
purpose of supporting the carriage and of also preventing derailing.
A similar device had been suggested--and possibly has been carried into
effect on the New York and Washington D. C. Line--when it was proposed
to elevate a track above the earth on a single line of upright beams,
the trains to be kept steady by an auxiliary rail on either side, but
which would only come into play on rounding curves.
HIGH-SPEED ELECTRIC RAILWAYS
In Belgium, Mr. Behr, who throughout his labours there received the
personal encouragement and patronage of King Leopold II., successfully
built an experimental high-speed mono-rail line at Tervueren in the
neighbourhood of Brussels, as an annexe to the Exhibition of 1897. To
find suitable ground was the great difficulty. The line had to cross ten
public roads, and in the absence of compulsory powers, leases for the
land had to be arranged with grasping occupiers and owners. The soil was
bad, big cuttings and embankment were unavoidable, and finally the line
consisted of nothing but steep, up-and-down gradients. In fact, all the
conditions were most unfavourable, notwithstanding which, the result of
the experiment was conclusive in showing that with the mono-rail and
perfected electrical traction, very high speed, double that of existing
passenger express trains, could be attained with absolute safety, a
principle which Mr. Behr had for a long time past been particularly
impressed with, but which he maintains is not possible on the ordinary
two-rail track, even with electricity as a motive power.
In November, 1901, Mr. Behr went to Berlin, and investigated the
experiments carried out during forty days by a number of engineering
experts on a military track laid down between the German capital and
Zossen. It was hoped that a speed of 160 miles an hour would be attained
and maintained, and, as a matter of fact, starting from a low speed, the
train gradually reached that of 87 miles; then, for a moment only, 95
miles; and for an instant of time, 100 miles per hour; but it was at
once discernible that the ordinary two-rail permanent way, though
straight, could not bear the terrific strain imposed upon it; the rails
bent at many places, while the hundred-miles-an-hour rate had so
destructive an effect as to render impracticable any attempt to create a
higher record. The air resistance was found to be considerable. With a
square-fronted instead of a pointed coach, it was appreciable, and the
suction behind the train resembled the pressure of the water at the
stern of a mail steamer, and was calculated to equal two-thirds of the
“bow” resistance. These experiments went to prove that for excessive
velocity an ordinary railway was absolutely unsafe.
A year before this, a steam locomotive train had been tried in America
by the Baltimore and Ohio Railway Company, on the Adams principle of
reducing the atmospheric resistance to a minimum. It consisted of six
cars, a tender, and an engine of fifty-seven tons. The entire train was
sheathed down to within eight inches of the track. There were no
projections, and all the windows were flush; the cars were coupled close
together, and the rear one was run off to a point, the train resembling
one long sinuous and flexible carriage.
With this comparatively light engine it is said that the forty miles
between Baltimore and Washington were covered in thirty-seven and a half
minutes. But it was claimed that with a more powerful locomotive the
train could have been easily run at the rate of one mile in thirty-five
seconds, or nearly two miles a minute.
These speeds appear tremendous, but custom would soon reconcile us to
them. Our forefathers thought fifteen miles an hour terrific; and one of
the objections to Stephenson’s ideas was, that at such a speed, not to
mention a twenty-or twenty-five-mile rate, no human being could draw
breath.
Since then we have quietly acquiesced in and equally welcomed a style of
travelling varying from 35 to an average of 58 miles an hour, and even
consider it no great feat to run a special viceregal train from Euston
to Holyhead--263½ miles--in five hours without stopping, and are not
astonished to read of last year’s record run of the mail express from
Boulogne to Paris--168 miles--at an average speed of 68 miles an hour!
Still, 120 miles every sixty minutes without stopping is a large order,
and in practice would give some remarkable results. For instance, a
resident at Putney could be whisked from the station nearest to him, and
thence to a point adjoining his office--say in Seething Lane, some seven
miles off--in less than five minutes. Brighton could be reached from
town in twenty-five minutes; Dover, in forty; Edinburgh, in three hours
twenty minutes. Inverness--663 miles away--could be arrived at from
Euston in six hours twenty minutes, instead of the fifteen hours
thirty-five minutes of the ordinary express; and Paris--allowing one
hour thirty minutes for the Channel passage--in three hours forty-two
minutes.
THE MANCHESTER AND LIVERPOOL ELECTRIC EXPRESS RAILWAY
Now, the contention of the advocates of the monorail principle is,
that only by that system can very high speed be safely attained; and
when one comes to closely examine the cars in which this
hundred-and-ten-miles-per-hour travelling is achieved, confidence is at
once inspired, because of their low centre of gravity and consequent
unlikeliness of derailment.
There remains only one question--_Cui bono?_ What useful purpose can be
served by being able to get from Liverpool to Manchester in twenty
minutes instead of over an hour? On an emergency, such as a sudden
necessity for the services of a medical specialist, a matter of life or
death perhaps, or on the occasion of any crisis in domestic or
mercantile life when the instant presence of some one distant individual
is imperative, it might be of immense service. But in the usual course
of business, do not existing railways bring merchant and broker,
importer and manufacturer, face to face quickly enough, and are not
telephones and telegraphs and the post sufficient to carry through big
transactions between the centre of the cotton trade and the great city
on the banks of the Mersey? Public opinion, which demands increasing
speed in every phase of life, especially in travelling, declares they
are not sufficient; for we live in an impatient age when every hour of
detention on a transatlantic passage is begrudged.
Therefore it is not to be wondered at that in 1900-1, after the most
exhaustive inquiries and criticisms, the royal assent was given August
17th, 1901, to the Manchester and Liverpool Electric Express Railway,
which was duly authorised by Act of Parliament. It must be premised that
the line, like our London Tube, does not provide for goods traffic; that
the time occupied by the journey being so short, neither luggage-van,
lavatory, or refreshment buffet is required, and that all trains consist
of a single car, couplings being a source of danger at so great a rate
of speed. But as the trains run every ten minutes, and carry about forty
persons each time, a large passenger traffic is provided for.
Well--a broker has been telephoned for by his client, a wealthy
cotton-spinner in Manchester, anxious to consult with him personally; so
he at once leaves the flags of the Exchange, and after an eight minutes’
walk arrives at the Express Railway Station, near the entrance gate of
the Blue Coat Hospital in School Lane. He considers that in getting into
and out of the lift he has lost two minutes, but he just catches his car
and starts for a run of 34½ miles to Manchester, and since it is his
first experience of lightning travelling, he notices everything
connected with the new line. There are many curves, he finds, all
necessary in order to avoid conflict with the vested interests of other
railway companies; the gradients, he observes, at points about
three-quarters of a mile from the Liverpool and Manchester stations, are
steep--1 in 25, and 1 in 30--but of service in accelerating and breaking
the trains.
Unlike the Listowel mono-rail line, the Manchester and Liverpool express
is fenced from end to end with an unclimbable barrier, and as there are
no level-crossings and no means of access, there is no possibility of
trespassing. Also, for the security of the workmen employed in
maintaining the track as on an ordinary railway--the system of “packing”
the sleepers and inspecting the various parts being common to all
railways--a clear space of three feet is left between the passing
trains, and strong posts, ten feet apart, are fixed along the centre of
the space for the labourers to hold on by when an express rushes by.
Collisions, our broker quickly perceives, are impossible, there being no
switches, and notwithstanding the multitude of passengers (some twenty
thousand per day) there are never more than two cars on the line at a
time, and there are no stoppages between the two termini.
For signalling purposes, the line is divided into four sections of about
five miles each, and as the train passes by, its electric motor
automatically operates the signal and immediately “blocks” the section
behind it, so that the train following cannot advance until its leader
has cleared the five-mile division.
The driver and conductor are both together in the front part of the
train, so that the conductor has ample time to look out for the signals,
to apply the brakes, and assist his mate. The brakes are of the
Westinghouse pattern, and the two combined can stop the cars in about
800 yards, even at the speed of 110 miles an hour. These can be aided by
Mr. Behr’s ingenious device, which Sir William H. Preece considers quite
practicable, viz. louvres or shutters, which, when opened, materially
increase the air resistance.
Past Toxteth Park, Garston, Halewood, Widnes (whose only rival in sheer
ugliness is perhaps London’s Stratford-by-Bow), and exactly half-way,
Warrington, conspicuous for the inkiness of its river Mersey, and noted
for its glass, wire, and chemical industries; famed for its network of
waterways, especially for the great but evil-smelling ship-canal; noted
in history--when but a hamlet, with a clear trout-yielding stream--as
the camping-ground of the young Pretender when on his march to Derby in
1745; and associated with Mrs. Gaskell (whose “Cranford” is identified
with Knutsford, a neighbouring village), the two Bishops Claughton,
Viscount Cross, Luke Fildes, R.A., and “Warrington” Wood, the sculptor.
Close by, in the parish of Great Sankey, is the power-generating
station of the railway, the current obtained being 15,000 volts on the
triphase alternating system, converted in five sub-stations placed along
the line, into a continuous 650 volt current. Every car has four
traction motors arranged in pairs, each with a full-speed capacity of
160 h.p., equal to 110 miles an hour. The cars are comfortably
upholstered; the seats are separated and placed back to back in the
middle, those along the sides facing inwards, as in the Twopenny Tube.
The lighting is, of course, excellent, and the ventilation perfect,
though to prevent accident the windows are fixed, and the doors, while
the train is in motion, are automatically locked.
[Illustration: FIG. 7. INTERIOR OF A BEHR MONO-RAILWAY CAR
_By permission of_ _Mr. F. B. Behr, Ass. Inst. C. E._]
As regards the cost of this novel undertaking, our Liverpool friend had
beforehand ascertained that the capital had been fixed at £2,800,000,
and that an average of eight persons per train would more than cover the
expense of the enterprise.
Swiftly leaving Warrington in the distance, the express shoots
onwards--past Eccles, Pendleton, and Salford--and reaches the terminus
at the west side of Deansgate, in the busiest part of Cottonopolis,
where, again using the lift, our honest broker speeds to the Exchange in
another eight minutes, and in forty-five minutes after leaving Liverpool
is in deep business conference with his principal at Manchester.
Contrast this with the existing facilities of the old system for rapid
transit between the two places; and those who know their Manchester and
Liverpool well, will at once be able to decide whether or not the
electric express better meets the requirements of those to whom every
minute is of consequence.
The London and North Western Railway (which has a perfectly straight bit
of track to Manchester, unequalled, except on the Great Eastern between
Littleford and Lynn--21 miles--and on the South Eastern between Nutfield
and Ashford--32 miles) runs expresses without stopping from Lime Street
and Edge Hill to the Exchange Station, Manchester, doing the journey in
forty minutes.
The Great Central Railway, by an indirect route, _viâ_ Garston and
Widnes, runs expresses from their Liverpool station (St. James’s) direct
to the Manchester Central, in from forty to forty-five minutes; but on
neither line is there such a thing as a ten minutes’ service, the
intervals between the direct expresses ranging from forty-five minutes
to so much as four hours.
Plans, it is said, have been submitted to the Board of Trade for a
mono-railway between Edinburgh and Glasgow. The proposed construction is
similar to that of the Behr mono-railway between Liverpool and
Manchester. It is quite unlike the canny Scot to rush into sensational
experiments for a speed of 117 miles per hour, especially as a few
years’ waiting for the completion of the Liverpool line would prove or
disprove the possibility of the scheme.
CHAPTER V
_REJUVENATING THE METROPOLITAN INNER CIRCLE_
“So that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s.”--Ps. ciii. 5.
CONSTRUCTION OF THE METROPOLITAN AND METROPOLITAN DISTRICT RAILWAYS
Can anything be satisfactorily rejuvenated? Is there any truth in the
Medean story that old age can revert to the vigour of young manhood?
In 1903 the usual reply is “No.” If a theatre becomes dilapidated, it is
pulled down. If a railway-station gets much out of repair, the company
proceeds to reconstruct, and not to patch up. If a macadamised
thoroughfare gives signs of too much wear and tear, it is broken up and
relaid with wood blocks.
In fact, rejuvenation on a large scale is so seldom attempted that the
scheme for renovating and electrifying the Inner Circle Railway may be
regarded as something remarkable.
For convenience we will call it the Inner Circle, but, as we all know,
it is a dual concern controlled by the Metropolitan and the Metropolitan
District, both of them old enough to have a respectable history.
Fifty years ago railways within the boundaries of Inner London were
non-existent, the nearest points approached by the country lines being
at Battersea, Euston, St. Pancras, Shoreditch, Paddington, London
Bridge, and Waterloo--miles away from the central districts.
It was an ideal time for omnibus companies, who charged pretty well what
they liked: and for cabmen, whose fare was nominally restricted to
eightpence a mile, but who were masters of the situation when passengers
with luggage had to be conveyed from the termini. Yet, although many
suggestions were made, including that of a great central station where
all the lines might converge, the travelling world was considerably
startled in 1854 by a proposition laid before Parliament to construct an
underground line from Farringdon Street to Bishop’s Road, Paddington;
and so astonished were capitalists that although the bill passed, the
money was so slow in coming in that work could not be begun until six
years later!
In planning the route a golden opportunity was lost of anticipating the
Twopenny Tube; but the opposition of Oxford Street was so fierce that
the line had to be poked away beneath the Marylebone Road in the
north-west of London, convenient for residents in Paddington and
Bayswater, but useless to other districts, and, what was more important,
it did not go to the Bank, the centre of the business world.
However, we, then as now, were but a slow people, therefore really
comprehensive schemes found little favour in the “fifties” and
“sixties.” For three years the Marylebone and Euston roads were closed
to traffic, and presented the appearance of a besieged city’s outskirts
where deep trenches and fortifications were being made. The roadway was
removed to a great depth; pipes and sewers were taken away and replaced;
foundations were underpinned, and a series of solid brick tunnels were
slowly and laboriously constructed and covered up. The plank pathways,
the noise, and the smells, drove householders along the route to
desperation; and, on nearing the City, the problem of dealing with the
old Fleet Ditch was at one period thought insoluble. No wonder that,
what with compensation to owners of damaged property, the acquisition of
necessary land, and engineering difficulties, the cost of the line at
some points mounted up to a million sterling per mile!
At last the first section was completed; and in September, 1862, a trial
trip was made. A contemporary picture represents the train passing
Portland Road Station, its open trucks in the rear full of enthusiastic
guests waving flags and tall hats--after luncheon probably--evidently
delighted with the success of the undertaking. But at the formal
opening, January 9th, 1863, a grand banquet was given in the Farringdon
Street Station, three long tables occupying the rail and platform space,
with a [ shaped table on a daïs for the principal guests.
The following day thirty thousand passengers journeyed over the line,
and everybody in London talked about the Underground as somewhat of a
marvel. But people exhibited strange ignorance on the subject, nervous
people preparing for wonderful possibilities, imagining that the cellars
would collapse as the trains thundered by, or that the houses would
tumble through on to the line, flinging their occupants before some
passing engine!
Yet, after all, the Underground was only an ordinary tunnel (such as
pierce a score of hills), placed in an exceptional position in the midst
of London.
Bit by bit, as years went by, the Metropolitan Railway extended itself
eastward and westward to High Street, Kensington, whence the District
Railway that had sprung into existence went ahead and got as far as
Westminster, its line being partly open and partly tunnelled. There the
District stuck for three years, and then found its way into the City (a
great boon as an alternative route). At the Mansion House Station it
seemed determined to rest for a long period; the Metropolitan showing
the same propensity at the Moorgate Street sheds, until City men began
to give up all hope of the two ends ever meeting.
It came about at last, however, and the year 1884 witnessed the
completion of the irregular Inner Circle--a total length of about 12½
miles--by way of Bishopsgate, Aldgate, Mark Lane, the Monument, and
Cannon Street, without any serious disturbance of the traffic, but with
much wonderful underpinning of warehouses and offices (a notable
instance of this operation being beneath King William the Fourth’s
statue, which weighs over 250 tons!).
At first there were no smoking-carriages, but the numerous complaints on
the subject induced the directors to alter their rules, and they went to
the other extreme, so that now non-smokers think there seem to be more
smoking-carriages than any others.
In its young days the Metropolitan was clean and its atmosphere
tolerable. In fact, it had been proposed to use smokeless engines, but
for some reason the idea was abandoned, and, as the main railway lines
began to send out feelers towards the inner districts of London, they
sought for, and obtained, running powers over the Underground, junctions
being made with the Great Northern Railway and Great Western, the London
and North Western, and the Midland. Consequently, the number of trains
immensely increased, and the smoke nuisance was intensified. Ventilating
shafts were adopted, and afforded some relief, but the imprisoned fog of
winter precipitated the “blacks,” and summer weather only made the
atmosphere still more stifling; while Baker Street, Gower Street, and
King’s Cross stations and tunnels were positive infernos, and for how
many deaths from asthma and bronchitis they were responsible no one
knows!
The rolling-stock of the Metropolitan became dirtier and dirtier, grime
and disfigurement settled down upon it, and everybody’s experience of it
resembled that of Mrs. Lilian Rosamond, described in Chapter VIII.
THE NEW DISTRICT RAILWAY
Just opposite St. Mark’s College, Chelsea, is a narrow thoroughfare
called Lot’s Road, leading to a creek that separates the Borough from
Fulham. Tradition says that the locality was formerly known as “The
Lots” (about four acres in extent), and was granted to a Sir Arthur
Gorges by the lord of the manor, in lieu of certain rights over land
which he gave up for the formation of the Kensington Canal; but
incredulous old folk dismissed this tradition with contempt, and
maintained that there was a Chelsea personage named Lot, very distantly
related to the patriarch’s nephew, who pitched his tent in the fertile
Jordan Valley, and that the dismal Chelsea wastes so much resembled the
desolateness of the fatal plains, that diligent search therein might
even result in the discovery of the Pillar of Salt, brought over to this
country at some remote period by a pious descendant! But whoever, or
whatever, the name Lot may represent, it is now associated with one of
the greatest electrical undertakings of the age--the huge generating
station of the Underground Electric Railway Company of London, Limited,
who, as at present arranged, will supply the District and other railways
with power.
At the bottom of Lot’s Road, and at a point on the Middlesex bank of
Battersea Reach, facing the ugly parish church of St. Mary, is the
mouth of Chelsea Creek, filled twice a day by the muddy waters of the
Thames, and here the Electrical Works are being erected. They are in
sight of an obscure cottage in Cheyne Walk where the painter Turner
lived in concealment, and where he died. The building, with its four
great chimney-shafts, is unæsthetic to a degree, and Turner would
probably have thought it ruined his favourite landscape. But it
represents something more valuable than æsthetic effect.
When Matthew Doulton, in the infancy of steam, took the Russian Prince
Potemkin round the works at Soho, Manchester, the distinguished visitor
inquired, “What do you sell here?” “We make and sell here,” replied
James Watts’ partner, “that which all the world wants--_Power_.” And
this, on a scale undreamt of by the famous engineer, is what the
Underground Electric Railway Company of London will produce, in view of
the river scenery so much admired by the chief of impressionists, and
which he never wearied of depicting.
This temple of electric force will be the largest in the Old World. In
New York, the Manhattan and the Metropolitan companies both have power
stations slightly smaller. The Rapid Transit Commission have projected
one that will be bigger, while the Waterside station of the Edison
Illuminating Company (partially completed) is on a still larger scale.
It has, however, been stated that the biggest power scheme on earth will
be at Massena, on the St. Lawrence River, Canada, where there will be
fifteen Westinghouse machines, equal to a total of 75,000 kilowatts.
Within the temple there will be turbo-generators fifty feet in length
and ten feet high, constructed by the British Westinghouse Company at
their Trafford Park
[Illustration: FIG. 8. ELECTRICAL POWER HOUSE (THE LARGEST IN THE OLD
WORLD) LOT’S ROAD, CHELSEA, TO SUPPLY THE METROPOLITAN DISTRICT AND
OTHER RAILWAYS WITH CURRENT
_By permission of the_ _Underground Electric Railways Co. of London,
Ltd._]
Works, Manchester, capable of producing the prodigious quantity of
60,000 electrical kilowatts, at a pressure, or force, technically
speaking, of 11,000 volts. In other words, about 100,000 horse-power
could be sent out, theoretically equal to the lifting of over 1,000,000
tons a foot high every minute.[3] Six such power stations could,
therefore, move the great pyramid of Cheops (over 6,000,000 tons
weight), and carry it bodily off on colossal rails, and dump it down
anywhere to order.
For condensing purposes, an enormous quantity of water will be required,
and every twenty-four hours 19,000,000 gallons of water (at times
mounting up to 40,000,000 gallons) will be drawn from the creek for use
in the power house.
The force of 11,000 volts will be much too powerful for direct
application to the purposes of locomotion. It requires reducing by
transformers and rotary converters into the safe and ordinary current of
about 550 volts, which will be effected at sub-stations--Earl’s Court,
South Kensington, Victoria, Charing Cross, Mansion House, and other
places along the line. To these the current will be sent from the power
house, and reduced by the transformers into ordinary low-pressure
voltage, and the fiery O.P. spirit tamed to a pleasant and portable
“under-proof” standard! The current will then be distributed to two
conductor-rails, one located between the present running rails, and the
other outside them. The motors on the trains will receive the current
from one rail by means of a sliding contact-shoe, and return it to the
other rail in the same manner. In passing through the motor the
electricity causes the armature to revolve, which motion, by means of
gearing, is communicated to the carriage axle.
So much for the driving-power of the trains. But what kind of trains do
the public expect?
[Illustration: FIG. 9. A 2,000 H.P. WESTINGHOUSE STEAM TURBINE,
RESEMBLING THE TURBO-GENERATORS (EACH OF 7,500 H.P.) IN THE CHELSEA
POWER HOUSE.
_By permission of the_ _Westinghouse Companies, Ltd., London_]
Surely not the old carriages cleaned up and re-upholstered--made “to
last a little longer,” until broken up for firewood and old iron. The
public will not be disappointed in the new cars, nothing as yet having
been seen in London to equal them.
The trains will be run on the principle of the multiple unit. That is,
each will be made up of seven coaches--three long motor-cars and four
trail-cars--with a motor-man’s cab at each end, and one in the centre.
These eight-wheeled coaches will be rectangular at the sides--not
sloping like those of the Waterloo Tube Company--and very roomy, 52
feet long and about 8 feet 2 inches wide inside, and about 8 feet 7
inches from the floor to the middle of the roof.
[Illustration: FIG. 10. A NEW METROPOLITAN DISTRICT RAILWAY CAR
_By permission of the_ _Underground Electric Railways Co. of London,
Ltd._]
The arrangement of the seats will be somewhat different from that of the
Tube. There will, of course, be corridor cars, which will be entered
from the platforms, through telescopic doors; there will be also sliding
doors. The gain in leg-space will be great, the centre gangway giving a
clear 4 feet, and there will be fewer cross seats. Each train will hold
about 338 passengers; the ventilation of the cars will be perfect; and
the height sufficient for a giant. As the District tunnels are 25 feet
in diameter, and 15 feet 9 inches from the rail level to the crown of
the arch, there will be about 2 feet of head-room, about 2 feet 6 inches
between each train, and the same between the trains and the sides of the
tunnels.
Compare this with the present Inner Circle trains that carry about three
hundred passengers, with gangways that, even in the first-class
compartments, leave no room for incomers to avoid a leg entanglement,
and whose height will hardly admit a tall man in a tall hat to stand
upright. Also compare it with the dimensions of the Central’s cars,
which are 39 feet long, 8 feet wide, and whose height to the middle of
roof is only 7 feet 5 inches, the gangway narrow, with seats in each car
for forty-eight people. The space in the cars of the City and South
London, and the Waterloo and City, is still more exiguous.
It is proposed to run about twice as many trains as at present, each
journey to be made in about two-thirds of the time now required; that is
to say, the trains that now run about ten miles an hour will, it is
anticipated, work up to at least fifteen miles; the total carrying
capacity being estimated at 70,000,000 per annum, increasable, if
necessary, to 100,000,000. There may be an all-night service, for the
convenience of people engaged at Covent Garden market, and for
journalists and others whose work lies in the vicinity of Fleet Street.
A somewhat novel and economical feature will be that the trains, during
the stock hours of the day, can be run in short lengths, as in the City
and Waterloo Railway, and, with their triple motors divided, will
resemble those strange Naidæ worms of the Annelida class that possess
the power of increasing by mechanical division. They will also be able
to go forward and backward without reversing the motor engines.
Brilliant will be the lighting of the cars and stations; the tunnels,
too, are to be illuminated. Fresh air will be obtained by the frequent
movements of the trains through the tunnels, while smoke and smuts will,
of course, become things of the past. The stations, with their wide and
roomy platforms, will in some cases be lengthened by fifty feet to
accommodate the three-hundred-and-fifty-feet-long trains, and be
thoroughly cleansed and repainted, and the tunnels may possibly be
whitened by means of “spraying”--the principle adopted at the Chicago
Exhibition for the finials of the pavilions.
The question of classes, fares, and tickets has not yet been settled,
but we may assume that the system adopted will be somewhat like that of
the Tube. The entire project closely resembles the Metropolitan
Underground Railway of Paris, and the Boston Subway. Lifts are not at
present contemplated, and probably their absence will be no great loss
to active travellers, nor even to the “old, subdued, and slow,” for
trains will so quickly succeed one another that the missing of one will
involve no serious delay. Possibly, however, as time goes on, some new
and convenient form of sloping footway may be adopted.
But alas! for the lovers of the beautiful, the directors, we are told,
“have not decided that they will be warranted in sacrificing, on
æsthetic grounds, the revenue derived from advertisements.”
Then, again, as there will be little or no waiting, even the most
impatient of _voyageurs_ will hardly need the diversion obtained by a
trial of the omnipresent penny-in-the-slot machines, or the
contemplation of the numerous works of art displayed on the station
walls. They will not even need the bookstalls, much less to gape at the
contents-bills of the daily paper.
And, provided the glass roofs be kept clean, and the atmosphere innocent
of smoke and gas, might not the stations--sheltered as they are from the
vagaries of weather, and brilliantly lighted--be transformed into
modified winter gardens, with sturdy flowers and shrubs filling up nooks
and corners, and bold paintings (frequently renewed) of distant lands,
seascapes, and historical subjects, in the recesses now covered by
“Reckitt’s Blue,” etc.? The frequent stopping of trains would be
actually welcomed, and people would travel by the “Circle” for the sake
of seeing the novelties! In fact, every station might be converted into
a thing of beauty.
One other suggestion for the directors of the new Inner Circle. Cannot
something be contrived in the new cars to effectually deaden the sound
of the closing and opening of doors, so irritating to modern nerves, and
unpleasantly associated with the “banging” in the old carriages, and the
“clashing” of the telescopics in the Tubes.
THE NEW METROPOLITAN RAILWAY
The Metropolitan Railway will be electrified in a very similar manner to
the District Railway, the system being the same, _i.e._ alternating
three-phase, converted at sub-stations into continuous current. Access
to the platforms will be by short staircases, and not by lifts. It is
said that when steam is abolished the appearance of the stations may
possibly be improved, but the advertisements are too important a source
of revenue to be removed, and, as the Company says, “they act as a
relief to the bare walls, and their withdrawal would answer no good”! An
effort will be made to cleanse the tunnels, but it has not yet been
decided what method will be adopted.
There exist an abundance of open spaces, ventilating-shafts, and holes,
and the frequent passing of trains in contrary directions will
necessarily keep the air in motion, and thus, as in the District, the
problem of ventilation will solve itself.
The cars will be of the corridor type, seven to a full train, each end
car and the middle one having a motor, and if the contingencies of the
traffic do not require a large train, it will thus be possible to divide
it and run it in two parts. The seating will be both transverse and
longitudinal, and considerably over four hundred passengers it is said
can be accommodated in each full train. As to day and night services,
their frequency, the fares, and the distinction of classes, nothing has
yet been decided.
About a mile from Wembly, where “Watkins’ Folly,” as it is locally
called--at one time aspiring, like Babel’s, to “reach unto
heaven”--shows gauntly against the skyline its first stage of only 150
feet, is Neasden, where, on land belonging to the Metropolitan Railway,
is being erected its power house (the most extensive in the kingdom
owned by a single railway company), capable of producing some 14,000
kilowatts. Water in abundance will be obtained by means of artesian
wells now being bored in the chalk; and coal can be readily supplied.
The current will be applied to cars, as on the District, by a
conductor-rail placed in the near side of the permanent way, with a
return fixed in the centre of the running track. By the end of 1903 it
is hoped that the work will be sufficiently advanced for some trains to
be run by electricity. Finally, as the Metropolitan’s engineer-in-chief
remarks, there will be no marked novelties, but “the very conversion
from steam to electric traction will prove a great novelty and an
attraction. New cars of the latest type will be introduced, the stations
will be bright and cheerful, the atmosphere pure; travel will be
undertaken with a greater degree of comfort, and freedom from
disagreeable odours. In short, nothing that can reasonably be expected
to be performed in the interests of the public will be left undone.”
AMERICAN CAPITAL
A good deal has been said in reference to the source whence the
necessary capital has been obtained for rejuvenating the Inner Circle,
patriotic people objecting to the so-called Americanising of this great
undertaking, though it is hardly a logical objection.
If British capitalists are lacking in enterprise, there is no reason why
London should wait until they evince it. The world will not go to sleep
while Lombard Street hesitates. As Mr. Perks, M.P., Chairman of the
District Company has said, out of the five millions sterling invested in
the new Underground Electric Railway Companies of London, Limited, less
than two millions were held in America, and three millions on this side
the Atlantic. “I do not care,” he said, “where the money comes from, so
long as it is good money”--a wise remark, like the _non olet_ of
Suetonius. What matters it whence the materials of a sovereign have
come? They cannot be ear-marked, and whether its gold is Brazilian,
Australian, South African, or American, is of no consequence. It is a
legal tender, and worth twenty silver shillings.
Another matter that has engaged public attention is the apparent
difference of opinion between the Metropolitan and the Metropolitan
District Companies, as to the control of the Inner Circle. Nature has
designed them to be one, and but for vested and promoters’ interests,
they probably would have been one from the first. They are not merely
brother and sister, but are united by a closer tie, therefore their
motto surely ought to be _Quis separabit_!
Let us hope that long before the scheme is completed there will be a
reconciliation, and a satisfactory working arrangement made “out of
court” between these two parties to an unnecessary divorce suit.
The two lines have carried their millions of passengers, and the
rejuvenated Inner Circle during its new and beneficent career is
destined to carry very many millions more, and prove a great boon to the
metropolis.
CHAPTER VI
_THE CENTRAL LONDON ELECTRIC RAILWAY_
“Tell by what paths, what subterranean ways.”--BLACKMORE.
HISTORY OF THE RAILWAY AND ITS CITY SUBWAYS
When those electric traction pioneers, the City and South London, and
the Waterloo and City Railways, were opened respectively in 1890 and
1898, they were regarded by the public with a certain amount of apathy.
But when, in July, 1900, the Central London Railway, inaugurated by the
Prince of Wales, was opened for traffic, and it was realised that the
line was laid literally in the centre of London, beneath one of the
greatest street routes in existence, viz. Cheapside, Newgate Street,
Holborn, Oxford Street, Bayswater and Uxbridge roads, and was capable of
dealing with a gigantic stream of passengers at a uniform fare for any
distance, it arrested universal attention, and for a time nothing was
talked about but the deep-level system for metropolitan railways; and by
general approbation the Central was forthwith dubbed “The Twopenny
Tube,” a name it will always retain.
Like most great enterprises, the Tube Railway had to contend against
considerable opposition before legislative sanction could be obtained
for its construction. It was incorporated on August 5th, 1891, after a
great battle with Parliament and local authorities, in which affray the
late Mr. J. H. Greathead, M. INST. C. E. (deviser of one of the methods
of shield-excavating for driving tunnels), took a conspicuous part, and
the principle of a “free-way-leave” beneath the streets was successfully
confirmed.
The original directors were Mr. Henry Tennant (at one time General
Manager of the North Eastern Railway Company), Lord Colville of Culross
(Director of the Great Eastern Railway Company), Sir Francis Knollys
(Director of the Great Northern Railway Company), the Hon. A. H. Mills
(of Glyn, Mills, Currie, and Co.), and the Right Hon. D. R. Plunket
(Director of the North London Railway Company). Thus the railway element
was strongly represented; the financial to a small but very important
extent, and Court influence by two prominent members of the households
of the Prince and Princess of Wales.
The Company was authorised to construct a double underground line from
Liverpool Street to Shepherds Bush (about 6½ miles); but the plan was
modified, and the Bank of England became the City starting-point. In
their prospectus the directors modestly predicted an annual passenger
traffic of some forty-two millions (or seven millions per mile of line);
but this estimate has been largely exceeded, the average being about
fifty-two millions per annum, or one million per week.
The Company’s capital ultimately reached the sum of nearly four millions
sterling, so the line can hardly be called a cheap one in point of
construction; for, although the “way-leave” beneath the streets was
free, land had to be bought for the surface booking-offices, costly
shafts had to be sunk to the requisite depth, and tunnels driven, and
numerous subterranean stations had to be built. Thus, apart from the
cost of the rolling-stock and installation of a large current-generating
station, the initial expenses soon mounted up.
All the booking-offices and stations are built on one principle, each
with its great electric lift; but special interest attaches to the City
terminus.
It was necessary to make use, somehow, of the open space between the
Mansion House, the Bank, and the Royal Exchange--an ideal spot for a
central railway station. But how was it to be effected? For years the
Civic Fathers had contemplated the construction of subways for the
safety and convenience of foot-passengers at this, which has been termed
the busiest--as it is almost the most dangerous--spot in the world,
though I doubt whether in the year 1903 Piccadilly Circus does not run
it hard.
The Central Railway Company approached the Corporation on the subject,
and eventually it was agreed between the parties that the Railway
Company, in return for being allowed the privilege of constructing their
station beneath the open space, without payment, should make the public
subways, and hand them over in perpetuity to the City.
So for many months the pavement in front of the Royal Exchange was
disfigured by a lofty wooden hoarding, which completely concealed a
shaft, wherein some mysterious work was progressing. But beyond this
there was no outward indication of what was going on below; and,
although the entire roadway in front of the Mansion House was being
undermined, the vast traffic continued as usual.
Arranging this station proved to be one of the stiffest bits of
engineering work ever attempted. Drain-pipes were ubiquitous--a perfect
tangle that had to be diverted. There were old disused and
long-forgotten pipes, electric cables, hydraulic power pipes, pneumatic
tubes, gas and water mains--a maze and wilderness of underground
communications. These were all rearranged in a special pipe-tunnel, 14
feet wide. Then, at a depth of about 20 feet, the booking-office was
built, bit by bit, of steel-work, which had previously been temporarily
put together in a field to ensure its fitting exactly into the
excavation prepared for its accommodation--an area 145 feet one way and
75 feet the other, its outline being on the curve. Its roof, consisting
of girders supporting steel troughing, was filled up with concrete, and
finally with asphalte, upon which thousands of people pass daily without
realising what is below them. Access to the booking-office is gained by
numerous entrances _viâ_ the public subway: two on the Royal Exchange
pavement, two at the bottom of Mansion House Place, one at the Poultry
corner, and one at Walbrook, one in front of the Safe Deposit City
buildings, two each at the corners of Princes Street and Cornhill, and
one at St. Mary Woolnoth Church. The entire arrangement reminds one of a
mole’s subterranean fortress, with its galleries for entrance and exit
branching off in various directions.
These subways, immense conveniences which should be adopted at every
_rond-point_ in London--though it is a strange fact that _habitués_ of
the City seldom use them, they being patronised chiefly by the
“work-girl” and by casual visitors to the central “square mile”--are 15
feet wide and 9 feet high, are lined with glazed brick, and have
electric-lighted stairways at the above-mentioned places.
DESCRIPTION OF THE RAILWAY
Some fifty feet below the Bank of England Station are the twin-tunnels
and their platforms, approached by five lift shafts of twenty feet, and
one stairway shaft of eighteen feet diameter; at a deeper level still
are the tubes of the City and South London Railway, crossing the City
_en route_ to Islington.
These great passenger lifts work with wonderful smoothness (_facile
descensus Averno est_), and without them no fewer than ninety-three
steps would have to be painfully descended.
We are all familiar by this time with the other ten surface stations of
the Twopenny Tube (at the Post Office, Marble Arch, etc.). They are
nearly all alike, and look as if they were waiting for a substantial and
lofty building to be erected upon them, and have little claim to
architectural beauty. The platforms, necessarily rather contracted in
area, are clean and bright, owing to the extensive use of opalite tiling
and glazed bricks, ever spotless, and practically indestructible. Each
train consists of six eight-wheeled bogie-cars, 45½ feet long, with
well-upholstered seats, arranged longitudinally and crosswise, for
forty-eight passengers. The lighting is effected by means of eight
sixteen-candle-power incandescent lamps, supplemented by small shaded
electric lights, excellent for reading by. The windows, of course, do
not open, but practicable ventilating louvres are arranged above them.
Entrance is obtained at each end of the car, and the telescopic gates
are cleverly and expeditiously manipulated by the attendants. Straps are
placed along rods on each side of the roof to aid passengers in
traversing the cars, and above the seats are racks for parcels, etc.
The electric locomotives[4] are curious in shape, with the driver’s
cabin in the middle, and a backward and forward slope for the apparatus
looking like gigantic coal-scuttles back to back. They have eight
wheels, and are fitted with motors, one for each axle. The current is
collected from a central third rail by means of two cast-iron shoes
which rub along it, and is led through an automatic circuit-breaker and
switched to the controller in the driver’s cabin, thence to the motors,
returning to the track rails through the wheels. The total weight of a
locomotive is about forty-four tons, and the average speed is about
fourteen miles an hour, the running time from the Bank to the western
terminus being twenty-four minutes.
At Shepherd’s Bush--once, as its name implies, a rural suburban hamlet,
suggestive of pastoral pursuits, flocks of sheep and lambs, washings and
shearings of fleeces--is the chief power station of the Central,
sub-stations being situated at the General Post Office, Marble Arch,
and Notting Hill Gate.
The premises cover sixty-eight acres, with plenty of room for locomotive
and car sheds, shunting tracks, boiler and engine houses, the latter
most impressive from the size of their six Corliss compound horizontal
engines, each rated at 1,300 horse-power, though, as in so much American
machinery, the somewhat rough exterior detracts from the appearance,
especially in the eyes of British engineers, accustomed not only to
internal mechanical perfection--as in the Central’s engines--but to
nicety of finish throughout. These giants are coupled direct to
Thomson-Houston dynamos, with the capacity, if required, of 5,100
kilowatts, or 6,800 indicated horse-power.
Amongst other contemplated improvements is that of loop-lines between
Liverpool Street and the Bank, which will materially help to accelerate
the traffic.
[Illustration: FIG. 11. A TYPICAL ELECTRIC POWER GENERATOR--TWO DYNAMOS,
EACH OF ABOUT 1,600 H.P.
_By permission of_ _Dick Kerr and Co., London_]
Some remarkable results, not very satisfactory to those interested in
vehicular traffic, have arisen from the opening of the Twopenny Tube.
The standard of travelling has gone up steadily; improvements in ’buses
are constantly demanded (garden seats, spiral spring cushions, etc.)
and--somewhat slowly--conceded. Yet, to quote the words of an omnibus
official, “_they (the public) want more!_” And this at a time when fares
have steadily decreased, and the cost of fodder and maintenance have
seriously increased. Worse still, the Tube’s existence has been keenly
realised all along the line of its route, ladies especially preferring
to go on a shopping expedition by means of the well-lit Tube than by the
not over-clean, and decidedly slow and stuffy, omnibus. The London Road
Car Company’s returns along Oxford Street and Holborn showed last year a
decrease nearly equivalent to the Tube’s increase, and the London
General Omnibus Company’s report for the half-year--December 1st,
1901--was so disappointing, owing to dear forage and decreased passenger
traffic, that its stock fell at one bound ten points, from 105 to 95--a
grave depreciation in value.
The Tube, during the six months ending December 31st, 1902, carried
22,425,776 passengers, a daily average of 121,879, out of which big
total 2,770,854 were workmen at a penny per traveller. On Coronation Day
202,000 people journeyed by the Central.
ITS VENTILATION
At the commencement of its career the Tube’s atmosphere and temperature
were remarkably sweet and equable, not varying much from 62° either in
summer or winter. During a spell of hot weather it felt delightfully
cool, and when east winds blew it was warm compared with the atmosphere
outside.
Trips in the Tube were at one time seriously suggested for the cure of
various maladies as a modification of that usual last resource of the
medical profession, “change of air.”
Before the advent of the Tube, however, many fond mothers with little
faith in the pharmacopœia regarded the Underground as a sanatorium
for children’s complaints. Tunnel air, they affirmed, was good for
croup, whooping-cough, and various other ailments. A doctor travelling
on the Metropolitan once noticed a woman in the same compartment pull
down the window upon entering a tunnel and hold outside a child she was
carrying, so that the youngster might get the full benefit of the foul
atmosphere. When the doctor inquired the reason for this extraordinary
performance, she told him that “tunnel air” had been found to be a
complete cure for croup. And only the other day an East End mother was
discovered by a guard giving her baby two rounds on the Inner Circle
because she had been told by a herbalist and bone-setter that a
sulphurous atmosphere was good for whooping-cough.
But the ideal state of things in the Tube did not continue, and
accusations respecting its ventilation began to be whispered about and
finally proclaimed from the housetops (_vide_ Chapter XIX). However,
practical steps were taken to ensure its efficiency, and at the last
meeting of shareholders the chairman said that the Company had now a
better character for ventilation than any other company in London.
At Bond Street Station a powerful fan has been placed at the base of the
lift shaft, which, under ordinary pressure, removes the vitiated
atmosphere from the permanent ways, fresh air taking its place at the
various halting-places. The fan, forty-eight inches in diameter, and
electrically driven, displaces 30,000 cubic feet of air per minute, and
is capable of entirely exhausting the tunnels in a fraction over three
minutes. The fan is worked every night after the trains have ceased
running, and travellers by the early trains literally breathe the
freshest of fresh air.
If a train in the Central should break down and come to a stop in the
tunnel, though it would not, of course, be run into--the block system
making that all but impossible--it might be necessary for the passengers
to get out. The question naturally asked is, “How shall they alight? And
where shall they go when they have alighted?” A fact that not every
traveller knows is that a narrow path at the side of the rails leads to
the nearest station, which cannot be more than a quarter of a mile off,
so that no serious athletic feat is required to get out at the rear of
the train and walk along the Tube.
ITS ANNUAL SALE OF LOST ARTICLES
Like the great trunk-lines, the Central has an annual sale of articles
left in the carriages and not claimed; but the collection differs
considerably from the miscellaneous assortment brought together by, say,
the Great Northern or Great Western. Heavy impedimenta are, as might be
expected, absent; but who could have been the owners of the 25 bottles
of whisky, the 13 boxes of cigars and cigarettes, the 300 ladies’
umbrellas, and the 264 gentlemen’s umbrellas, the walking-sticks
innumerable, the 150 pairs of spectacles and eyeglasses (showing that
the light is so good that reading is a favourite way of passing the
time), the 44 fur necklets, 920 pairs of gloves and 14 muffs, the 166
empty purses, and the multitude of books, chiefly fiction? While every
week someone very mysteriously leaves behind a spirit-bottle--evidently
recently emptied of its contents--enclosed in cardboard and done up in a
neat parcel.
How the Twopenny Tube, and others like it, were constructed will be
described in the next chapter.
CHAPTER VII
_THE TUBULAR SYSTEM_
“Thy arts of building from the bee receive;
Learn of the mole to plow, the worm to weave.”--POPE.
ORIGIN OF THE SYSTEM
Last year there were sounds of strife in that financial atmosphere where
dwell Titan capitalists, who think and talk and dream in millions; a
battle of giants, like the conflict imagined by Milton, when the satanic
host levelled “triple-mounted rows” of deadly tubes with such effect
against seraph and seraphim, “that whom they hit none on their feet
could stand, though standing else as rocks.” But the conflict now past,
concerned tubes of another kind--iron railway tubes, that seem to be the
destiny of underground metropolitan travellers. The Morgan group, the
Yerkes’ combination, and other great coalitions, mustered their
battalions for the fray. The London County Council, following the policy
of Lord Stanley’s army at Bosworth field, hovered aloof ready to take
advantage of the defeat of either; the Corporation of London anxiously
watched from afar; the great suburban railway companies shivered in
their shoes; a parental Legislature held the balance impartially between
the combatants; while the people whom the matter most concerned--some
six millions of Londoners--had to sit down with folded hands and,
patiently or impatiently, await their fate.
Recollecting this tangle and uproar of conflicting interests, it behoves
everybody to have some notion of the subject of the Tubes and their
construction.
Like many other things in the world, there is nothing new in the idea of
boring a hole through the earth and lining it with brick or iron. As
Pope suggests, mankind doubtless learnt the art from Nature, though the
correctness of the poet’s zoological knowledge is hardly shown in the
examples heading this chapter. For ages past--before London
existed--that skilful excavator, the mole, tunnelled through the earth,
making roads and galleries, the friction of his fur, set perpendicularly
on his skin, lining his tube so that the soil did not fall in. The larvæ
of the humble caddis-fly covered the inside of their cases with fine
silk; and the trap-door spider lined its 12-inch long shaft with similar
material to prevent the tumbling in of loose particles and to afford
itself a foothold in climbing up; while the ant constructed her
galleries and stuccoed them with the finest grains of soil, so that the
inner walls presented a smooth, unbroken surface.
With the advent of man and his civilisation came the extensive use of
furs, and in these the grubs of the moth--in the abstract the most
engaging of creatures--made galleries whenever they got a chance, lining
them with their own silk, wherein to undergo their transformation into
the pupa stage.
Well-experienced engineers, such as the vine, beech, pine, and
bark-boring beetles, are all tube-makers; but it is the pholas, or
_teredo navalis_, who is the arch-borer, so skilled an expert in lining,
that, though only the size of a quill and “soft in body,” he pierces the
hard timbers of ships and quay-piles, lining the tubes as he proceeds
with a saliceous substance as hard as china. The body of the Teredo is
like a long white worm, varying from a foot to two inches and a half in
length, and about the width of a finger. From him, it is said, the elder
Brunel took his idea of the shield which he employed in constructing the
tunnel beneath the Thames after the shaft had been excavated.
[Illustration: FIG. 12. A 3,000 H.P. TRIPLE EXPANSION CENTRAL VALVE
ELECTRICAL ENGINE
_By permission of_ _Willans and Robinson, Rugby_]
But his clever system was crude, and not calculated to cope with porous
or aqueous soil; therefore, when the stratum of clay, through which the
work was being carried forward, broke off abruptly, a serious influx of
water took place. The work had to be abandoned, and was only completed
after much delay and ruinous expense. In a commercial sense, it was an
utter failure.
Since Brunel’s time, engineering has developed its resources _pari
passu_ with the development of science. Hydraulic force displaces the
primitive screw power, and steel plates the cumbersome timber works used
in the Thames tunnel.
Tunnelling through rock, like the Mont Cenis and St. Gothard mountains,
is a comparatively simple engineering feat, as no lining is required; so
also is the ordinary railway tunnel, carefully bratticed and propped
inside, and securely cased with brick or stone. But it is, as the Great
Western Railway knows to its cost, in dealing with water-bearing strata,
_vide_ the Severn Tunnel, that a system is required, not only to protect
the men as they bore with a gigantic centre-bit through clay, chalk, or
gravel, but, pholas-like, to line the tunnel simultaneously. This is
obtained by the use of the famous shield invented by the late Mr. J. H.
Greathead, and employed by him in the construction of the City and South
London and Waterloo and City Railways, though he did not live to witness
the adoption of his principle in the Twopenny Tube.
RAILWAY TUBES, HOW THEY ARE BORED
A revolution in tunnelling has been brought about in constructing Tube
railways. By the new process a great cylinder or shield at the bottom of
a shaft is pushed forward by hydraulic power into the soil ahead of it.
The navvies work inside, excavating the earth in front of them, and fit
up iron segments at the rear of the tail end of the cylinder, or shield.
Thus, on the one hand, the exact size and shape of the tunnel is
ensured, and the workers are fully protected from the risk of the roof
falling in.
This arrangement of shield and iron tube resembles an old-fashioned
single-drawn telescope; the outer case being the shield, and the inner
tube the lining of the tunnel. These shields have fronts that bear a row
of steel knives forming a true cutting edge, and are so arranged that
they can, if required, bore a circle slightly larger than the iron
segments of the tube. As the shield slides away from the inner tube, the
space it occupied is filled in with what is called “grout,” a kind of
porridge of water and lime, which soon sets as hard as stone. This is
ingeniously blown in through apertures in the iron lining by means of
compressed air, and effectually fills up cracks accidentally formed in
the soil, which might otherwise extend to the surface and cause
subsidence in the foundations of buildings. Theoretically, therefore, no
disturbance of the ground below or above the tubular lining is possible.
In the pioneer Tube railways, the City and South London for instance,
the diameter of the tunnels was only 10 feet 6 inches, that of the
Central 12 feet, but the Great Northern and City Company made a new
departure by fixing the width at 16 feet. For the construction of this
railway, the shield was designed by Mr. E. W. Moir, M. INST. C. E., and
varies in some important respects from the Greathead shield. A
remarkable photograph, which, by the courtesy of the _Tramway and
Railway World_, I am able to present to the readers of this book, shows
this shield at work in the construction
[Illustration: FIG. 13. SHIELD AT WORK IN A TUBE RUNNING TUNNEL
_By permission of the_ _“Tramway and Railway World” Publishing Co.,
London_]
of a running tunnel, 16 feet in diameter, on the above line. The Great
Northern shield is much more powerful than any hitherto employed.
Greater hydraulic force is applied, and the “jacks” are more numerous,
and considerably larger. The shield used for the sixteen-foot tunnel may
be taken as typical of others up-to-date. Its cylindrical skin is
composed of half-inch steel plates riveted together at the bottom of the
indispensable shaft, which may be, in the future, anything from 50 to
500 feet beneath the surface. In length, the shield from the rear to the
cutting edge in front is 8 feet 9 inches, half of this being used by the
excavators (as in Brunel’s Thames tunnel), the after part for the
erectors of the metal segments of the tube. Round the shield front are
mounted ten heavy cast-steel cutters, the pressure upon them being no
less than two tons to the square inch, the hydraulic rams exerting this
pressure direct upon the back of the cutters, and the purchase is taken
off the edge of the nearest tunnel segment already in position. The
excavated soil is taken away in trolleys, which, as in a mine, are drawn
by ponies on a miniature track, and afterwards sent up to the surface by
the nearest shaft.
London clay is generally the kind of soil thus bored through in the
metropolitan tubes. The Central, while sinking the shafts, met with it
29½ feet below the surface; but before this was reached, 12 feet of made
ground, 18 inches of loam, and 16 feet of gravel, had to be pierced.