I have realized one of my first ambitions. In the dark engine cab of
an Underground train I have shot like a comet through light and
darkness, the glittering tail of the train thundering behind packed
with people on their way from Bow to Ealing.
A bell rang. The driver looked out over the track where three
gleaming steel rails met in a point outside a tunnel. He pulled over
a lever and the train started. It was the strangest sensation. I
forgot the six packed coaches at the back of us. I forgot the cargo
of calm newspaper-reading men and novel-reading girls which we were
carrying across London. In the semi-darkness of the driver's cab an
ordinary Underground journey had become strangely adventurous and
exciting.
The driver accelerated. His pointer moved round a dial, and the
train answered his small movements, gathering speed and noise. I was
conscious only of being in the grip of a tremendous force that was
hurling us over those three gleaming rails. We took the tunnel at a
good thirty-five miles an hour, and the noise we made changed to a
hollow roar! I could feel the train swerve and rock slightly as we
rounded a curve; but I could see nothing save here and there a green
light close to the ground. If you can imagine that you are tied to a
projectile shot from a gun in the night, you have an idea of driving
an electric train through a tunnel.
In the underground blackness stations show first as a faint yellow
glow cut across by the jet-black semicircle of the tunnel. The next
second you can see their curving rows of lights; they straighten out,
and then the platform at which you will pull up lies level as a knife
edge before you. Mark Lane ... Mansion House ... Blackfriars ...
Temple ... Charing Cross.
Charing Cross is big. As you sweep in the driver has time to collect
a lightning series of snapshots! A bookstall, a cigarette booth, lit
and yellow, a pretty girl coming down the steps carrying a bag, a
fussy old lady asking a ticket inspector how to get to Baron's Court,
and a sudden stir and interest of Ealing-bound people who detach
themselves from the crowd of waiting passengers. Just a flash! All
seen in the fraction of a second! Bells ring down the train. A loud
one clangs in the engine cab. And off you go again through the
blackness towards Victoria.
Few things are more uncanny in mechanical London than the system of
automatic signalling which permits a chain of electric trains to move
over the same line at minute intervals with no chance of a collision.
Little green lights beckon you on, telling you the way is clear. As
you pass them red lights at your back change to green, beckoning on
the train behind; and so it is all the way along. Now and then you
meet a red light. You stop! The light changes to green. On you go!
The marvellous thing is that if, in a moment of colour blindness, you
tried to override a red light your train would correct you. It would
refuse to go on!
At Kensington we shot out into the open air. Gaily, madly, we raced
over the shining rails, marvellously, so it seemed to me, taking a
sharp bend, smoothly continuing along the straight. It was like
flying without the perpetual anxiety of flight. Once, with the awful
insolence of the cocksure, I thought the driver had erred.
"Good Lord!" I said. "That was a red light, and _you've gone on_!"
Instead of kicking me out on the metals, as he should have done, he
smiled and remarked:
"Wrong signal! That red light governs the loop line!"
Safe! On we thundered triumphantly Ealing-wards, with the green
lights smiling a benediction on us, telling us that the next ahead
was at least a minute ahead, telling the next behind that we, in our
turn, were sixty seconds on the right side of safety.
"Do you ever get bored with driving the Ealing express?"
"No," replied the driver, "I like it! I wanted to do this ever since
I became a conductor. Most conductors want to be drivers. The first
time you take a train out alone is what you might call a bit of
excitement, but it soon wears off."
"You don't feel as though you were flying?"
"No, you soon lose that feeling."
"You never get the wind up?"
"No, you can't go wrong if you keep your eyes open and your repair
bag in good order!"
* * *
In a cabin where a signalman kept his eyes on an illuminated map over
which little black snakes were crawling--trains coming and trains
gone--I met an inspector who had been on London's electric railways
for over thirty years!
"The changes I've seen?" he said. "Yet it's marvellous what we did
in the old days. Do you know that we used to take eighty thousand
people a day to exhibitions in the old steam trains? I'm not saying
that we weren't a bit packed and a few children on the rack, but--we
did it! Now, of course, everything is bigger, quicker, and better,
and--you can have the good old days! I remember them and prefer
these!
"Why, bless my soul, in the good old days we had to have a regular
baby hunt nearly every night under the seats of the old trains.
Anybody who didn't want a baby seemed to leave it in the Underground."
* * *
I bought a ticket like any ordinary unenlightened passenger and went
back to London in a "smoker" with my thoughts straying to the man in
the engine cab ahead, sitting there with his eyes glued to the little
_crème de menthe_ lights that tell him he can fly and thunder on
through the darkness.