Underground, Overground (17 page)

The
Daily Mail
was a supporter of the Central, and approvingly christened it ‘The Tuppenny Tube', a phrase hated by the
Railway Magazine
. In 1907 the Central introduced an additional maximum fare of 3d., and the
Railway Magazine
approved of that: ‘The Central London Railway has at length awoken to the fact that “2d. all the way” is not a profitable fare, and has wisely altered its fares introducing a maximum of 3d. The raising of the fare, of course, robs the gutter-title of Tuppenny Tube of its meaning.' It approved of a 3d. fare partly, I suspect, because it made things more complicated. Victorian railways were complicated. If they were not complicated, there would be nothing for the
Railway Magazine
to explain. There was a joke about the flat fare in
Punch
. A yokel up in London for the day buys a ticket on the Central. On being handed it, he says to the clerk, ‘But there's no destination stated.' ‘That's correct,' says the clerk, ‘all our tickets are alike.' ‘But,' objects the yokel, ‘how will I know where I'm going?' Today London buses have a flat fare, but the Underground covers too wide an area for the policy to be feasible on the network.

There were thirty trains an hour in peak time, twice as many as on the City & South London Railway. The stations, lifts and trains were all brightly lit with electricity, and there was no question of voltage drop from being too far from the source of the
power because the Central was the first line long enough to justify the building of sub-stations along the route.

There were just two little problems, the first of which came from the 6-mile length of the line. It smelt. In 1904 the General Manager, Granville C. Cunningham, speculated that this might be ‘the smell of the earth', and conceded that there had been objections from ‘delicate people'. Electrical fans were installed, then more fans. In 1911 giant fans began blowing ionised air and ozone along the tunnel. ‘You were meant to think you were at the seaside,' John Betjeman would recall. ‘But you never really did.' The other problem was that the electrical locomotives vibrated, with the result – a Board of Trade inquiry of 1901 found – that the draughtsmen in Cheapside could not draw straight lines. The electrical locomotives were put out to pasture, the carriages were adapted, and Electrical Multiple Unit traction was introduced from 1903.

We will be returning to the Central Line in the 1930s, when it was extended, but first a note about the migraine-inducing complications created by a preliminary, Edwardian expansion at its western end. In 1908 the line was extended to a station called Wood Lane, which was built on a terminal track loop so that trains could turn round and go back the other way, and which served the stadium that had been built for the 1908 Olympics. The station also served the nearby Franco-British trade exhibition held on a site that was called (because of the marble cladding on the exhibition buildings) White City. The stadium itself would later be named White City Stadium. Also in 1908, a station catering to the exhibition was opened close by on the Hammersmith & City Railway, and it was called Wood Lane (Exhibition).

In 1914 the above-mentioned station was closed. But it re-opened intermittently from 1920 under the name Wood Lane (White City). In that year the Central was further extended west
to Ealing Broadway. In 1948 Britain again hosted the Olympics at the White City Stadium (Germany was not invited), and the visitors accessed the stadium from a new Central Line station called White City, opened a little to the west of Wood Lane in late 1947. (Wood Lane, with both its original loop and tracks allowing through-running to the stations west of it, was operationally complicated, hence its replacement.) At the same time as White City opened on the Central, Wood Lane (White City) on the Hammersmith & City spluttered back into life with another new name: White City. So now there were two stations called White City. Then, in 2008, a smart new station opened on the Hammersmith & City where its White City station had been.

The name of this new station? Wood Lane.

I sometimes catch a train from Highbury & Islington station to Moorgate. As I wait, I am standing on a subterranean platform with Seventies' tiling and the colour scheme of the long-lost Network South-East subdivision of BR. A sign points towards the ‘North London Link', which is what the stylishly rebranded London Overground was called a long time ago. The platform I'm on is not branded; it is called Platform 4, but there are no signs of any others. The platform is black; I've never seen a black platform before. I appear to be standing in a Tube tunnel, but there's something wrong, apart from the colour scheme. It's too big.

The train enters the tunnel, and it is definitely not a Tube train. It is a full-size electrical main-line train, and it might well be rain-smeared and filthy, bearing all the battle scars of main-line operation. There is the sense of something that should be outdoors being indoors, like a horse in a living-room. We have entered the dreamlike world of what was officially called the
Great Northern & City Railway, but which would come to be nicknamed, with a mixture of awe and pity, as with the kid at school who has a glandular problem, ‘The Big Tube'. And that is how I will refer to it, since its official name is confusingly close to that of the overground railway company that spawned it, namely the Great Northern. It was another of the 1892 authorisations, and it was from the start a line that defied categorisation, although you might pin it down as being somewhere between white elephant and red herring.

The line was conceived by our old friend James Henry Greathead, armed with his amazing tunnelling shield. As authorised by an Act of 1892, the plan was for a line running from the main-line station of the Great Northern Railway at Finsbury Park to Drayton Park, where it would delve underground before running in twin tunnels to Moorgate. Yes, another line aiming for the City.

The idea was to provide an alternative to the congested Widened Lines, which had themselves been intended to ease the congestion on the Metropolitan Line, the aim in both cases being to bring commuters from the north London suburbs into the heart of the City. The particular aim of the Big Tube was to enable commuters from such Great Northern stations as Edgware, High Barnet and Enfield to bypass the parent company's main line station at King's Cross, and to gain direct access to the City in the very trains which they'd boarded at Edgware, High Barnet or Enfield, albeit with different engines attached at Finsbury Park prior to the descent into the tunnel: electrical ones in place of steam-powered. To accommodate these trains, the tunnels of the Big Tube would be 16 foot in diameter, bigger by about a third than the Tube tunnels already built, and for that matter the ones that would be built subsequently.

The Great Northern would build the Big Tube, and guarantee that a certain number of its trains would be run along it to
Moorgate. But there was a delay in raising the money, and by the time work started in 1898 the Great Northern had got into bed with a new Underground partner: the Great Northern
& Strand
Railway, Parliamentary approval for which was given in 1899, and which would achieve fame under a different name as part of the Piccadilly Line.
Its
original proposal was for a Tube line running from Alexandra Palace into Finsbury Park, King's Cross and the West End, thus easing the pressure on the latter two stations, although the idea of connecting Alexandra Palace would be quickly abandoned.

In 1901 the Great Northern cancelled its agreement with the backers of the Big Tube, by which time the latter was half-built, and its big tunnels looked like grandiose folly, since it would now not be allowed running rights into Finsbury Park main-line station. Instead, the Big Tube company was allowed to build a station under the main-line one, so that the line, when it opened in 1904, started as a Tube (albeit a big one) at Finsbury Park. It emerged into the open soon afterwards, then went below ground again at Drayton Park, from where it proceeded to Highbury (later ‘Highbury & Islington'), Essex Road and Old Street before finally arriving at Moorgate, where it – a line whose tunnels were far too big – met the City & South London Railway, a line whose tunnels were far too small, and the Metropolitan, a line whose tunnels were at that point still filled with smoke.

At Finsbury Park the Great Northern tried its best to keep secret the presence of its subterranean lodger, like someone who has an embarrassing relative living in the basement. So there were no signs pointing towards the Big Tube platforms, and indeed the platforms of the line remain hard to find today, as already mentioned. But anyone who did find the trains was in for a treat: great mahogany wardrobes of carriages with comfortable transverse seats, clocks and cigarette machines.

The fare for the end-to-end trip was 2d., so it was another
‘Tuppenny Tube' of sorts. About 15 million passengers were carried in the first year, a third below expectations. In
Rails through the Clay
(1962), Alan A. Jackson and Desmond F. Croome describe the line's commercial history as ‘a sad story'. After an initial contractual dividend was paid, the ordinary shareholders received nothing. The line was a failure, and would be further stifled by the network of electric trams that would grow up around Finsbury Park.

In 1912 it was bought by the Metropolitan, which wanted to extend the line south from Moorgate to Lothbury, and to revive the direct connection to the Great Northern, but these plans met with objections from competitors, and so the Met did its best with the line as it was. The service was improved, and in 1916 the only multi-class seats to be offered on the Tube railways were introduced. Both first and third classes were available, and they lasted until 1934, after London Transport had inherited the line.

In 1939 LT added to the complexity of the Northern Line by making the Big Tube its ‘Northern City' branch, with ordinary Tube trains looking too small in the baggy tunnels. As part of the New Works plan of the late 1930s, it was proposed to use the Big Tube as a link between Moorgate and above-ground stations at the north end of the Northern Line. For the Big Tube to be freed from its underground prison in this way, the direct link to the main line at Finsbury Park would have to be finally created, but this plan would be shelved after the war, as we shall see. What happened instead was that the line would be banished altogether from Finsbury Park in 1964, in order that one of its tunnels there could be given to the new Victoria Line. In the general re-adjustment the other was given to the Piccadilly Line, which had first arrived at Finsbury Park in 1906.

Today, if you wait for a southbound Victoria Line train or a westbound Piccadilly Line train at Finsbury Park, you are standing on the old platforms of the Big Tube. In the early Nineties I rented a room in a flat at Finsbury Park, and I would use one or
other of those platforms every day. I didn't notice they were too big for the trains that ran in them, even though there's about two feet between the carriage and the tunnel wall there, as against a foot or so in a normal Tube tunnel, but I think I did have a sense of expansiveness and possibility when heading south on the Vic or West on the Picc. Admittedly that could have been because both led to the exciting West End, or it may just have been youth.

Having been kicked out of Finsbury Park, the Big Tube's northern terminus was now Drayton Park. It was in this phase of its existence that the event occurred that has made the history of the line not just baleful and bizarre but also tragic: the Moorgate disaster. On the morning of Friday 28 February 1975 the 8.39 a.m. train from Drayton Park, driven by Leslie Newson, stopped normally at Highbury & Islington, Essex Road and Old Street, but as it approached Platform 9 at Moorgate, the train, which ought to have been going at 15 miles an hour, was travelling at 35 m.p.h., and apparently accelerating. It smashed into the head wall of the 60-foot dead-end tunnel because, as we have seen, the Metropolitan's plans to extend the line south had come to nothing. The tunnel being much bigger than the train, there was room for more mangling to occur than would have happened on a normal Tube. The second carriage was driven under the first, and the third one hit the back of the first. Forty-three people died. At the last moment, driver Newson was seen sitting upright, looking directly ahead, his hands on the controls. He had not lifted his hand from the dead man's handle, an action that would have stopped the train. When his body was retrieved, it was apparent that he had not raised his hands to cover his face. Had he suffered some sort of fit or seizure? The coroner's verdict was accidental death. Laurence Marks, the comedy writer, whose father died in the crash, conducted a journalistic investigation and concluded that the driver had committed suicide, which was emphatically denied by Newson's wife. In 2010 Marks wrote in
the
Daily Mail
, ‘Newson didn't want to stop the train. I don't know why. No one ever will.' It was the worst peacetime disaster on the Underground.

A friend of mine boarded that train at Drayton Park. She was a regular on the run to Moorgate, where she was taking a secretarial course. ‘I knew
something
was going to happen, and I got off at Highbury & Islington. I then got on a Victoria Line train, which took me miles out of my way. I had a sense of physical danger. I don't know how or why – I'm probably a witch.' She knew Newson by sight. ‘I'd see him at Drayton Park, walking from one end of the train he'd just brought in to the other end to take it out again. I'd nod to him. He was a cheery, friendly-looking sort of man.' After the accident she stopped travelling on the Tube for about fifteen years. She then would venture onto it, but only with the aid of ‘The Way Out' Tube map, which showed the carriages to board if you wanted to arrive near the exits at any given station. (A recently published little booklet called
TubeWhizzard
is a refinement of the ‘The Way Out' map.) ‘I had to minimise my time on the platforms,' she told me. ‘I used to see your column on the Underground in the
Standard
, but I would immediately turn over the page. I couldn't bear to read a word of it.'