How the worlds first metro system was built Christian Wolmar
It was the dawn of 1863,
and London’s
not-yet-opened subway system,
the first of its kind in the world,
had the city in an uproar.
Digging a hole under the city
and putting a railroad in it
seemed the stuff of dreams.
Pub drinkers scoffed at the idea
and a local minister accused the railway
company of trying to break into hell.
Most people simply thought the project,
which cost more than
100 million dollars in today’s money,
would never work.
But it did.
On January 10, 1863,
30,000 people ventured underground
to travel on the world’s first subway
on a four-mile stretch of line in London.
After three years of construction
and a few setbacks,
the Metropolitan Railway
was ready for business.
The city’s officials were much relieved.
They’d been desperate to find a way
to reduce the terrible
congestion on the roads.
London, at the time the world’s largest
and most prosperous city,
was in a permanent state of gridlock,
with carts,
costermongers,
cows,
and commuters jamming the roads.
It’d been a Victorian visionary,
Charles Pearson,
who first thought of putting railways
under the ground.
He’d lobbied for underground trains
throughout the 1840s,
but opponents thought the idea
was impractical
since the railroads at the time
only had short tunnels under hills.
How could you get a railway
through the center of a city?
The answer was a simple system
called “cut and cover.”
Workers had to dig a huge trench,
construct a tunnel out of brick archways,
and then refill the hole
over the newly built tunnel.
Because this was disruptive
and required the demolition
of buildings above the tunnels,
most of the line went
under existing roads.
Of course, there were accidents.
On one occasion, a heavy rainstorm
flooded the nearby sewers
and burst through the excavation,
delaying the project by several months.
But as soon as
the Metropolitan Railway opened,
Londoners rushed in
to ride the new trains.
The Metropolitan quickly became
a vital part of London’s transport system.
Additional lines were soon built,
and new suburbs grew around the stations.
Big department stores opened
next to the railroad,
and the railway company
even created attractions,
like a 30-story Ferris wheel in Earls
Court to bring in tourists by train.
Within 30 years,
London’s subway system covered
80 kilometers,
with lines in the center of town
running in tunnels,
and suburban trains operating
on the surface, often on embankments.
But London was still growing,
and everyone wanted
to be connected to the system.
By the late 1880s,
the city had become too dense with
buildings, sewers, and electric cables
for the “cut and cover” technique,
so a new system had to be devised.
Using a machine
called the Greathead Shield,
a team of just 12 workers could
bore through the earth,
carving deep underground tunnels
through the London clay.
These new lines, called tubes,
were at varying depths,
but usually about 25 meters deeper than
the “cut and cover” lines.
This meant their construction
didn’t disturb the surface,
and it was possible
to dig under buildings.
The first tube line,
the City and South London,
opened in 1890 and proved so successful
that half a dozen more lines
were built in the next 20 years.
This clever new technology was even used
to burrow several lines
under London’s river, the Thames.
By the early 20th century,
Budapest,
Berlin,
Paris,
and New York
had all built subways of their own.
And today, with more than 160 cities
in 55 countries
using underground rails
to combat congestion,
we can thank Charles Pearson
and the Metropolitan Railway
for getting us started on the right track.