When the great and the good of London's railways gathered on a chilly Friday 9th December 1932 they marked both a beginning and an end. One purpose was to celebrate the opening of one of the last surface railways to be built in Greater London, the Metropolitan Railway's branch to Stanmore. But the event was also the swansong of the company, which would be absorbed into the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB) seven months later. A renowned railway would disappear as an independent entity after 78 years: this article explores some of its lasting achievements.
The origins of ‘the Met’, as we shall call it here, are well known and can be summarised briefly: as we shall see, they have resonance for the rest of its history and, indeed, today. The relative isolation of Paddington station in relation to the City of London, together with growing congestion in the streets, were the fundamental causes. The influence of property owners west of the City was strong enough to ensure that a surface railway would not be built, a prohibition long reinforced following a Royal Commission in 1846. For the first time anywhere the solution was to construct an entirely sub-surface line, mostly built using the ‘cut-and-cover’ technique, excavating a deep trench, walling it securely and laying a new street surface above.
Put like that the project may seem simple, but it wasn't, of course. Propping up adjacent structures, coping with the old rivers of North London which flooded the works, designing appropriate locomotives, ideally free from smoke which was an obvious and overriding problem: all this troubled what was already an unprecedented task. Because the line was in effect an extension of the Great Western Railway Brunei's ‘broad’ track gauge (7ft 0¼in or 2,140mm) was adopted, although the intention of connecting with other railways north and south of the Thames dictated mixed gauge. The Met project was first mooted in 1854 but fundraising, and the unpredictable progress of the engineering works, delayed opening until 10th January 1863. The broad gauge rails were removed in 1869.
From the GWR at Bishop's Road (absorbed into the main Paddington station in 1933) the trains called at Edgware Road, Baker Street, Portland Road (Great Portland Street from 1917), Gower Street (Euston Square from November 1909), King's Cross and Farringdon Street (Farringdon from January 1922).
Much doubt had been cast on public acceptability of subterranean travel but in practice it soon became clear, with over 28,000 journeys daily, that the principle was a success (and, it was perhaps implausibly claimed, the atmosphere was beneficial for sufferers from asthma). The initial Met stations were reached from handsome and unpretentious surface buildings, and whilst
