A Century of Subways: Celebrating 100 Years of New York's Underground Railways

Chapter 3: The World’s First Subway

3 The World’s First Subway As described in Chapter 2, Boston opened the first subway in North America on September 1, 1897, seven years before the Interborough Rapid Transit Company welcomed passengers aboard New York’s first underground railway in 1904. But Boston ’s Tremont Street operation was not the first subway on the face of the earth—or under the face of the earth, to be a bit more precise about it. The world’s very first subway opened in London , England, on the Saturday afternoon of January 10, 1863, thirty-three years before the Boston inaugural—and ten days after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation . To provide a further sense of context for the inauguration of subway service on the Interborough in 1904—and the first century of subway service in the City of New York in the years between 1904 and 2004—a brief and necessarily general review of subway developments in London in particular, and Europe more generally, will be helpful. London (Before discussing rapid transit in London, an advisory word is in order about the quantity of written material that is available on the subject. It may well be the case that there have been more books, articles, and pamphlets written about the London Underground than about any other electric railway in the world. As just one example, in the year 2001 alone, two comprehensive books have appeared that treat the general development of the railway. In addition, there are multiple volumes about every single underground line in London, not to mention specialized studies dealing with stations, rolling stock, tunnel construction, and so forth. 124 A CENTURY OF SUBWAYS Many of these works are cited in the notes or listed in the bibliography .) When intercity railroads were built in Great Britain in the early years of the nineteenth century, the narrow, twisting streets and extraordinarily dense concentration of buildings in the center of London precluded any of the new railways from extending their rights-of-way into the heart of the British capital. And so the first railways to reach London necessarily terminated on the city’s outskirts. Euston Station, opened in 1837, and King’s Cross, built in 1852, were two important railway terminals along London ’s northern perimeter, while to the south one could find Victoria Station (1860), Waterloo (1848), and Charing Cross (1864), among others.1 This exclusion of mainline railways from the central portion of London was a matter of formal public policy, since ‘‘a Royal Commission of 1846 had recommended that no railway should penetrate the inner London area between the River Thames and the New Road (now Marylebone, Euston and Pentonville roads), and Parliament seemed reluctant to go against this.’’2 London’s first subway evolved, then, as an effort to link these various railway terminals with the city’s central core. The enterprise that opened in January 1863 as the Metropolitan Underground Railway took the better part of a decade to develop, plan, finance, and build. A principal mover behind the venture was the City Solicitor of London, Charles Pearson, who began pressing for an underground urban railway after a pedestrian tunnel was successfully built beneath the River Thames in 1853 under the direction of Marc Isambard Brunel. Brunel, whose son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, would bring even more engineering acclaim to the family name, took eighteen years to complete his Thames Tunnel. It was an extraordinary achievement from an engineering perspective. Perhaps more important, it served to dispel a variety of popular fears about traveling belowground, a style of transport many people associated with unsavory journeys in dark realms of ancient mythology.3 Pearson secured authorization from Parliament to begin work on London’s first subway in 1854, but construction did not get under way until 1859. The initial segment, almost 4 miles long, ran from Bishop’s Road, Paddington, to Farringdon Street along London’s northern rim, connecting Euston Station with King’s THE WORLD’S FIRST SUBWAY 125 Cross along the way. On the afternoon before the Metropolitan formally opened—that is to say, on Friday, January 9, 1863— between 600 and 700 invited guests assembled at Bishop’s Road for a ceremonial trip over the new line. Two special trains, each hauled by a pair of hand-polished steam locomotives, traveled the length of the line, pausing at several intermediate stations so guests could inspect the design of the new...