Underground, Overground (16 page)

This may be why the line is nicknamed ‘The Drain', but more likely is the fact that it was built when Tube railways were still a disturbing novelty. In the National Archives at Kew there is a memorandum relating to the opening of the line on which an official of the London & South Western has scrawled, ‘Will passengers consent to be squirted through a drainpipe?' Having been so squirted towards Bank, they then had to walk up a long incline to reach the surface. This was created because the Corporation of London wouldn't allow the construction of the building that a lift would have required, and such a building at this spot would have been prohibitively expensive anyway. The slope was always resented, especially on Monday morning, and it
was supplemented by the installation of the Underground's first Trav-o-lator – or moving walkway – in 1960.

The Waterloo & City offers the commuting experience distilled to its essence. It goes from the quintessential overground commuter station, Waterloo – the only large terminus in the city with no hotel, such is its dedication to sending people home for the night – to the quintessential Underground commuter's station, Bank: the ‘apex of the Underground railway', according to Sigurd Frosterus in his book
London Rhapsody
(1903). There are only those two stations, so that the name of the railway is no longer than a complete list of its destinations, a pleasing state of affairs that would be spoilt if the station at Blackfriars that has occasionally been mooted were ever to be built. At those times when absolutely no commuting occurs – Saturday evening and all Sunday – the line shuts, which is why there is an ominous little dagger next to it on the pocket Tube maps, warning you to ‘Check before you travel'.

It is so easy to appear eccentric when using the Waterloo & City. For example, you could try going the opposite way to everyone else. In other words, Bank to Waterloo in the morning peak, Waterloo to Bank in the evening. (Or, when everyone gets off the train at Bank, you could stay on, and go back to Waterloo.) It might be an idea to set yourself up with a flat near Bank and a job near Waterloo. You would more or less always have the train to yourself. But be warned, both sides of the Trav-o-lator, or moving walkway, at Bank run in the same direction –
out
of the station and into the street – in the morning peak. So if you were so mad as to want to descend towards – as opposed to ascend from – the Waterloo & City platforms at Bank in the morning, you would have to use the long slope. I once asked a ticket platform guard at Bank why both tracks of the Travel-o-lator didn't run
towards
the Drain platforms in the evening peak (because they don't; they run alternately then).
He said, ‘Because there'd be an almighty bloody pile-up at the barriers, wouldn't there?'

In spite of its being ‘The Drain', the tunnels of the line were wider than those of the City & South London. The first trains – which were still in service forty years later – were painted a pretty chocolate and salmon, and had proper windows in spite of there being nothing to see. The carriages had transverse seats, which makes for a narrower gangway and slower loading and unloading; this was perhaps because they were built by a main-line railway company, transverse being the norm on the main-lines. The most significant thing about the trains is that they were a primitive form of Electrical Multiple Unit – an early British use of a type of train becoming common in America, and those on the Drain would be of American make.

The
Oxford Companion to British Railway History
says:

Diesel- or electric-powered vehicles are said to be able to operate as multiple units when they can be coupled to others for operation from one driving position as a single train. The driver then has control of power and breaking throughout, so permitting the other driving positions to be left unmanned.

To put it another way, a multiple unit is a set of vehicles that include driving cabs, motors or control units connected to motors, and each of these vehicles also includes passenger seats. Essentially, multiple units – which can be electrical or diesel-powered – are trains consisting of motorised carriages.
There is no locomotive.
It is therefore hard to tell which is the front until they start moving. (When my son, aged three, first saw a Tube train he said, ‘It has no face.') Multiple units look unheroic, and their rise has been blamed for the decline of trainspotting. The ones that run below ground are particularly hard to love. They are deliberately un-aerodynamic, their flat front being designed
to push air through the tunnels as an aid to ventilation. In
The Subterranean Railway
Christian Wolmar suggests that the Underground lost out to the main-line railways after the Second World War because its ‘clean electric powered trains' elicited no sympathy, as opposed to ‘the grimy dirty steam engines that were still to be seen throughout the rail network'. The functionality of multiple units might have a subtly lowering effect on the spirits of London commuters, and yet whether on the Underground or on the main-lines coming into the southern termini, they are the pistons that have powered London for over a hundred years.

The original Drain trains were replaced in 1940 with ones offering more standing room. At the time, the Corporation of London was trying to get overcrowding on the line debated in Parliament. The line was passed from the London & South Western Railway, via the Southern Railway, to British Rail, who sold it to London Underground in 1994 for the pleasingly simple sum of £1 – a very fair price, some of its regular users may think. Since the early Nineties the line has used modified Central Line trains, and the Drain has been given its own line colour: a queasy turquoise.

My first settled London home was in a rented house in Leytonstone, E11. It was a 1920s' villa with an actual billiard room, although the billiard table was long gone. Not only this, but it was next to mysterious Wanstead Flats, famous for its gloomy fishing ponds and low winter mist;
and
I got to ride on the Central Line, which, as the Central London Railway, was another of the Tubes arising out of the 1892 applications.

The Central was my line. I knew that one of the original promoters, Sir James Henry Tennant, who had made the North
Eastern Railway the most powerful regional railway company in Britain, had his main mansion in York, not far from my dad's house, and the year of the manufacture of the carriages – as given on the door plates – was 1962, the year of my birth. I knew that the Central London Railway (and we'll come to its early history in a minute) became the Central London Line on being taken over by London Transport in 1933; that the name was shortened to Central Line in 1937, and it had become the red line on the Tube map in 1934, having previously been a weak orange. Bakerloo, which
had
been red, became brown. Red suited the Central, and I thought of it as a red carpet rolled out through central London, or an arrow flying steadily along the primary London trunk route: Bayswater, Oxford Street, High Holborn. Its original promoters boasted of its ‘extreme directness'.

Every weekday morning I took the line from Leytonstone to Holborn, in order to attend lectures at the Inns of Court School of Law. As I rode into town, I gradually woke up, and as I returned to Leytonstone I often subsided into sleep, lolling against the substantial red armrests. But in 1992 my reveries east of Chancery Lane were interrupted, because a grim event befell the Central. Yes, it was
upgraded
, at a cost of more than £80 million. New trains were introduced. Whereas the 1962 rolling stock had had wooden floors and grey and red seats – a colour scheme pleasingly reminiscent of a coal fire in the later stages of combustion – the 1992 was red and blue. And about a week after the trains came in, all the armrests fell off, or were pulled off by vandals, as had happened in previous years to the armrests on the Bakerloo. London Underground commissioned a feasibility study into whether it might be possible to re-attach armrests and the answer was evidently ‘No', because, ten years on, Central Line trains still lack armrests, as do Bakerloo ones.

Without them, it was harder to get to sleep, but there wasn't much question of it anyway, because the 1992 stock were the first
Tube trains to have automated announcements. It was a woman's voice, and a platform guard at Chancery Lane told me Underground staff nicknamed her Sonia, because ‘her voice gets Sonia nerves'. Certainly there was an irritating contrast between the way she said ‘Bond Street' (all breathy, parvenu excitement) and the way she said ‘South Woodford' (no enthusiasm at all).

The new trains were introduced in conjunction with Automatic Train Operation (on the Central, as on the Victoria, the driver does little more than close the doors) and new signalling, but it took months for this to ‘bed in', one result being that the new dot matrix indicators on the platforms would read ‘Check Destination on Front of Train', which was like spending a fortune on a new watch only to look at the face and see the words ‘Ask a policeman'. But now the new signalling
has
bedded in, and the Central is the line that got its upgrade out of the way early. It gives the best train frequency on the network: thirty an hour in the peak. Even Sonia – because she still holds forth – is not so annoying now that all the other lines have their own equivalents. I no longer use the Central every day, but it usually gives no trouble when I do use it. The central stations of the Central have been restored to their original colour scheme – a simple and salubrious white – and it is once again what it always was: the most glamorous of the Tubes.

Well, it was a glamorous syndicate that built it. Handling the engineering side was the Greathead, thirty-one of whose tunnelling shields would be employed simultaneously at the peak of construction. Arrayed behind him were the money men, and the funding of the Central would be a mere footnote in their blue chip lives. They included, besides Sir James Henry Tennant, Sir Ernest Cassel, who lived at Brook House, Park Lane, who was a friend of the Prince of Wales and had built railways in China and Mexico, and who, according to the
Dictionary of National Biography
, ‘never neglected to keep in contact with the world of
influence wherever it was to be found, whether at the card table, the dinner table or at Cannes'. There was also his other good friend Natty Rothschild, and Darius Ogden Mills, President of the Bank of California and of the Edison General Electric Company. The Americans were coming. On the Central, carriages were ‘cars', as they are in America, and would come to be on the whole of the London Underground. (‘Pass down inside the cars.') It would run ‘eastbound' and ‘westbound' instead of ‘up' and ‘down', and there would be leather straps to hang from, as on American commuter trains.

The line, authorised in 1892, was for a railway from Shepherd's Bush to Liverpool Street. Digging began in 1896, and Greathead died soon after. In pursuit of free passage, the Central did its best to follow public roads, so the running tunnels are sometimes almost plaited together rather than side by side, and at St Paul's (which was opened as Post Office), Chancery Lane and Notting Hill Gate the platforms are on top of one another.

The line wriggles its way through the City because the City streets are medieval and not straight, which is why you hear the sharp squealing of wheel rims on track at Bank as the bends are negotiated. At Bank the platform is curved to the extent that not only can you not see one end of it from the other; you can't even see half-way. So there is the most yawning of all gaps between train and platform, and there used to be the greatest, most sonorous ‘Mind the Gap' announcement there as well.

The line opened in 1900 from Shepherd's Bush to Bank. (The promised Liverpool Street would not be reached for another twelve years.) The station buildings were of light brown terracotta with the word ‘Tube' (they admitted it!) displayed vertically on the flat roof – a tackily expanded façade that gave them a Wild West look. The original style – although not the vertical signage – survives at Holland Park. Once inside the stations, however, there was something graceful and feminine about the line. The
single-class carriages were spacious and filled with what looks like an alternation of sofas and armchairs – both transverse and longitudinal, with shaded reading lamps, and padded and evidently
very well-fixed
armrests. Not only were the platforms tiled in white, the tunnels were painted white too – to prettify them, and make them less claustrophobic – and the Central proudly issued a postcard of its tunnel-whitening machine. It and the even vainer Metropolitan would be the main issuers of postcards. (London Transport would stop issuing its own in 1974, but the London Transport Museum continues to produce them.)

Ladies in white dresses were depicted using the line in advertising posters. They showed how it was possible to ‘Take the Tuppenny Tube and Avoid All Anxiety'. They were shown buying the tickets in the stations, descending in the lifts and dropping the tickets into a box at the ticket gate, thereby sparing themselves the anxiety of having to retain the ticket on the train. They were shown in dangerously close proximity to smart, top-hatted men, but whereas the men were presumably going to Bank, the women were presumably going shopping at the department stores growing up along Oxford Street, and the Central's nearness to these stores would make the advertising space in its stations the most expensive on the Underground.

Gordon Selfridge had wanted a tunnel connection between the Central station at Bond Street to the basement of his new store, and he wanted Bond Street station to be
called
Selfridges. (In 1932 Herbert Chapman, the dynamic manager of Arsenal, persuaded the Underground Group to rechristen Gillespie Road station on the Piccadilly Line Arsenal after the football club, whose stadium was near by. In 1939, as we shall see, the MCC successfully petitioned London Transport to re-christen St John's Wood station on the Metropolitan Line Lord's. In 2011 I asked Richard Parry, Deputy Managing Director of London Underground, whether I could rename a Tube station, say,
Andrew Martin Place, and he didn't entirely rule it out. After all, there'd been talk of calling Oval ‘Foster's Oval' after the sponsors of the cricket ground. ‘But it'd be vastly expensive,' he said, ‘with all the changes to the maps and the signs. You'd have to put half a million on the table before we started talking.') As it turned out, Mr Selfridge would have to be content with the installation of an in-store booking office supplied by the Central. It issued 5-shilling all-line season tickets for use by female shoppers in the January sales. (In the late 1960s the Central would run extra weekday evening trains for shoppers.)