The Baker Street and Waterloo Railway (BS&WR), also known as the Bakerloo tube, was a railway company established in 1893 that built a deep-level underground "tube" railway in London. The company struggled to fund the work, and construction did not begin until 1898. In 1900, work was hit by the financial collapse of its parent company, the London & Globe Finance Corporation, through the fraud of Whitaker Wright, its main shareholder. In 1902, the BS&WR became a subsidiary of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL) controlled by American financier Charles Yerkes. The UERL quickly raised the funds, mainly from foreign investors.
When first opened in 1906, the BS&WR's line served nine stations and ran completely underground in a pair of tunnels for 6 km between its northern terminus at Baker Street and its southern terminus at Elephant and Castle with a depot on a short spur nearby at London Road. Extensions between 1907 and 1913 took the northern end of the line to the terminus of the Great Western Railway (GWR) at Paddington. Between 1915 and 1917, it was further extended to Queen's Park, where it came to the surface and connected with the London and North Western Railway (LNWR), and to Watford; a total distance of 33 km.
Within the first year of opening it became apparent to the management and investors that the estimated passenger numbers for the BS&WR and the other UERL lines were over-optimistic. Despite improved integration and cooperation with the other tube railways and the later extensions, the BS&WR struggled financially. In July 1933, the BS&WR was taken over as part of the UERL by the newly unified London Passenger Transport Board, which was nationalised in 1948. Today, the BS&WR's tunnels and stations are part of the London Underground's Bakerloo line.
Establishment
Origin, 1891–93
The idea of building an underground railway along the approximate route of the BS&WR had been put forward well before it came to fruition at the turn of the century. As early as 1865, a proposal was put forward for a Waterloo and Whitehall Railway, powered by pneumatic propulsion. Carriages would have been sucked or blown a distance of three-quarters of a mile (about 1 km) from Great Scotland Yard to Waterloo Station, travelling through wrought-iron tubes laid in a trench at the bottom of the Thames. The scheme was abandoned three years later after a financial panic caused its collapse. Sir William Siemens of Siemens Brothers served as electrical engineer for a later abortive scheme, the Charing Cross and Waterloo Electric Railway. It was incorporated by an act of Parliament, the Charing Cross and Waterloo Electric Railway Act 1882 (45 & 46 Vict. c. cclv), in 1882 and got as far as constructing a 60 ft stretch of tunnel under the Victoria Embankment before running out of money.
According to a pamphlet published by the BS&WR in 1906, the idea of constructing the line "originally arose from the desire of a few business men in Westminster to get to and from Lord's Cricket Ground as quickly as possible," to enable them to see the last hour's play without having to leave their offices too early. They realised that an underground railway line connecting the north and south of central London would provide "a long-felt want of transport facilities" and "would therefore prove a great financial success." They were inspired by the recent success of the City and South London Railway
Opening
The official opening of the BS&WR by Sir Edwin Cornwall, chairman of the London County Council, took place on 10 March 1906. Shortly after the line's opening, the London Evening News columnist "Quex" coined the abbreviated name "Baker-loo", which quickly caught on and began to be used officially from July 1906, appearing on contemporary maps of the tube lines. The nickname was, however, deplored by The Railway Magazine, which complained: "Some latitude is allowable, perhaps, to halfpenny papers, in the use of nicknames, but for a railway itself to adopt its gutter title, is not what we expect from a railway company. English railway officers have more dignity than to act in this manner."
The railway had stations at: While construction was being finished, trains operated out of service beyond Baker Street, reversing at a crossover to the east of the station under construction at Marylebone.
Rolling stock, fares and schedules
The service was provided by a fleet of 108 carriages manufactured for the UERL in the United States by the American Car and Foundry Company and assembled in Manchester. They were transported to London by rail but because the BS&WR had no external railway connections, the carriages then had to be transported across the city on horse-drawn wagons to their destination at London Road depot.
The carriages operated as electric multiple unit trains without separate locomotives. Passengers boarded and left the trains through folding lattice gates at each end of cars; these gates were operated by gate-men who rode on an outside platform and announced station names as trains arrived.
Co-operation and consolidation, 1906–10
Despite the UERL's success in financing and constructing the railway, its opening did not bring the financial success that had been expected. In the Bakerloo Tube's first twelve months of operation it carried 20.5 million passengers, less than sixty per cent of the 35 million that had been predicted during the planning of the line. The UERL's pre-opening predictions of passenger numbers for its other new lines proved to be similarly over-optimistic, as did the projected figures for the newly electrified DR – in each case, numbers achieved only around fifty per cent of their targets. 37,000 people used the line on the first day, but in the months following the line's opening only about 20,000–30,000 passengers a day used the service. The number of carriages used by the BS&WR was cut back to three per train at peak times and only two during off-peak hours. The Daily Mail reported in April 1906 that the rush-hour trains were carrying fewer than 100 people at a time. To add to the line's misfortunes, it suffered its first fatality only two weeks after opening when conductor John Creagh was crushed between a train and a tunnel wall at Kennington Road station on 26 March.
The lower than expected passenger numbers were partly due to competition between the tube and sub-surface railway companies, but the introduction of electric trams and motor buses, replacing slower, horse-drawn road transport, took a large number of passengers away from the trains. The Daily Mirror noted at the end of April 1906 that the BS&WR offered poor value for money compared to the equivalent motor bus service, which cost only 1d. per journey, and that passengers disliked the distances that they had to walk between the trains and the lifts. Such problems were not limited to the UERL; all of London's seven tube lines and the sub-surface DR and Metropolitan Railway were affected to some degree. The reduced revenue generated from the lower passenger numbers made it difficult for the UERL and the other railways to pay back the capital borrowed, or to pay dividends to shareholders.
From 1907, in an effort to improve their finances, the UERL, the C&SLR, the CLR and the GN&CR began to introduce fare agreements. From 1908, they began to present themselves through common branding as the Underground.
Extensions
Paddington, 1906–13
Having planned a westward extension in 1900 to Willesden Junction, the company had been unable to decide on a route beyond Paddington and had postponed further construction while it considered options. In November 1905, the BS&WR announced a bill for 1906 that replaced the route from Edgware Road to Paddington approved in 1900 with a new alignment. This had the tunnels crossing under the Paddington basin with the station under London Street. The tunnels were to continue south-east beyond the station as sidings, to end under the junction of Grand Junction Road and Devonport Street (now Sussex Gardens and Sussex Place). In a pamphlet published in 1906 to publicise the Paddington extension, the company proclaimed:
"[I]t will thus be seen that the advantages which this line will afford for getting quickly and cheaply from one point of London to another are without parallel. It will link up many of the most important Railway termini, give a connection with twelve other Railway systems, and connect the vast tramway system of the South of London, thus bringing the Theatres and other places of amusement, as well as the chief shopping centres, within easy reach of outer London and the suburbs."
The changes were permitted by the (6 Edw. 7. c. clix) on 4 August 1906, but the south-east alignment did not represent a suitable direction to continue the railway and no effort was made to construct the extension.
In 1908, the Bakerloo Tube attempted to make the hoped-for extension into north-west London using the existing powers of the North West London Railway (NWLR), an unbuilt tube railway with permission to build a line from Cricklewood to Victoria station
Improvements, 1914–28
Overcrowding was a major problem at many stations where interchanges were made with other Underground lines and efforts were made in a number of places to improve passenger movements. In 1914, work was carried out to provide larger ticket halls and install escalators at Oxford Circus, Embankment and Baker Street. In 1923, further work at Oxford Circus provided a combined Bakerloo and CLR ticket hall and added more escalators serving the CLR platforms. In 1926, Trafalgar Square and Waterloo received escalators, the latter in conjunction with expansion of the station as part of the CCE&HR's extension to Kennington. Between 1925 and 1928, Piccadilly Circus station saw the greatest reconstruction. A large circular ticket hall was excavated below the road junction with multiple subway connections from points around the Circus and two flights of escalators down to the Bakerloo and Piccadilly platforms were installed.
Move to public ownership, 1923–33
Despite closer co-operation and improvements made to the Bakerloo stations and to other parts of the network, the Underground railways continued to struggle financially. The UERL's ownership of the highly profitable London General Omnibus Company (LGOC) since 1912 had enabled the UERL group, through the pooling of revenue, to use profits from the bus company to subsidise the less profitable railways. However, competition from numerous small bus companies during the early 1920s eroded the profitability of the LGOC and had a negative impact on the profitability of the whole UERL group.
To protect the UERL group's income, its chairman Lord Ashfield lobbied the government for regulation of transport services in the London area. Starting in 1923, a series of legislative initiatives were made in this direction, with Ashfield and Labour London County Councillor (later MP and Minister of Transport) Herbert Morrison at the forefront of debates as to the level of regulation and public control under which transport services should be brought. Ashfield aimed for regulation that would give the UERL group protection from competition and allow it to take substantive control of the LCC's tram system; Morrison preferred full public ownership. After seven years of false starts, a bill was announced at the end of 1930 for the formation of the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB), a public corporation that would take control of the UERL, the Metropolitan Railway and all bus and tram operators within an area designated as the London Passenger Transport Area. The Board was a compromise – public ownership but not full nationalisation – and came into existence on 1 July 1933. On this date, the LER and the other Underground companies were liquidated.
Legacy
The plan for the extension to Camberwell was kept alive throughout the 1930s and, in 1940, the permission was used to construct sidings beyond Elephant & Castle. After the Second World War, the plans were revised again, with stations located under Walworth Road and Camberwell Green, and the extension appeared on tube maps in 1949. Rising construction costs caused by difficult ground conditions and restricted funds in the post-war austerity period led the scheme to be cancelled again in 1950. Various proposals have been evaluated since, including an extension to Peckham considered in the early 1970s, but the costs have always out-weighed the benefits.
One of the LPTB's first acts in charge of the Bakerloo line was the opening of a new station at South Kenton on 3 July 1933. As part of the LPTB's New Works Programme announced in 1935, new tube tunnels were constructed from Baker Street to the former MR station at Finchley Road and the Bakerloo line took over the stopping service to Wembley Park and the MR's Stanmore branch. The service opened in November 1939 and remained part of the Bakerloo line until 1979 when it transferred to the Jubilee line.
The Bakerloo line's Watford service frequency was gradually reduced and from 1965 ran only during rush hours. In 1982, the service beyond Stonebridge Park was ended as part of the fall-out of the cancellation of the Greater London Council's Fares Fair subsidies policy. A peak hours service was restored to Harrow & Wealdstone in 1984 and a full service was restored in 1989.
External links
References
- , plans of stations. Connor. 2006^
- Length of line calculated from distances given at Clive's Underground Line Guides, Bakerloo line, Layout Clive D. W. Feathers, retrieved 7 November 2009^
- Charles E. Lee. Jubilee of the Bakerloo Railway – 1 The Railway Magazine, March 1956^