The difficult birth and troubled life of North London's Hybrid tube-cum-train line to the City

Fig. 1: Great Northern and City Railway advertising postcard from 1906

For many years my journey into work depended wholly or partly on a line that was inaugurated as the Great Northern and City Railway (GNCR). Early dubbed the Big Tube, the line between Finsbury Park and Moorgate has its origins in a set of circumstances that foresaw its hybrid future.

By the end of the nineteenth century, transporting people in and out of London each day had become both a big business and a logistical headache for passengers and city authorities alike. By the 1890s 16 million passenger journeys were being made each year between Finsbury Park and the City.¹ The journey took about twenty five minutes on trains that ran from Finsbury Park, via Holloway Road to terminate at Kings Cross where onward connections were made by tube. Hornsey and Harringay locals regularly gave vent to their frustration about their city-bound journeys. They complained about the cost of tickets, the overcrowded conditions and frequent delays at Holloway Road. One imagines that W. R. H. of Stroud Green steadied his pen as he wrote with great phlegm:

"Whether the Great Northern, in common with other railway companies, should be allowed to continue the issue of tickets, season and ordinary, in palpable and notorious excess of the accommodation which they can supply, is a question on which I entertain opinions far too strong for expression ..."

Such was the frustration of travellers that by 1892 regular meetings of season ticket holders were being convened in Stroud Green.³ Attendees gave voice to their feelings about the latest sleight by the Great Northern Railway Company and a new communique was despatched to the usually tin-eared corporate. Later the same year a deputation of passengers from Hornsey managed to arrange a meeting with the Great Northern Railway (GNR) chairman Sir Henry Oakley.  They explained to him their grievances and presented a memorial signed by 3,000 people. Although Oakley was polite and allowed the deputes have their say, his only response was to reply that, "... he had thoroughly grasped the views of the deputation, and would go very carefully into the question and lay the whole matter before his directors." He was more candid a few years later however when giving evidence about the need for a relieving line into the City:

"It is one of the troubles of our lives," cried Sir Henry Oakley "We are carrying the public very badly indeed. They are overcrowded every night and every morning, but we cannot help ourselves".⁴

With the Great Northern's passenger numbers increasing at the rate of a million a year⁵ and frustrated passengers positively seething, a new faster more direct link for commuters from north of London was desperately needed.

The solution began to take shape in 1891 when notice was given of the intention to lodge a private parliamentary bill for the Great Northern and City Line. Designed to run between Drayton Park and Moorgate Street (as Moorgate station was then known), the line was to connect to Finsbury Park, originally via a short new line laid and owned by the GNR (although later this was changed so that the line was built and owned by the GNCR on land leased from the GNR).

Despite the urgent need for the line and an apparent enthusiasm in the City, the line was to take thirteen years to come to fruition. Things began well enough with the inauguration of the Great Northern and City Railway company in 1892. Sadly by February 1895, the company were forced to announce that "The capital of the Great Northern and City Railway Company not having been fully subscribed, the directors have decided not to proceed to allotment".⁶ The company did not however give up the ghost. By the following month with a three-year time limit granted by the 1892 Act soon to expire the Great Northern and City Railway Extension of Time Act had been drafted and was soon passed into law. Nonetheless, it was to take another six long years before the necessary capital had been arranged and agreements made with the GNR before construction work on the new line would start.

A second attempt to raise capital was made in June 1898. This met with a reception little better than the company's first attempt. The editor of one railway journal opined, "Candidly, we cannot say that we think very highly of the financial prospects of this enterprise ..."⁷ and by the end of July, the London Daily Chronicle was reporting on the company's second failure to raise the whole capital needed. Their report said, "The investing public are evidently suffering from a load of undigested securities, when a sound home railway enterprise such as this has to go begging for capital." The paper nonetheless concluded more positively, "... we consider both classes of shares worthy of the attention of investors who prefer to keep their capital in England".⁸

Despite the challenges, sufficient capital was eventually raised and a contract to dig the required tunnels was let to S.Pearson and Son fresh from finishing the Blackwall Tunnel. By the end of the year construction was under way and in the GNCR's half-year meeting in February 1899, the Chairman read the following excerpt from the engineer's report:

"The working shaft has now been sunk to its full depth - viz., 53ft. from the surface, and the heading to give access thence to the railway tunnels is being started. The foundation for the electric light engine and air compressor are in place, and some of the machinery has been delivered on the ground. ... The construction of the special shields for driving the tunnels is well in hand ... .The work is being pushed day and night."⁹

Fig. 2: Excavating a tunnel on the Great Northern and City Railway, c1901. (Image from a private collection. Original image by tunnellers Pearson & Son Ltd.)

By the summer of 1902, tunnelling work was complete and the laying of track and construction of the stations was in progress. By November the first train was delivered. With an increased sense of self-confidence the company also began talking up its plans to extend the line to a planned terminus at Bank. In August 1903 newspapers reported the company as having said that they, "...looked on the extension to Bank as being a very important part of their system, and the work would be proceeded with without delay."¹⁰ The planned station was to have been the first on the tube to have had escalators. However, the challenges in realising the short extension proved too great for the company and in February 1905 the chairman announced that due to the difficulty in raising the necessary capital, the plan for a Bank terminus had been abandoned.¹¹

The Great Northern and City Railway line finally came into service on 14 February 1904 as London's fourth deep level tube line.¹² The line and trains were fully electrified. Its tunnels were built large enough to take a mainline Great Northern train. This gave an internal diameter of 16 feet (4.9 m), (as opposed to 12 feet (3.7 m) on the Central Line), which allowed for bigger train units and led to the line being popularly known in its early days as the "Big Tube".

The original trains were each composed of seven carriages. They used a multiple unit control system known as the Sprague-Thomson-Houston system. The building of the trains was subcontracted to Brush of Loughborough and the Electric Railway Tramway and Carriage works of Preston. The trains continued in use until 1939.

Fig. 3: An original Sprague-Thomson-Houston train at Finsbury Park c1904

Sprague trains were also used on the Paris Metro, where several examples survive as museum pieces. I have no information as to whether they were identical to the GNCR trains or merely similar to them. Comparing the picture above with the one below, I suspect the latter is true. A London Transport Museum photo of a 1913 Sprague Thomson Train from Metropolitan Line stock suggests that the London version was rather plusher than its more utilitarian Paris counterpart shown in Figure 5 below.¹³

Fig. 4: Sprague Thomson train exterior from Paris Metro.

Fig. 5: Sprague Thomson train interior from Paris Metro.

In 1935 the Northern Heights plan was published which foresaw the GNCR being connected to existing main-line suburban branches including the loop from Finsbury Park to Alexandra Palace. Only parts of this plan were completed when the Second World War started. The plan was first postponed and finally cancelled after the war.

Fig. 5: Station and depot at Drayton Park c 1962. (Photo: Alan A. Jackson).

In 1970 the GNCR was connected (as intended by its original promoters) to the mainline via the high level platforms at Finsbury Park as part of a wider plan to electrify suburban services. The line was renamed Northern line (Highbury Branch) and the following year an agreement was made to transfer it to British Rail. Commuter trains were run to/from Moorgate instead of King's Cross, relieving congestion at the latter. The last London Underground services from Finsbury Park to Moorgate ran in October 1975 and British Rail services commenced in August 1976.

Just 8 months before the last tube ran on the line, the awful Moorgate tube crash resulted in 43 deaths and 74 injuries. A cause has never been established, and theories include suicide, or that the driver may have been distracted, or that he was affected by a medical condition.

Recently it was announced that the line that started off as a tube line and became a suburban railway is to be brought back into the TfL fold as part of the Overground family.

Notes

1. Financial News, 8 June 1898.

2. Hornsey and Finsbury Park Journal, 27 April 1895.

3. Hornsey and Finsbury Park Journal, 12 March 1892.

4. Hornsey and Finsbury Park Journal, 9 February 1895.

5. Ibid.

6. Manchester Courier, 8 February 1895.

7. Herapath's Railway Journal, 10 June 1898.

8. London Daily Chronicle 27 July 1898.

9. Railway News, 11 February 1899.

10. Yorkshire Evening Post, 4 August 1903.

11. Another nearly first escalator on the underground was the Piccadilly Line at Holloway Road in 1906 where Jesse Reno's Coney Island Spiral escalator was constructed. In fact two spirals encircling a central core were built - one going up, and one down. It seems that the complex design was flawed and there is no evidence that the escalator ever entered passenger service. It was dismantled in 1911 and only found later during maintenance work.

12. The first deep-level tube line was the City and South London Railway which opened in 1890. This was followed by the Waterloo and City Railway in 1898, the Central London Railway in 1900.)

13. In 1913, the GNCR was acquired by the Metropolitan Railway.