The very first.........

[chris]

Does anyone know anything about the very first tube service? E.g. drivers name, where to and from, ticket price, dates, speed, times, passenger numers etc.

Any info would be greatly appreciated.

[Deleted]

The first proper 'tube' service was (I think) the City & South London Railway. Opened in 1890, it ran from King William Street, Near the Bank to Stockwell. It soon outgrew the King William Street terminus , which was far too small so in 1900 it was diverted to the route used today by the Northern Line City branch.

It was very popular with the public, as it was something new and exciting.

As for speed, it was slow, especially climbing to King William Street, as the line passed under the Thames by Old Swan Pier, then curved sharply under Arthur Place. I've read that trains struggled to climb this gradient.

[Deleted]

Following up on David5032's comments, there's a good description of the First Tube in another book, Rails Through The Clay - a huge 'bible' on the London Underground. Original speeds on the City & South London Railway were up to 22mph; and it was known that, because of the sharp curves on the King William Street stretch, the sides of the cars used to scrape against the tunnel wall. Also, because this part was on a severe gradient, the lights in the cars [4 light per car, each of 16 candle power] were apt to fade to a dull red or go out altogether... sometimes the trains failed to make it up the steep climb and had to 'coast' back down to have another run; failing that, the seperate locomotive that was waiting at King William Street, was sent to assist.

[q8]

Does anyone know anything about the very first tube service? E.g. drivers name, where to and from, ticket price, dates, speed, times, passenger numers etc.

Any info would be greatly appreciated.
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Contact the LTM. They may have that info

[mandgc]

I would swear on my "Rails Through the Clay " if need be . :-)

[trainopd78]

mandgc said:

I would swear on my "Rails Through the Clay " if need be . :-)

Failing that a very good book on the subject is called "the amazing electric tube". A fantastic book. Sorry I cant give you authors details etc, but my library is currently living elsewhere. I'll have a look when I visit my parents next.

[Deleted]

Just to add to trainopd78's post above, "The Amazing Electric Tube", very rare, and quite well sought after; its by Printz P Holman, soft card covers with about 74 pages - very good and some interesting photographs too. Well worth looking at sales stands at railwayana events, because it's not available in bookshops, as its now out of print.

[chris]

tubeoperator92 said:

Just to add to trainopd78's post above, "The Amazing Electric Tube", very rare, and quite well sought after; its by Printz P Holman, soft card covers with about 74 pages - very good and some interesting photographs too. Well worth looking at sales stands at railwayana events, because it's not available in bookshops, as its now out of print.

Have you tried eBay?

[Deleted]

I was reading the said book as I typed the post. If I hadn't, there's no way I would have remembered the author. Thats given me an idea to look for a few other books tho.

[trainopd78]

tubeoperator92 said:

Just to add to trainopd78's post above, "The Amazing Electric Tube", very rare, and quite well sought after; its by Printz P Holman, soft card covers with about 74 pages - very good and some interesting photographs too. Well worth looking at sales stands at railwayana events, because it's not available in bookshops, as its now out of print.

Thats the one. It's a very well detailed book with very good illustrations including early ticket types etc. Thanks for that.

[Deleted]

theres also a page which shows part of the working timetable for 1916, showing running times from Clapham Common to Euston of 31 minutes on weekdays, with the first through train at 5.15am [there's an earlier 'staff train' at 4.40am, which started from Stockwell.
Wonderful book. FWIW, I got my copy from a Transport event, near Tottenham Hale. Think I paid about £5, after a bit of bartering...

[Deleted]

Just for the record, the General Manager of the line, upon opening was a Mr T. C. Jenkin, who was a former LTSR accountant. The Line Engineer was a Basil [Later Sir Basil] Mott

[CSLR]

chris said:

Does anyone know anything about the very first tube service? E.g. drivers name....

I have been looking through some old threads that were active before I joined this group and found this question from ChrisA that appears to have only been answered partially. Everyone skirted round the really difficult bit, so I thought I would try to fill in one of the blank spaces. What was the name of the first tube train driver?
There is no doubt that the first real tube railway was the City & South London. The line was officially opened on 4 November 1890 when the Prince of Wales and other guests travelled from King William Street to Stockwell in a train driven by Mather & Platt’s resident engineer on the C&SLR project, Mr J A Grindle.
So is that it? Well no. You see that was not really the first train to be driven on the tube system, for that we go back to the end of 1889 and one of the most unbelievable parts of the story. At that time, Dr John Hopkinson had been employed in London as consulting engineer to supervise the installation and testing of the electrical equipment and locomotives that were being built in Manchester. In a way the family honour was at stake, because his brother was employed in Manchester as head of Mather & Platt’s newly formed electrical department. Although there was considerable pressure on young John to prove that the system worked, it also appears that he could not wait to try out his new toy! With none of the running tunnels connected to the surface, he had the first locomotive lowered in pieces down a lift shaft at the Borough, together with a couple of experimental carriages. To overcome the fact that there was a total lack of anything even resembling an electricity supply at the Borough (remember, this was 1889), he set up a generator at the top of the lift shaft and ran electric cables down to the track. He then placed a steam engine in the road and initially fired it up at night when there was less traffic about and fewer horses to frighten. Rather unsurprisingly, the neighbours were not very impressed by having their sleep disturbed.
Thus the very first tube train journey started from the Borough. There is no known document that actually names John Hopkinson as the driver of the first train, but a lot of evidence suggests that it was him.
As time passed, dignitaries and delegations went down to travel on the train; even the neighbours were invited for a ride. This lash-up allowed the very first tube trains to operate experimentally and to carry passengers. These were almost certainly driven by John Hopkinson or J A Grindle. But the visitors at this time were simply guests who did not pay any fares. So who drove the first tube train that carried genuine fare paying passengers?
Well, the line opened to the public on 18 December 1890 without any further ceremony, the first train leaving Stockwell at 6.53 am. The driver of that train appears to have been an unnamed employee of the City & South London railway. We may never know exactly who he was…but we can narrow it down a bit. You see, there were at that time only a dozen or so drivers working for the company and their names do survive.
For the record, I will dig them out when I have a moment.

Oh, yes….Happy birthday ChrisA

[chris]

Thanks mate - i'll read that in more detail later! Makes some interesting reading.

[Deleted]

One could argue that the first tube was the Tower Subway under the Thames, which proved the concept of the deep-level tubes. The "train" consisted of one car, which was drawn from end to end by a cable, so there was no driver.

It also proved the difficulty of making money from tube railways by rapidly going broke. It was then used as a pedestrian tunnel until the opening of Tower Bridge, since when it has been used to carry electric cables and other services under the river.

[CSLR]

sydneynick said:

One could argue that the first tube was the Tower Subway under the Thames, which proved the concept of the deep-level tubes. The "train" consisted of one car, which was drawn from end to end by a cable, so there was no driver.

This is a really old chestnut.
Greathead - who constructed the tunnels for the Tower Subway (TS) and the C&SLR - never looked on TS as a true railway. It had no signals, no trains, in fact nothing that defines a real railway. The only reason that it had rails was to keep the open truck going in the right direction; and they did not do that very well, especially when the rope broke.
Horse drawn wagons in a coal mine would probably be more comparable to a tube railway that TS was.
The tunnels were a different matter. The C&SLR tunnels were directly descended from those of the TS; although, to be historically and factually correct, the TS should never be called a tube railway. The first time the word 'tube' was used in relation to this type of construction was during the proceedings of a parliamentary committee - and it was used exclusively to describe the railway that would become the C&SLR .

[CSLR]

To clarify a point.
When the descriptive term that we now use for deep-level underground railways was first coined, during the committee stage of a parliamentary bill on 14 May 1884, the phrase used was 'the tubes'. It was only after it came into more common usage that it altered to 'the tube'.
That however is how the English language works. Today we refer to a collection of different lines in the singular as the tube, but we use the plural to describe a single item of clothing - trousers.

[Deleted]

cslr said:

sydneynick said:

One could argue that the first tube was the Tower Subway under the Thames, which proved the concept of the deep-level tubes. The "train" consisted of one car, which was drawn from end to end by a cable, so there was no driver.

This is a really old chestnut.
Greathead - who constructed the tunnels for the Tower Subway (TS) and the C&SLR - never looked on TS as a true railway.

Ummm. I rely on p.7 of Reconstructing London's Underground by H.G. Follenfant (LT, 1974). Follenfant was Chief Civil Engineer of LT, so he probably knew a railway when he saw one, and he says the Tower Subway "was intended to be an underground passenger railway".

[CSLR]

sydneynick said:

Ummm. I rely on p.7 of Reconstructing London's Underground by H.G. Follenfant (LT, 1974). Follenfant was Chief Civil Engineer of LT, so he probably knew a railway when he saw one, and he says the Tower Subway "was intended to be an underground passenger railway".

Then we will have to disagree on this.
With the greatest respect; Mr Follenfant may well have known a railway when he saw one, but he never saw the Tower Subway in operation (and neither did you or I).
Rather than base my judgment on the speculation of one man commenting 104 years after the event, I am more inclined to believe the reports of people who saw this monstrosity in action and who describe a basic wagon being drawn backwards and forwards (with little success) by a wire rope.
The Tower Subway was, and still is, a superb engineering achievement that pioneered tunnel building techniques. Unfortunately it did nothing to advance railways and if anyone suggests that this thing should be called an underground 'railway', then we might just as well start looking at lead mining where they operated similar systems hundreds of years prior to this.
While dear Mr Follenfant may have considered it a railway, Mr Greathead who actually built it admitted that it was not. Even the company that operated it referred to it as an 'omnibus subway'.
Perhaps we should also consider the exact words that you quote Mr Follenfant as saying, the Tower Subway "was intended to be an underground passenger railway". That may be true, but what is originally intended is often far removed from what is eventually achieved.
Anyone commenting on this attempt to propel people under the Thames should remember that it was so unsuccessful operationally that the company went bankrupt within three months and the whole lot had to be ripped out and junked.

[CSLR]

barney said:

The consensus is that it WAS a railway. There is an illustration that depicts same in one of these URL's.

Whose consensus? All of these descriptions are modern. They are written years after the event.
While the illustration that you refer to is contemporary, it is wildly stylised and grossly out of scale. The dimensions of the tunnel and the descriptions at the time show that it could not possibly have been as spacious and as comfortable as that. This is a problem that I have previously discussed in this forum (not in relation to this particular subject) and it is something that is inherent in engravings of the period.
The tunnel was 6ft 7ins internal clearance. Allow a bit of space between the wagon and the wall, the width of the body panels and then additional clearance for the upright depicted as a backrest and you will be hard pushed to get more than 4ft internal width. To get some idea of what this was like, position two chairs face to face with their backs 4ft apart (someone else will have to do a metric calculation if you do not understand me).
By comparison, the illustration depicts a scenario where there is something like 3ft clear space between the knees of the people sitting opposite each other. Using this and other data that can be seen in the image, the seatback to seatback measurement alone would exceed the internal diameter of the tunnel! In other words, if this illustration was true-to-life, the tunnel would have to be around 11ft in diameter in order to accommodate the people and vehicle as depicted. We know that it was not that large.
Now make an allowance for some form of track; allow for a clearance between the track and the floor; then add the thickness of the floor and (with a known internal tunnel dimension of 6ft 7ins) you cannot have an internal clearance within the vehicle that greater than 4ft between the floor and the roof of the tunnel! In the picture, the floor appears to intersect the tunnel at its centre point which would give an internal clearance of just 3ft 3 1/2ins (less if the vehicle has a roof). I know that Victorians were smaller than us, but not that much smaller.
In fact these dimensions are not correct, but this is what happens if you rely too much on the accuracy of an illustration.

For every event that is described as the 'first' there are a whole heap of others that claim to have preceded it. The further one gets from the event, and the fewer contemporary witnesses there are, the more wild the claims become.
The Tower Subway was not a true underground railway and a million recently written documents will not convince me otherwise. We should always lean towards contemporary descriptions and must try to identify what is accurate and what is not. As you can see from the illustrations, not every contemporary document is completely accurate; but then again, neither is every newspaper report of what happened yesterday. When contemporary documents that can be shown to be inaccurate are used as source material by modern interpretors, the problems are compounded. This is then made worse when other writers copy such interpretation and put their own spin on it instead of going back and checking the original sources.
To resolve this, I know exactly where there is definitive proof on this subject from reputable, respected and accurate contemporary sources. I regret that it will be a few weeks before I will be able to visit the record offices again in order to get copies. When I do, I will post that evidence here. That is a promise.
At this stage, I feel that there is nothing more that I can add. Some of you have your views, I have mine. Continue arguing on this subject if you wish, but I will not be taking any further part until I am holding the documents that I intend to refer to.

If this sounds a little bit like, "I am not going to play this game anymore", that is not the intention. Everyone that has posted on this subject has made valid points based on the documentary evidence that they have to hand. I want to be in the same position and be able to show you what I am referring to. You may then make your own judgment.
You will appreciate that my main interest is the C&SLR. The Tower Subway was something that I necessarily researched in the process; I did not keep copies of all of the TS documents that I read, but I do remember their content.

We have got a little off topic in this thread. Please advise me when I can get back to the original subject as I have now completed the research that I promised for ChrisA and am ready to post it.

[CSLR]

I will of course wait until there is a consensus that I may continue with the original thread.
In the meantime, if anyone would like to view my original notes regarding the type of illustrations that I mentioned you will find them in reply no.22 to this thread:-

districtdave.proboards39.com/index.cgi?board=History&action=display&thread=1140620810&page=2#1140706605

Note particularly the references to scale and the way that people were put into the illustrations.

[Deleted]

Note I said "it is arguable", and it seems to have started a thoroughly enjoyable argument.

Stirring the possum can be fun!