These shallow tramways of the London County Council are a novelty in England, but on a large scale have been successfully adopted in Paris, Buda-Pesth, Boston, and New York. At present the shallow subway which the Council has been authorised to construct at a total cost of £279,000, commences at Theobald’s Road, Holborn, where it forms a junction with an existing surface tramway, the property of the Council. Thence the line falls in level, until, in Southampton Row, it runs beneath the street, whence, in a trench of inconsiderable depth, it passes along the new thoroughfare, Kingsway, from Southampton Row to the new Strand crescent, Aldwych. There it turns towards the Embankment, on gaining which near Waterloo Bridge it again comes out to the surface. In its total length of about five-eighths of a mile it has four stations. Its motive power is electricity on the underground conduit third rail system. The cars, running singly, and at frequent intervals, are single-decked. It claims for its principle that the station platforms are readily accessible, so that instead of having to descend a great number of steps, or to enter a lift to reach the cars, passengers arrive there by means of a short well-lighted stairway; that the ventilation of the tunnels is perfect, and the speed of the cars equal to that of the trains, and as they run singly and close together, long waits are avoided, and thus they are specially suited for short-distance travelling. It also claims a general immunity from vibration.
To thoroughly understand how a complete system of shallow underground works we must go abroad to Paris, Buda-Pesth, Boston, and New York. I may remark that in describing this system a certain amount of repetition is inevitable.
PARIS
Paris has its “Twopenny Tube,” or rather its equivalent. On July 30th, 1900, Londoners for the first time travelled by a deep-level line from the City to Shepherds Bush, a distance of 5·77 miles; and a few days earlier, on the 19th of the same month, the Electrical Chemin de Fer Métropolitain de Paris—the main channel of an elaborate system that links together every district of the capital—was opened for traffic. This chief artery connects at the fortifications, the Porte Maillot with the Porte de Vincennes, a distance of 6·6 miles. In other words, it crosses Paris diagonally from north-west to south-east; from a point at the north of the Bois de Boulogne to another at the north of the Bois de Vincennes; the eighteen stations (including terminals) on the main line being Porte Maillot, Rue D’Obligado, Place de L’Etoile (Arc de Triomphe), Avenue de L’Alma, Rue Marbœuf, Champs Elyseés, Place de la Concorde, Tuileries, Palais Royal, Louvre, Châtelet, Hotel de Ville, St. Paul, Place de la Bastille, Gare de Lyons, Rue de Reuilly, Place de la Nation, and Porte de Vincennes.
On the Métropolitain there is a three-minutes’ service of trains during the day, and a six-minutes’ service at night. On the London Tube the intervals vary from two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half minutes in the day, while at night they are the same as in Paris, both railways being open for some twenty hours out of the twenty-four.
In Paris two classes of passengers are provided for: first and second. The former are called upon to pay 2½d., the latter 1½d., for any length of journey. Up to nine a.m., second-class, or workmen’s tickets, are issued for 2d., the return half being available for the remainder of the day.
Thus, as regards date of opening, length of line, service of trains, and average fares, there is a close similarity between the English and French lines; but the system is widely different. In London we burrow deep; in Paris they go just beneath the surface, the authorities after much hesitation having adopted the shallow underground system. Our Tube trains are shot through huge iron pipes penetrating the subsoil at depths varying from sixty to a hundred feet, and to get at the rail level, passengers must take a perpendicular journey in a big lift. But their Parisian counterparts trip down a few steps and along a brightly-lighted, white-tiled tunnel, so beautifully ventilated and smokeless—electricity being the motive power—that an enthusiastic expert declares its atmosphere to be “perfectly clean and sweet.” The tunnels are as near the surface as possible, and on the greater part of the line the keystones of the masonry arches are only about 3 feet 6 inches below the street level. The excavations were at first attempted by means of shields, as in “tubular” work; but this had to be abandoned in favour of the time-honoured “cut and cover” plan employed in the construction of our early underground railway.
When the great Parisian scheme is completed upon a twentieth-century model, much more finished and convenient in many ways than any of ours in London, it will comprise a total length of 38·86 miles of track, seven-tenths being laid in shallow covered trenches, the remainder in open cuttings or on viaducts, the entire cost being estimated at twelve million sterling. An interesting feature of the scheme is that each section is self-contained and ends in loops, so that shunting is obviated. No trains run from any one distant strip of line into another, but where there are crossings, or where the termini touch, there are stations to facilitate changing. This arrangement ensures a rapid service, maintained with regularity and punctuality on each section. Like our “Tube,” the success of the Parisian Métropolitain was from the first immense, and at the end of ten months showed a return of over forty million passengers.
BUDA-PESTH
Along the Boulevard Andrassy at Buda-Pesth there is a shallow electric tramway built upon similar principles, a few feet under the main thoroughfare, which is by no means a failure, financially or otherwise.