All these facilities served a most useful purpose; but they obviously required to be supplemented by lines of railway which would directly serve the central area of London, and both allow of easier movement from one part of London to another and enable City workers to travel more readily between their suburban homes and the immediate locality of their places of work or business. Neither surface nor overhead railways across the centre of London were even to be thought of, while the cost of still more underground railways of the "shallow" type already constructed was looked upon as almost prohibitive, though underground any further London lines would assuredly have to be.
A way was found out of the difficulty by the construction of deep-level iron tubes passing through the stratum of clay underlying London, such tubes providing for lines of railway along which trains to be worked by electricity could pass between various stations—in still larger tubes—in different parts of London and the suburbs.
The first of these tube railways was projected by the City and South London Railway Company, and received the sanction of Parliament in 1884. The line was opened in 1890, and with it London acquired the pioneer of those tube railways which were to effect so revolutionary a change in her general transport conditions. The Central London Railway followed, in 1900, and since then London has been provided with a network of tube railways, offering facilities for a more or less complete interchange of traffic, north and south, and east and west, both between themselves and in conjunction with the termini of the main line steam railways. In this way movement about and across London has been greatly facilitated. Three of the new tubes, the Bakerloo, the Piccadilly and the Hampstead have been united into one system by the London Electric Railway Company, and, together with the earlier District Railway and the London United Tramways, are under the same control, with great advantage to everyone concerned, while the original underground lines—the Metropolitan and the Metropolitan District—have been electrified and vastly improved. The disadvantages of "isolated projects" on which successive Commissions—the London Traffic Commission among the number—have insisted so strongly have thus, to a certain extent, been met by the principle of combination through private enterprise. No action has yet been taken to carry out the recommendation made in June, 1905, in the Report of the Royal Commission on London Traffic, in regard to the formation of a London Traffic Board, though a useful work is being done by the London Traffic Branch appointed by the Board of Trade in August, 1907, "to continue and supplement the work of the Royal Commission by keeping the statistics up to date, collecting information, and studying the problem of London traffic in all its changing aspects." In the reports issued by this Branch will be found a mine of interesting data on London traffic conditions, supplementing the abundant information in the reports of the Royal Commission itself.
It is to be hoped that the sequel to these continued investigations will be the eventual creation of some such central authority as the London Traffic Board recommended. Whether this should be done by calling into existence for London an entirely new body, such as the Public Service Commission which controls all transportation questions and facilities in New York City, or whether the simpler method of enlarging the powers of the present Railway and Canal Commission should be adopted, by preference, are matters of detail which the future must be left to decide; but the advantages that would result from a greater degree of co-ordination in the organising and regulating of London transport conditions are incontestable.
As showing the extent of the patronage which the electric railways of London, whether tube railways or otherwise, are now receiving, I might quote from the Board of Trade "Railway Returns" the following figures, giving the number of passengers (exclusive of holders of season and periodical tickets) carried in 1910:—
| COMPANY OR LINE. | NUMBER OF PASSENGERS. |
| Central London | 40,660,856 |
| City and South London | 23,501,947 |
| Great Northern and City | 9,380,378 |
| Waterloo and City | 3,724,277 |
| London Electric | 95,647,197 |
| Metropolitan | 82,728,776 |
| Metropolitan District | 64,627,829 |
| Whitechapel and Bow | 19,886,273 |
CHAPTER XXXI
THE OUTLOOK
Having now traced the important part that improvements in the conditions of inland transport and communication have played in the economic and social development of this country, and having seen, also, the action taken therein, on the one hand by so-called "private enterprise" (defined by Samuel Smiles as "the liberality, public spirit and commercial enterprise of merchants, traders and manufacturers"), and on the other hand by State and local authorities, we have now to consider, in this final chapter, what are the prospects of further changes and developments in those transport conditions to which, judging from past experience, it would not be wise to fix finality in the matter of progress.
Thus far the railway certainly represents the survival of the fittest; and, curiously enough, although great improvements have been made in locomotive construction, in rails, in signalling, in carriage-building and in the various departments of railway working, no absolutely new principle has been developed since the Liverpool and Manchester Railway definitely established the last of the three fundamental principles on which railway construction and operation are really based: (1) that a greater load can be moved, by an equivalent power, in a wheeled vehicle on a pair of rails than in a similar vehicle on an ordinary road; (2) that flanged wheels and flat rails are preferable for fast traffic to flat wheels and flanged rails; and (3) that a railway train should be operated by a locomotive rather than by either animal power or a stationary engine.