From Bow to Ealing
I have realized one of my first ambitions. In the dark engine cab of an Underground train I have shot like a comet through light and darkness, the glittering tail of the train thundering behind packed with people on their way from Bow to Ealing.
A bell rang. The driver looked out over the track where three gleaming steel rails met in a point outside a tunnel. He pulled over a lever and the train started. It was the strangest sensation. I forgot the six packed coaches at the back of us. I forgot the cargo of calm newspaper-reading men and novel-reading girls which we were carrying across London. In the semi-darkness of the driver's cab an ordinary Underground journey had become strangely adventurous and exciting.
The driver accelerated. His pointer moved round a dial, and the train answered his small movements, gathering speed and noise. I was conscious only of being in the grip of a tremendous force that was hurling us over those three gleaming rails. We took the tunnel at a good thirty-five miles an hour, and the noise we made changed to a hollow roar! I could feel the train swerve and rock slightly as we rounded a curve; but I could see nothing save here and there a green light close to the ground. If you can imagine that you are tied to a projectile shot from a gun in the night, you have an idea of driving an electric train through a tunnel.
In the underground blackness stations show first as a faint yellow glow cut across by the jet-black semicircle of the tunnel. The next second you can see their curving rows of lights; they straighten out, and then the platform at which you will pull up lies level as a knife edge before you. Mark Lane ... Mansion House ... Blackfriars ... Temple ... Charing Cross.
Charing Cross is big. As you sweep in the driver has time to collect a lightning series of snapshots! A bookstall, a cigarette booth, lit and yellow, a pretty girl coming down the steps carrying a bag, a fussy old lady asking a ticket inspector how to get to Baron's Court, and a sudden stir and interest of Ealing-bound people who detach themselves from the crowd of waiting passengers. Just a flash! All seen in the fraction of a second! Bells ring down the train. A loud one clangs in the engine cab. And off you go again through the blackness towards Victoria.
Few things are more uncanny in mechanical London than the system of automatic signalling which permits a chain of electric trains to move over the same line at minute intervals with no chance of a collision.
Little green lights beckon you on, telling you the way is clear. As you pass them red lights at your back change to green, beckoning on the train behind; and so it is all the way along. Now and then you meet a red light. You stop! The light changes to green. On you go! The marvellous thing is that if, in a moment of colour blindness, you tried to override a red light your train would correct you. It would refuse to go on!
At Kensington we shot out into the open air. Gaily, madly, we raced over the shining rails, marvellously, so it seemed to me, taking a sharp bend, smoothly continuing along the straight. It was like flying without the perpetual anxiety of flight. Once, with the awful insolence of the cocksure, I thought the driver had erred.