Steam on the Met

The London Passenger Transport Board came into existence on July 1 1933. It was London’s equivalent of the Grouping, except that it also involved buses and trams too. The Metropolitan Railway, with its main line from Moorgate to the rural Buckinghamshire junction of Verney Junction was merged with the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, which included deep tube lines, the sub-surface District Railway, as well as Tilling and London General Omnibus Company bus companies and the many tram operators.

The Metropolitan may have been the first railway to be built under the streets, and the Metropolitan & St John’s Wood Railway pushed it to Aylesbury, where it then took on the Aylesbury & Buckingham Railway to connect it to the LNWR at Verney Junction.

Funding was in short supply and the Met, and what became the Great Central Railway, came to an agreement for the GCR to share its tracks into London from a junction just north of Quainton Road.

The Met had electrified its main line as far as Rickmansworth and passenger trains were in the hands of the handsome Metro-vick Bo-bo electrics. That main line, from Quainton Road in rural Buckinghamshire to St Johns Wood, was also shared with the LNER. The LNER took on steam services north of ‘Ricky’ in November 1937 and, as part of the deal, acquired the larger Met steam locomotives. The Verney Junction-quainton Road section was closed in 1936 and LT services north of Aylesbury suspended.

LPTB was nationalised under the Transport Act of 1947 and the new, government-owned London Transport Executive came into effect on January 1 1948.

Steam returned to the Metropolitan in 1989 and has become a semi-regular fixture ever since, culminating in the return of Metropolitan Railway No. 1 to the tunnels to Moorgate in 2013 to mark the Met’s 150th anniversary. Sadly, changes to Tfl’s signalling system means that it is unlikely that steam will return to any part of its system again.