Twists and turns of the Tube’s past
FORGOTTEN LONDON UNDERGROUND LINE FROM BERKSHIRE TO ESSEX
IN LONDON we have a transport system that is truly iconic.
Everything from the famous roundel to the trains themselves captures the imagination of people across the world.
But just as fascinating as the Underground system we have today is the long history of how it came to be.
That story has as many different branches, twists and delays as the current system with a truly radical amount of change over the years.
An amazing example of this is the District Railway, a forgotten line that once crossed the whole capital from West to East.
At separate points in time it went all the way to Windsor and even to Southend.
The Railway was built in the second half of the 19th Century, a time of great change for transport in the capital.
The Metropolitan Railway, the world’s first underground railway, opened in 1863 and its success soon inspired others.
Permission for the District Railway soon followed but the intended route, through well-heeled neighbourhoods like Kensington and Sloane Square, meant the project quickly ran ran over budget.
Still it limped on opening the first section from South Kensington to Westminster in 1868, expanding eastwards to Mansion House in 1971.
Onwards to Windsor
Its potential meant that over the next 12 years it continued to snake out West across the boroughs.
By 1880 the line stretched up to Ealing Broadway and down to Richmond, the same route the modern District Line serves today. But that wasn’t enough. In 1883 a service was brought in going all the way to Windsor, using the tracks of the Great Western Railway.
There were stops at Castle Hill & Ealing Dean (now West Ealing), Hanwell, Southall, Hayes & Harlington, West Drayton, Langley, Slough and Windsor (now called Windsor and Eton Central).
Unfortunately there was little appetite for this new line and service was stopped in 1885. But for those two short years you could get an Underground train from Mansion House in the City of London all the way to Windsor.
To the East, after Mansion House, the District Railway joined forces with their great rival the Metropolitan Railway, sharing a track onto Whitechapel.
This meant both could feed trains onto the East London Railway which served New Cross.
Services on this Joint Railway, as it was called, began running October 1884.
From there the line crept eastwards by combining with two other local lines, the Whitechapel & Bow Railway and the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway (LTSR).
By June 1902, District trains were running all the way to Upminster along the route the modern District Line serves.
With the combined tracks of the District Railway and the LTSR, the possibilities were endless and in 1910 trains ran from Ealing Broadway through Central London all the way to Shoeburyness stopping at Southend on the way.
Unlike the Windsor line this one proved sustainable and ran until 1939 and the outbreak of the war.
Legacy
In 1933, the various independent railways in the capital were nationalised under the London Passenger Transport Board, a precursor to TfL.
At that point most of the District Railway became the District Line.
The Hounslow branch was slowly phased out before being finally withdrawn in 1964. In the 1970s was absorbed in to the Picaddilly Line as the Heathrow branch.
Other trains running through to South East London and Uxbridge were taken over by other lines.