Proposed Metropolitan Underground Railway, London

In 1855 Parliament appointed a Select Committee on Metropolitan Communications which sat for three months and considered a number of radical solutions. Several of them involved trains which were to be propelled by atmospheric pressure, an idea that briefly attracted the interests of many eminent railway engineers. The atmospheric system of propulsion was proposed for two of the schemes that the Select Committee examined at length; proposals were put forward for a ‘crystal’ railway, developments of Pearson’s original idea of an arcade railway. The first, presented by an architect, William Moseley, was for a railway twelve feet below street level between St. Paul’s and Oxford Circus, a route which nearly half a century later would become the core of the Central Line. It would be covered by a wrought-iron ‘superway’ across which pedestrians could pass for a toll of one penny, the trains visible beneath them. The walkway itself would be enclosed within a glass arcade, with arcades of shops, houses and the occasional hotel on either side; a sort of nineteenth-century shopping mall complete with atrium.

While recognizing the visionary character of Moseley’s scheme, costing an estimated £2 million, the committee members were more impressed by a similar proposal put forward by the ‘apostle of glass’ Sir Joseph Paxton, the designer of the Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace. His ‘Grand Girdle Railway and Boulevard under Glass’, which he had patriotically named the ‘Great Victorian Way’, was even grander, a twelve-mile railway built above ground but within a glass arcade, and shops and houses on either side. As with Moseley’s system, the crystal railways were to be powered by atmospheric pressure, a system by which a cylinder under the train was sucked through a sealed pipe between the tracks by creating a vacuum at one end using huge pumping engines. Paxton’s scheme was quite liked by the committee but was ruinously expenses. The visionary acknowledged that the cost, £34 million, was too great for any company to bear and suggested that it be underwritten by public funds, “a most unattractive proposition for Victorian politicians who were wedded to laissez-faire economics and still cherished the hope of abolishing the income tax.” The proposal was ultimately rejected on the grounds of cost.