The Tube began with steam engines, gaslit carriages and bearded staff
When the world's first underground railway opened between Paddington and Farringdon in January 1863, steam locomotives hauled gas-lit wooden carriages through the tunnels. Smoke and heat made passengers faint, and the Metropolitan Railway even encouraged its staff to grow beards to filter the air. Opening day still drew 38,000 riders.
Plans to link the City with central London surfaced in the 1830s, and the Metropolitan got permission in 1854. Engineers rehearsed in a short test tunnel at Kibblesworth, chosen because its ground resembled London's, before filling it in. Early lines were dug by cut and cover, trenching along streets and roofing them over, and the Metropolitan and District companies closed the Circle line loop in 1884.
Deep tubes came next. The City and South London Railway of 1890 ran through two tunnels just over 3 metres wide, bored beneath roads so no landowners had to agree, and its electric trains pulled carriages with tiny opaque windows nicknamed padded cells. The Central London Railway followed in 1900 as the twopenny tube. The American financier Charles Yerkes took over the District, pushed through direct current over the Metropolitan's objections, and opened three more tubes by 1907. A railway magazine sneered at the name Bakerloo as a gutter title.
Branding became the network's calling card. Edward Johnston's typeface arrived in 1916, the bullseye roundel evolved from early station signs, and Harry Beck's diagram, drawn in 1931, first appeared in 1933, the year most buses, trams and underground lines merged into London Transport. Tube and Electric were both rejected as official names before Underground won, though Tube stuck anyway. The Metropolitan sold suburban houses under the Metro-land label.
Today the system runs 11 lines over 400 kilometres of track with 272 stations, handling more than 1.2 billion journeys in 2024–25. Despite the nickname, only 45 percent of it is underground, most of the surface track lying north of the Thames. It uses an unusual four-rail DC supply. Ticketing moved from the Travelcard in 1983 to Oyster in 2003, and in 2014 it became the first major transit network to accept contactless bank cards.
Source: London Underground
