Subway trains are older than you might think. It was August 2, 1870 that the first one opened. It was in London, and would take you on a 1300 foot journey under the Thames, near the Tower of London. In 1870 there weren’t any electric trains yet (although they were very, very close to appearing). And a steam train was just not going to work underground. So how did the little subway work? With a rope! They put the steam engine above ground (actually there were two of them; one on each side of the river).
The subway only had two cars, each carrying just 12 people, but it was England, so they still had first-class and second-class tickets. At least they did at first, but it didn’t take long for passengers to find out that the only thing a first-class ticket got you was the chance to get on first, after that everything was the same.
The first subway might have been a success, if the steam engines of the time had been more reliable. The engines powering the subway also ran elevators at each end of the line, and they broke down all the time. People who might have been potential passengers weren’t keen on the possibility of getting stuck in an elevator or, worse, stranded underneath the river. The whole operation went bankrupt.
But it didn’t completely disappear; they dismantled the rails and the cars, installed spiral stairways instead of elevators, and charged people a half a penny to walk through the tunnel. It was, after all, less than a quarter-mile long.
As a pedestrian tunnel it turned out to be pretty popular; they averaged over 20,000 people per week. It was an actual commuter route; the only other way across that part of the river was on a ferry. By 1888 it had become a commonplace part of the London scene, and only got mentioned in the newspapers when someone noticed that a man in the tunnel had a knife. This wouldn’t have been remarkable except for one thing: Jack the Ripper was operating in Whitechapel, which wasn’t very far away. Whether that was Jack himself in the tunnel remains a mystery.
The tunnel closed in 1897 after a long decline in traffic — it still cost a half cent to walk through it, but in 1894 the Tower Bridge had opened not too far away, and it was free to cross the river that way. The London Hydraulic Power Company bought the tunnel and used it for piping water around the city.
The tunnel is still there, and still in use as a utility tunnel. A bomb exploded in the Thames just above it during WWII, but its effect was only to “squeeze” part of the tunnel — it was still round, but the diameter became smaller at the site of the explosion. The bomb didn’t even cause a leak. In fact, when they went down to inspect it after the war, they discovered the tunnel was still in perfectly good condition.
The original idea of using a stationary steam engine to pull the cars with a cable didn’t work out in London, but when they tried the same thing in New York it worked better. At about the same time they were tunneling under the Thames, a company formed by Charles Harvey was building an elevated rail line called the West Side and Yonkers Patent Railway. The part of the line that ran in the actual city (Yonkers was just a village then) was raised on poles right in the middle of the streets. When it opened, in 1868, it also used stationary steam engines to pull the car back and forth by cable.
The cable-operated version of the WS&YPRR was only a couple of miles long, but it eventually extended 35 miles — too long for a cable, but by then they’d converted it to electricity. The line was pretty successful; it kept going until 1958.
The same year the Yonkers elevated railway opened, a ship left England heading for Australia, full of convicts. General Sherman broke yet another treaty between the US and the Plains Indians. Thomas Edison applied for his very first patent (for an electric device to record votes). Scott Joplin, the ragtime piano player, was born.
And the year the railway closed, the first US satellite, Explorer 1, was launched. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was launched in England. Pizza Hut was founded. The Beatles (at the time still called the Quarrymen) had their first recording session. And Ellen DeGeneres was born. Quite different worlds. But from start to finish, you could always ride the train.
