Northern City Line - History

History

The Great Northern & City Railway was planned to allow trains to run from the Great Northern Railway line at Finsbury Park directly into the City of London at Moorgate. The tunnels were built large enough to take a mainline train with an internal diameter of 16 feet (4.9 m), compared with those of the Central London Railway which had been built with a diameter less than 12 feet (3.7 m). However, the Great Northern eventually opposed the scheme, and the line opened in 1904 with the northern terminus in tunnels underneath the mainline Finsbury Park station. It was originally electrified with an unusual fourth-rail system featuring a conductor rail outside each running rail.

The GN&CR was bought in 1913 by the Metropolitan Railway, which operated today's Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City lines and the ex-East London line. They had plans to link it to the Circle line and to the Waterloo & City line, but these were never fulfilled.

The original generating station for the GN&CR was closed when the Metropolitan Railway took over, and became the studio of Gainsborough Pictures. After lying derelict for many years, it was a temporary venue for the Almeida Theatre, and has since been redeveloped as apartments.

After the Metropolitan amalgamated with the other Underground railways to form the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933, the line was renamed the Northern City Line and became part of the Edgware-Morden Line (which became the Northern line in 1937) for operational purposes. As part of London Underground's "New Works" programme, plans were made to connect the Northern City Line to the surface at Finsbury Park, and then join suburban branches to Alexandra Palace, High Barnet and Edgware. The Highgate branch of the Edgware-Morden Line would be connected to this network north of Highgate. By the time the Second World War started, the Highgate link and electrification of the Barnet branch were well under way, but work on the Northern City link was postponed.

After the war there were proposals to extend the Northern City Line north and south. The London Plan Working Party Report of 1949 proposed several new lines and suburban electrification schemes for London, lettered from A to M. Route C would become the Victoria Line. The lower priority routes J and K would have seen the Northern City extended to Woolwich (Route J) and Crystal Palace (Route K), at the same time as retaining the "Northern Heights" extensions to Edgware and Alexandra Palace, the line would have run in small-diameter tube tunnel south from Moorgate to Bank and London Bridge. The "K" branch would have run under Peckham to Peckham Rye, continuing onward to join the old Crystal Palace (High Level) branch (which was still open in 1949) near Lordship Lane station. But nothing came of the 1949 proposal, and the Edgware, Alexandra Palace and Crystal Palace (High Level) branches were all closed to passengers in 1954. As a result the Northern City Line remained isolated from the rest of the network.

Services were cut back from Finsbury Park to Drayton Park in 1964 to make room for the Victoria line to use the low level platforms at Finsbury Park. The former Piccadilly line platforms became the northbound Piccadilly/Victoria line platforms, and the former Northern City Line platforms the southbound Piccadilly and Victoria line ones. At the same time a change was made at Highbury and Islington, with the Northbound Northern City line diverted to a new platform alongside the Northbound Victoria line, and the Southbound Victoria using the former Northbound Northern City platform, also providing cross platform interchange.

In 1970 the line was renamed Northern line (Highbury Branch) and the following year, an agreement was made to transfer the line to British Rail and connect it (as was intended by its original promoters) to the main line via surface platforms at Finsbury Park. By running commuter trains to Moorgate instead of King's Cross, congestion at King's Cross was relieved.

The last London Underground services ran in October 1975, and British Rail services commenced in August 1976, replacing services run into Broad Street via the City Branch of the North London Line. These BR services used the name "Great Northern Electrics". The track is now owned by Network Rail. Services, provided on the line by First Capital Connect, run to Welwyn Garden City or are Hertford Loop Line services to Hertford North (some extending to Stevenage or Letchworth). The name "Northern City Line" has been revived to refer to the subsurface part of the route.

The Moorgate tube crash, the most serious railway accident on the London Underground system, occurred at Moorgate station on 28 February 1975, when a Highbury Branch train ran through the terminus at speed and crashed into the dead end of the tunnel beyond. The cause of the accident, which killed 43 people, was never determined.