Waterloo & City Line - History

History

The London and South Western Railway (L&SWR) reached Waterloo in 1848. This location made passenger access to the City of London difficult, and at that time proposals were considered for an extension, but they were abandoned on grounds of cost. When the South Eastern Railway constructed its Charing Cross line, some trains operated from the L&SWR line to Cannon Street, but this was commercially and operationally unsuccessful.

Nonetheless the difficult access continued to be a problem, and eventually it was decided to build a tube railway, hugely cheaper than a surface line as it avoided nearly all the land acquisition that would have been required on the surface. The Waterloo & City Railway opened on 11 July 1898, and from the start was operated by the L&SWR. It remained a separate legal entity until 1906, when it was absorbed into the L&SWR, and became part of the Southern Railway on the grouping of British railways in 1923, and subsequently part of British Rail's Southern Region on nationalisation in 1948. Only in 1993, when British Rail was privatised, was it seen as anomalous for a tube line to be part of the National Rail network and by agreement ownership was transferred to London Underground, effective from 1 April 1994.

Its ticketing was fully integrated with the national network and passengers could buy through tickets from mainline railway stations to Bank.

The line was designed by civil engineer W. R. Galbraith and by James Henry Greathead, inventor of the tunnelling shield that bears his name. The remnants of one of the Greathead tunnelling shields used in the construction of the line can be seen in the interchange tunnel at Bank linking the Waterloo and City with the Northern Line and the Docklands Light Railway.

There have been proposals to extend the Waterloo & City Line for nearly a century. After acquiring the Great Northern & City Railway (GN&C) in 1913 (the current Northern City Line), the Metropolitan Railway made plans to join the GN&C to the Waterloo & City or to the Circle Line, but these never came to fruition. The London Plan Working Party Report of 1949 envisaged as its Route G the electrification of the London, Tilbury & Southend Railway (LTS), and its diversion away from Fenchurch Street to Bank and on through the Waterloo & City tunnels to Waterloo and its suburban lines. The Waterloo & City tunnels would have had to be bored out to main line size for this "Crossrail" to happen. In the event only the electrification of the LTS took place, though the Docklands Light Railway tunnel from Minories to the Bank follows part of the envisaged route. The revised Working Party Report of 1965 did not mention the Route G proposal, though it does say that "he possibility of extending the Waterloo & City Line northwards to Liverpool Street has been examined, but found to be physically impracticable." More recently the Green Party has revived the Metropolitan's plan of connecting the Northern City and Waterloo & City lines as a Crossrail route.