In the 1930 a successful hoax succeeded by selling hundreds of 10 guinea tickets for a charity ball to be held at a house in Leinster Gardens.

When the underground line was being built Nos. 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens were dismantled leaving just their 5ft-deep façades, the space left behind allowed the trains to empty their smoke boxes before entering the next tunnel. Today the fake houses can still be seen while behind them the District Line rattles along its way.

At Crystal Palace Park in 1864 a novel way of transporting the public through a tube was opened which obviated the need to let off steam. A large tube enough to accommodate entire carriages was assembled, and air was forced through the tube, in the manner of a bicycle pump, to propel the train and its hapless passengers along the tube’s entire length, at the other end of its quarter mile length giant fans would suck the train to its destination.

[I]t cannot have come as a surprise to any passengers of this mode of transport to learn that it closed after a few months. Rumours later persisted that the tunnel was haunted with skeletons dressed in Victorian clothes still sitting in an old railway carriage. We shall never know as the site was demolished in 1911 to make way for the Festival of Empire celebrations.

Travel along the southern section of the Bakerloo Line and you enter the tube that the Waterloo & Whitehall Railway laid down in 1865. Running parallel with Hungerford Bridge this underwater cast-iron pipe was expected to take passengers in trains propelled along its length by fans sucking or blowing the carriages along. Fifteen trains an hour and costing 2d for a first class ticket, second class for a ha’penny less and third class at a bargain 1d. Unfortunately for its operators the company went bust before they could experience this ‘commodious, and well lighted’ form of transport.

A version of this post was published by CabbieBlog on 12th October 2012

In the 1930 a successful hoax succeeded by selling hundreds of 10 guinea tickets for a charity ball to be held at a house in Leinster Gardens.

When the underground line was being built Nos. 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens were dismantled leaving just their 5ft-deep façades, the space left behind allowed the trains to empty their smoke boxes before entering the next tunnel. Today the fake houses can still be seen while behind them the District Line rattles along its way.

At Crystal Palace Park in 1864 a novel way of transporting the public through a tube was opened which obviated the need to let off steam. A large tube enough to accommodate entire carriages was assembled, and air was forced through the tube, in the manner of a bicycle pump, to propel the train and its hapless passengers along the tube’s entire length, at the other end of its quarter mile length giant fans would suck the train to its destination.

[I]t cannot have come as a surprise to any passengers of this mode of transport to learn that it closed after a few months. Rumours later persisted that the tunnel was haunted with skeletons dressed in Victorian clothes still sitting in an old railway carriage. We shall never know as the site was demolished in 1911 to make way for the Festival of Empire celebrations.

Travel along the southern section of the Bakerloo Line and you enter the tube that the Waterloo & Whitehall Railway laid down in 1865. Running parallel with Hungerford Bridge this underwater cast-iron pipe was expected to take passengers in trains propelled along its length by fans sucking or blowing the carriages along. Fifteen trains an hour and costing 2d for a first class ticket, second class for a ha’penny less and third class at a bargain 1d. Unfortunately for its operators the company went bust before they could experience this ‘commodious, and well lighted’ form of transport.

Central London is starting to look as if a giant mole has been at work, with holes appearing at the most unlikely locations the largest of these is to be found beside Centre Point; and just what did happen to the iconic fountains which once stood outside?

Said to be the biggest engineering work being carried out in Europe, CrossRail is, at £15bn, certainly the most expensive.

The only compensation is that Knowledge students will never have to memorise the “Dirty Dozen”,twelve road which form a short cut through Soho from west to east, now that Great Chapel Street has been turned into a hole.

[C]rossRail is just the latest of the Capital’s grandiose rail schemes, which started in 1836 with the London & Greenwich train line; its name would indicate that Greenwich was not part of the Metropolis at that time.

Unlike CrossRail it was planned to run the tracks over an elevated Roman-style viaduct with its terminus modestly styled on the Acropolis. It was routed through some of the poorer parts of London, so that less compensation had to be paid when demolishing people’s houses and making them homeless, even so it was costly and time consuming for no fewer than 878 separate brick arches were constructed, making it at the time the world’s longest viaduct, the surviving arches and station booking office can still be seen in the Spa Road area of Bermondsey. When completed the cabbies at that time, no doubt were among those who complained about “the thundering steam engines and omnibus