The Age of the Drain

One of the things that you get struck by when you travel on a different metro system for the first time is how similar it is to the London Underground, and one of the other things you get struck by is how different it is. If we take Lisbon, the Metro I used for the first time most recently, it’s far more homogenous than the tube. The firs line of the Metro de Lisboa first opened in 1959, which is a long time ago being before I was born. However it was almost a full century after the Metropolitan Railway – the first Underground line of any kind. Today, in my experience the platforms of every station I visited looked all the same and the trains looked all the same. There are four lines, but apart from the colours they are named after there is no noticeable difference.

Compare this to the Underground when I was growing up in the 70s. The District Line from Ealing Broadway ran very different trains from the Central Line from Ealing Broadway, which were different from the newer trains on the Piccadilly from Northfields which began running in the mid 70s. However, the most different of all was the Waterloo and City line. That's the subject of my latest drawing

For one thing, when I was a kid it wasn’t even run by London Transport, even though it was included on the London Underground Map. It was built in 1898 by the Waterloo and City Railway Company, with the support of the London South Western Railway (LSWR). The LSWR took the line over completely before the stat of the Great War. In the 20s the many railway companies of Great Britain – with the exception of the London Underground railways – were amalgamated into the big four – the LMS, LNER, Great Western and the Southern Railway, which the LSWR was part of. In the post World War II nationalisation of the railways the line passed to British Railways. Finally, in 1994, the line was transferred to London Underground for the princely sum of £1.

The picture shows a single car of the 1940 stock that continued running right up until the end of the British Rail custodianship. I made a simpler drawing of one of these for Inktober a few years ago when the prompt was Drain, that being the nickname of the line.