The Baker Street and Waterloo Railway (BS&WR), also known as the Bakerloo tube, was a railway company established in 1893 that built a deep-level underground "tube" railway in London. The company struggled to fund the work, and construction did not begin until 1898. In 1900, work was hit by the financial collapse of its parent company, the London & Globe Finance Corporation, through the fraud of Whitaker Wright, its main shareholder. In 1902, the BS&WR became a subsidiary of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL) controlled by American financier Charles Yerkes. The UERL quickly raised the funds, mainly from foreign investors.
When first opened in 1906, the BS&WR's line served nine stations and ran completely underground in a pair of tunnels for between its northern terminus at Baker Street and its southern terminus at Elephant and Castle with a depot on a short spur nearby at London Road. Extensions between 1907 and 1913 took the northern end of the line to the terminus of the Great Western Railway (GWR) at Paddington. Between 1915 and 1917, it was further extended to Queen's Park, where it came to the surface and connected with the London and North Western Railway (LNWR), and to Watford; a total distance of .
Within the first year of opening it became apparent to the management and investors that the estimated passenger numbers for the BS&WR and the other UERL lines were over-optimistic. Despite improved integration and cooperation with the other tube railways and the later extensions, the BS&WR struggled financially. In July 1933, the BS&WR was taken over as part of the UERL by the newly unified London Passenger Transport Board, which was nationalised in 1948. Today, the BS&WR's tunnels and stations are part of the London Underground's Bakerloo line.
Establishment
Origin, 1891–93
The idea of building an underground railway along the approximate route of the BS&WR had been put forward well before it came to fruition at the turn of the century. As early as 1865, a proposal was put forward for a Waterloo and Whitehall Railway, powered by pneumatic propulsion. Carriages would have been sucked or blown a distance of three-quarters of a mile (about 1 km) from Great Scotland Yard to Waterloo Station, travelling through wrought-iron tubes laid in a trench at the bottom of the Thames. The scheme was abandoned three years later after a financial panic caused its collapse. Sir William Siemens of Siemens Brothers served as electrical engineer for a later abortive scheme, the Charing Cross and Waterloo Electric Railway. It was incorporated by an act of Parliament, the Charing Cross and Waterloo Electric Railway Act 1882 (45 & 46 Vict. c. cclv), in 1882 and got as far as constructing a stretch of tunnel under the Victoria Embankment before running out of money.
According to a pamphlet published by the BS&WR in 1906, the idea of constructing the line "originally arose from the desire of a few business men in Westminster to get to and from Lord's Cricket Ground as quickly as possible," to enable them to see the last hour's play without having to leave their offices too early. They realised that an underground railway line connecting the north and south of central London would provide "a long-felt want of transport facilities" and "would therefore prove a great financial success." They were inspired by the recent success of the City and South London Railway (C&SLR), the world's first deep-tube railway, which proved the feasibility of such an endeavour when it opened in November 1890 and carried large numbers of passengers in its first year of operation.
In November 1891, notice was given of a private bill that would be presented to Parliament for the construction of the BS&WR. The railway was planned to run entirely underground from the junction of New Street (now Melcombe Street) and Dorset Square west of Baker Street to James Street (now Spur Road) on the south side of Waterloo station. From Baker Street, the route was to run eastwards beneath Marylebone Road, then curve to the south under Park Crescent and follow Portland Place, Langham Place and Regent Street to Piccadilly Circus. It was then to run under Haymarket, Trafalgar Square and Northumberland Avenue before passing under the River Thames to Waterloo station. A decision had not been made between the use of cable haulage or electric traction as the means of pulling the trains.
Bills for three similarly inspired new underground railways were also submitted to Parliament for the 1892 parliamentary session, and, to ensure a consistent approach, a joint select committee was established to review the proposals. The committee took evidence on various matters regarding the construction and operation of deep-tube railways, and made recommendations on the diameter of tube tunnels, method of traction, and the granting of wayleaves. After rejecting the construction of stations on land owned by the Crown Estate and the Duke of Portland between Oxford Circus and Baker Street, the Committee allowed the BS&WR bill to proceed for normal parliamentary consideration.
The route was approved and the bill received royal assent on 28 March 1893 as the (56 & 57 Vict. c. iv). Stations were permitted at Baker Street, Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Embankment and Waterloo. The depot would have been at the south end of the line at James Street and Lower Marsh.
Search for finance, 1893–1903 Although the company had permission to construct the railway, it still had to raise the capital for the construction works. The BS&WR was not alone; four other new tube railway companies were looking for investors – the Waterloo and City Railway (W&CR), the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway (CCE&HR) and the Great Northern and City Railway (GN&CR) (the three other companies that were put forward in bills in 1892) and the Central London Railway (CLR, which received royal assent in 1891). The original tube railway, the C&SLR, was also raising funds to construct extensions to its existing line. Only the W&CR, which was the shortest line and was backed by the London and South Western Railway with a guaranteed dividend, was able to raise its funds without difficulty. For the BS&WR and the rest, and others that came later, much of the remainder of the decade saw a struggle to find finance in an uninterested market.
Like most legislation of its kind, the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway Act 1893 imposed a time limit for the compulsory purchase of land and the raising of capital. To keep the powers alive, the BS&WR announced a new bill in November 1895, which included an application for an extension of time. The additional time and permission to raise an extra £100,000 of capital was granted when the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway Act 1896 (59 & 60 Vict. c. ccxxvii) received royal assent on 7 August 1896.
In November 1897, the BS&WR did a deal with the London & Globe Finance Corporation (L&GFC), a mining finance company operated by mining speculator Whitaker Wright and chaired by Lord Dufferin. The L&GFC was to fund and manage the construction, taking any profit from the process. The cost of construction was estimated to be £1,615,000 (equivalent to approximately £ today). The L&GFC replaced the BS&WR's directors with its own and let construction contracts. Wright made fortunes in America and Britain by promoting gold and silver mines and saw the BS&WR as a way of diversifying the L&GFC's holdings.
In 1899, Wright fraudulently concealed large losses by one of the corporation's mines by manipulating the accounts of various L&GFC subsidiary companies. Expenditure for the BS&WR was also high, with the L&GFC having paid out approximately £650,000 (£ today) by November 1900. In its prospectus of November 1900, the company forecast that it would realise £260,000 a year from passenger traffic, with working expenses of £100,000, leaving £138,240 for dividends after the deduction of interest payments. Only a month later, however, Wright's fraud was discovered and the L&GFC and many of its subsidiaries collapsed. Wright himself subsequently committed suicide by taking cyanide during his trial at the Royal Courts of Justice.
The BS&WR struggled on for a time, funding the construction work by making calls on the unpaid portion of its shares, but activity eventually came to a stop and the partly built tunnels were left derelict. Before its collapse, the L&GFC attempted to sell its interests in the BS&WR for £500,000 to an American consortium headed by Albert L. Johnson, but was unsuccessful. However, it attracted the interest of another American consortium headed by financier Charles Yerkes. After some months of negotiations with the L&GFC's liquidator, Yerkes purchased the company for £360,000 plus interest (£ today). He was involved in the development of Chicago's tramway system in the 1880s and 1890s. He came to London in 1900 and purchased a number of the struggling underground railway companies, The BS&WR became a subsidiary of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL) which Yerkes formed to raise funds to build the tube railways and to electrify the District Railway. The UERL was capitalised at £5 million with the majority of shares sold to overseas investors. Further share issues followed, which raised a total of £18 million by 1903 (equivalent to approximately £ today) for use across all of the UERL's projects.
Planning the route, 1893–1904
BS&WR bill, 1896
While the BS&WR raised money, it continued to develop the plans for its route. The November 1895 bill sought powers to modify the planned route of the tunnels at the Baker Street end of the line and extend them approximately beyond their previous end point at the south-eastern corner of Dorset Square to the south-eastern corner of Harewood Square. This area was to be the site of Marylebone station, the new London terminus of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway's extension from the Midlands then under construction. Approval for the extension and a new station at Marylebone were included in the (59 & 60 Vict. c. ccxxvii).
New Cross & Waterloo Railway bill, 1898 On 26 November 1897, details of a bill proposed for the 1898 parliamentary session were published by the New Cross and Waterloo Railway (NC&WR), an independent company promoted by James Heath MP, which planned two separate sections of tube line that would connect directly to the BS&WR, extending the line south-east from Waterloo and east from around Marylebone Road.
The southern of the NC&WR's two extensions was planned to connect with the BS&WR tunnels under Belvedere Road to the west of Waterloo station and head east under the mainline station to its own station under Sandell Street adjacent to Waterloo East station. The route was then planned to run under Waterloo Road, St George's Circus and London Road to Elephant and Castle. The route then followed New Kent Road and Old Kent Road as far as the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway's Old Kent Road station (closed in 1917). Intermediate stations were to be constructed at St George's Circus, Elephant and Castle (where the NC&WR station would interchange with the C&SLR's station below ground and link to the London, Chatham and Dover Railway's station above ground), in New Kent Road at Munton Road, at the junction of New Kent Road and Old Kent Road, and on Old Kent Road at the junctions with Mina Road, Bowles Road and Commercial Road (now Commercial Way). A power station was planned on the south side of Old Kent Road where it crossed the Grand Surrey Canal (now filled-in) at the junction with St James's Road. This would have provided a delivery route for fuel and a source of water. Tunnels were also planned to connect the BS&WR's proposed depot at Waterloo to the NC&WR's route enabling trains to enter and exit in two directions.