IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 23: Passage 1

By the middle of the nineteenth century, London was the largest city in the world, and its streets were among the most congested. Every morning, vast numbers of clerks and labourers poured into the City, the capital's commercial centre, on foot, by horse-drawn omnibus or by cab. The railways had made matters worse rather than better. In 1846 a Royal Commission recommended that main-line railways should be kept out of central London, so terminuses such as Paddington, Euston and King's Cross remained along what was then the northern edge of the city. Travellers arriving there still had to complete their journeys by road, adding to the congestion that the railways might have relieved.

The solution proposed by Charles Pearson, a solicitor employed by the City of London, was to take the railway beneath the streets. Pearson had campaigned for a railway into the City since the 1840s, but his ideas were at first widely dismissed. Many people doubted that passengers would ever agree to travel in tunnels, which they associated with darkness, damp and danger, and raising the money took years. Construction of the Metropolitan Railway, which would run from Paddington to Farringdon, close to the City, finally began in 1860. Pearson did not live to see the result: he died in 1862, a few months before the line opened.

The engineer in charge, John Fowler, used a method that became known as 'cut and cover'. A wide trench was dug along the line of an existing road, its sides were lined with brick, and it was then roofed over with a brick arch or iron girders before the road was relaid on top. By following the roads, the company avoided having to buy and demolish large numbers of buildings, which would have been extremely costly. The method was far from painless, however. For months, the streets concerned became deep, muddy ditches, traffic had to be diverted, and the digging often disturbed gas pipes and drains. In 1862 a sewer burst and flooded part of the works near Farringdon.

The Metropolitan Railway opened to the public on 10 January 1863, running for about six kilometres between Paddington and Farringdon. Fears that the public would refuse to go underground proved groundless: around 38,000 passengers are said to have travelled on the first day, and more than nine million used the line in its first year. Passengers could choose between first, second and third class, and the carriages were lit by gas, so that travellers were able to read during the journey. From 1864 the company also ran cheap early-morning 'workmen's trains', which allowed labourers to reach their jobs for a fraction of the normal fare.

The line's greatest weakness was the way its trains were powered. Electric traction was not yet practical, so steam locomotives were used. To limit the smoke, these were designed to burn coke, which produces less smoke than coal, and to condense much of their exhaust steam into water tanks. The arrangement was only partly successful: the air in the tunnels was often thick with fumes, and openings to the surface had to be made to let the smoke escape. Nevertheless, the railway was a commercial success, and others followed. The Metropolitan District Railway opened in 1868, and after years of rivalry between the two companies, the 'Inner Circle', joining their lines into a loop, was completed in 1884.

By the 1880s, the limits of cut and cover had become clear, since new lines through the centre would mean tearing up some of the city's busiest streets. The answer was to go much deeper, boring tunnels through the thick layer of clay beneath much of London. This was made possible by the tunnelling shield, an iron cylinder that was pushed forward through the ground while workers dug out the clay in front of it and lined the tunnel behind it with iron rings. Using a shield designed by the engineer James Henry Greathead, the City and South London Railway opened in 1890. Steam was out of the question so far below ground, and after a plan to pull the trains by cable was abandoned, electric locomotives were chosen instead, making it the world's first deep-level electric railway. Passengers reached the platforms by lift, and the carriages had only narrow windows set high in their sides, since it was thought there was nothing to see in a tunnel. They were soon nicknamed 'padded cells'.

The deep lines, which Londoners called 'tubes', proved extremely popular. The Central London Railway, opened in 1900, charged the same fare of twopence for any journey and became known as the 'Twopenny Tube'. Faced with this competition and with continuing complaints about smoke, the Metropolitan and District companies converted their lines to electricity in the early 1900s. In 1908 the companies agreed to advertise their services together under a single name, 'Underground', and in 1911 the first escalators came into use at Earl's Court station. A scheme once regarded as absurd had become an essential part of daily life in the capital.