The Great British Railfanning Trip: London Transport Museum

Frank writes...

This is Part IV of our recent trip to England. After seeing Mail Rail and HMS Belfast, as described in Part III, we took a Routemaster bus to Covent Garden, the home of the London Transport Museum. We'd visited the LTM Acton Depot, where most of the collection of rolling stock is housed, earlier in the trip but that facility is only open a few days a year. The museum at Covent Garden is the real public face of the museum.

The museum is gorgeous, with entry and exit through a spacious gift shop (of course) located just steps from the middle of Covent Garden, which was really hopping. After buying your ticket you take an elevator up to the third floor to start your chronological journey through the history of public transportation in London.

And boy, they start at the beginning! Above is a sedan chair with two men in tricorn hats (the rear one is hidden) carrying some peer or something through late 18th-century London. I'd suggest that we have one of these in our visitor center someday but it predates Chicago itself!

This is a little more like it. This is a replica built in 1929 of an omnibus, or horse bus, dating to 1829. So it still predates Chicago but by less time! It's not all that different than a horse-drawn omnibus from Chicago that used to be in the CTA Historic Collection and is now, I'm told, owned by the Chicago History Museum. Visitors can climb into this thing and take a seat; at the front are a couple of mannequins and a soundtrack of them talking to each other is played. Mostly it consists of them outlining rules for passengers of the omnibus (don't spit on the floor, etc) in increasingly shrill and bothered tones. It's actually pretty funny.

Past the ominbus is this smaller stage-coach style horse-drawn carriage known as a "knifeboard" horse bus because of the bench running down the center on the upper deck. This thing was built around 1875 and apparently set aside for preservation in the 1920s.

Then we get to the rail equipment. This double-deck horse car, from London Tramways, dates to 1882 and was retired in 1910. It was used as a shed on a farm until retrieve and restored in 1974. The neatest thing about it, or so I thought, was that it was built by the John Stephenson Company of New York! It was turned out of their plant about 13 years after our own horse car and 20 years before CA&E 36, though the latter car was built at their Elizabeth, New Jersey plant while the horse cars would have been built at their old plant in Manhattan.

Once past the horse car, you descend a ramp to arrive at the initial section about the London Underground. This is not one of the very first steam engines built for the initial section of the underground, which opened in 1863, but it is still an extremely early example. It is Metropolitan Railway 23, built in 1866 as one of the initial series of "class A" 4-4-0T locomotives for the "inner circle" Metropolitan Railway. It was used in service for some 70 years before going into work service in 1935. It ran until 1948 and was set aside for preservation. It's been restored to its 1903 appearance.

Coupled behind it is Met 400, an appropriate wooden carriage which was built in 1900. This car, beautifully restored, has quite an interesting history. It was originally constructed as a simple steam-hauled coach but later, I think around 1920, it was rebuilt as an MU control trailer for use with electrified Met trains. Then later still, around 1940, it was rebuilt again, this time as an "autocoach" (though that may just be a Great Western term). Basically it was a control cab for a steam-powered push-pull service on the Chesham branch.

The Chesham branch, shewn thus, is the horizontal line in the upper-left corner of this map inside one of the compartments on Met 400 (visitors may go into some of the compartments). The entire car is fully restored to its later push-pull condition, which is why it has those end windows. Note that this is the "inner circle" railway. The current Circle Line was built by two different companies, one building the "outer" or clockwise route and the other the "inner" or anti-clockwise route. The two companies, initially allies, developed a strong rivalry and would refuse to honor each other's passes, so if you got on the wrong train you'd eventually get to the right stop but you might end up going virtually the entire way around the circle to get there!

"Pardon me, is this the train to Kensington High Street?" "Yes, but the outer circle line would be much quicker."

Next to Met 400 is Met 5, the "John Hampden," an electric locomotive built by Metropolitan-Vickers in 1922. The initial electric locomotives built for the Met were Westinghouse steeplecabs dating to 1906, but in 1922 twenty of these diminutive boxcabs were built to replace them. The locomotives hauled carriages on the inner ends of some suburban lines to Baker Street with power changed to steam engines for the outer ends of the lines. These locomotives acquired GE type equipment during a rebuilding in the early 1950s and ran until the line to Amersham was electrified in 1960, permitting MU cars to replace the last locomotive-hauled trains. Besides this locomotive, number 12 "Sarah Siddons" is also preserve and sees use on railfan specials on the current Undergroundnetwork.

And behind the locomotive was this beautifully restored example of Q-23 stock from the District Line. This is very similar to the cars being worked on by Geoff and his crew at Acton Depot, and in fact the car is identical to one of the cars under tarps outside the depot. London Q-stock consisted of three distinct body types. The oldest, shown here, were built around 1923 and had clerestory roofs that were just chopped at the ends; then there were cars built between 1927 and 1935 that had clerestory roofs that tapered at the end like normal railroad practice (the restored Q35 trailer at Acton Depot is of this type); and finally there were the 1938 cars with arched roofs and sides that flared at the bottom (the Q38 car Geoff's crew is working on now exemplifies this type). The car shown here, Q-23 number 4248, ran until 1971 and is shown in its end-of-service appearance.

The interior of the car is beautifully restored, complete with mannequins whose 1970-era outfits seem jarringly out of place but which fit with the period until which this car ran.

Descending to the main floor of the museum from the Underground area is impressive. Here we see a double-decker bus, a tram, and in the back left corner a trolleybus.

This beautifully restored London tram is West Ham Corporation Tramways 102, built by United Electric Car in 1910. It's typical of early 20th century London trams, double-ended with open platforms on the upper deck. It was retired in 1938. Visitors can't enter the body of the car but can board the platform, and climb the stairs to the balcony, on this end of the car.

Those who ascend to the upper balcony are rewarded with this slice of Edwardian life depicted in the car body. "Right, you'd better pay your fare or else off you go!"

This London trolleybus is a Q-1 style built in 1948 to replace earlier types that had worn out or been destroyed in the war. It carried 70 people, probably about as many as our "Queen Mary" trolley bus! This one ran until 1961 and was set aside for preservation. One thing which I noticed over and over was that the museums in Britain were often very good at setting up interesting little scenes, whether that meant adding some subtle period details like hardware or posters or creating a scene many people wouldn't even notice. In this case, the trolleybus has dewired and the driver is back there with a "hot stick" to put the poles back on the wire, as British trolleybuses didn't typically have ropes and retrievers like American ones did.

Now this is an old electric locomotive. City & South London 13 was built in 1890 for the C&SL, which was the first deep-level "tube" line built in the city. The line was initially planned as a cable car line but during construction they switched to electric power, with tiny locomotives like this hauling short trains of carriages. The locomotive has motors mounted right on the axles, with the axle forming the armature shaft (like on our New York Central S-Motor), and the driver sits towards one end of the locomotive with a door at either end.

Brakes were Westinghouse air brakes and control was by means of a rheostat controller, shewn thus, though the cover has been removed so that you can see the contacts. This type of rheostat was common in exceptionally early electric railway design and on early double-ended streetcars the rheostat was often located under the floor of the car and operated from each end via a chain-and-sprocket system. I have an early booklet about how to be a motorman that includes tips on freeing up your control chain if it gets jammed (and also mentions the "modern E and K type controllers").

And here is the last surviving example of the original tube car: an 1890 "padded cell" car that would have been hauled by C&SL 13 in service. These cars had practically no windows and had doors on the ends that went out to open, gated platforms.

And this is why these cars were nicknamed "padded cells." As with many of the museum's displays, part of the car features period-dressed mannequins to enhance the ambiance. These cars, and the primitive locomotives that hauled them, weren't replaced until the Standard Stock MU cars came along in the mid-1920s.

Well, I don't know if I saved it, I really only rode it for a few... oh, Yerkes. Yes, there were a few different places where Chicago's own Charles Yerkes popped up, given his role in unifying some of the tube lines in London around the turn of the century.

Although there are Standard Stock cars at Acton, at the Covent Garden museum we skip right from the "padded cells" to 1938 Stock tube cars. One complete car, shown here, is very nicely restored and on display on the ground floor of the museum. You can walk into it though part of the car is screened off in a manner similar to the CTA spam can at the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

They do have a simulator where you can drive a 38 Stock car. Here Zach navigates the tube network while Greg looks on. The simulator was pretty neat, and used an original controller and brake stand. But there were some programming glitches, like if you took a normal brake application then it wouldn't let you take power again until you popped the handle and then took it back out of emergency. But it was still fun to play with.

The Covent Garden museum rotates exhibits frequently with Acton Depot, mostly exchanging buses though at least occasionally I think that trams move in or out. There were a couple of Routemaster (or similar) buses there plus this ancient one, which evidently is privately owned and just on loan. It's a 1906 Leyland from London. To think that this thing is as old as the 308!

So that was the London Transport Museum. Afterward we grabbed a quick bite at a pie shop in Covent Garden (steak and kidney, of course!) and headed to the DLR as described in the previous post. Stay tuned for an account of our travels on Saturday!

Click here for Part V of our trip.