Larger trains on the Northern line? The 1860s railway that could have been

If a planned railway from the 1860s had come to pass, people travelling on the Charing Cross branch of the Northern line could have been travelling in much larger trains than they do today.

Following the success of the Metropolitan Railway, which opened in 1863 to great acclaim, several plans were put forward for new railways in central London. One of them, the North Western and Charing Cross Railway (NW&CCR) was proposed in 1863 to build a line linking Euston and Charing Cross.

The railway received royal assent on 29th July 1864, and the company’s plans were supported by the London and North Western Railway, which ran trains into Euston, and by the South Eastern Railway, which was building its new station at Charing Cross.

Both saw the benefits of offering swift and comfortable onward links from their stations into the heart of the shopping district and West End.

The plans called for a sub-surface line to be built just under the road, very much like the Metropolitan Railway, with intermediate stations at (modern name) Euston Square, Goodge Street, Oxford Street/Tottenham Court Road, north of Leicester Square, and down to Charing Cross, where it would have risen to link up with the South Eastern Railway’s mainline tracks for possible extensions towards London Bridge.

To avoid borrowing money to pay for the railway, the company planned to pay its contractors in shares. The contractors would borrow the cost of building the railway, expecting that the shares would rise in price and pay off the debt.

It looked as if plans were progressing, especially as the residents of Tottenham Court Road were protesting against the plans to dig up the road to create space for the railway.

However, the 1866 banking crisis, which saw off a lot of speculative railway projects, also killed off the Euston to  Charing Cross Railway, and later that year, the plans were formally abandoned

An attempt to revive it in 1867 also failed.

In 1870, a revised version came back with a slight extension at the northern end to the newly opened St Pancras station. Approved in 1871 and renamed the Central London Railway it also planned to clear land for a new road between Oxford Street and Charing Cross under which the railway would run.

However, despite £200,000 in funding from the Metropolitan Board of Works for the new road, it also struggled to raise enough funds, and eventually the plans were abandoned in 1874.

The legal powers for the railway were formally dissolved the following year.

Although the railway didn’t get built, the road did. Today, it’s Charing Cross Road between Trafalgar Square and Oxford Street.

But what if…

In 1890, the first deep-level tube line opened on what is today the Bank branch of the Northern line. This proved that deep-level tube trains were viable, and in 1907, the precursor of the Charing Cross branch of the Northern line opened. The two separate railways later merged to form the Northern line as we know it today.

But what if there was already a sub-surface railway through the west end? It wouldn’t have been possible to merge it with the deep tunnels of the City and South London Railway through Bank.

So instead of a single Northern line, we’d have two separate tube lines — the deep-level bank branch line and a sub-surface line via Charing Cross.

And passengers on the Charing Cross branch would be able to commute to work in much larger, air-conditioned trains.