Nick Leverton wrote:
In article ,
77002 wrote:
On 18 Dec, 08:50, Nick Leverton wrote:
In article ,

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Which section was tube track? AFIK Earls Court to Moorgate is all sub-
surface. Moreover, one cannot bring back something which never
existed. The tube lines were electric from their beginning.

It's a colloquialism.

Indeed so. It dates back to the opening of London’s deep level lines
bored thru London Clay. In 1900 the Central London Railway was opened
and became known as the 'Tuppenny Tube'. This of course was because
of its price and the shape of the bored tunnels. At 2d (a little
under 0.5p) the price was actually a little on the high side.

The tube routes should never be confused with the earlier sub surface
lines. Although I guess we should not be surprised that this is lost
on the bourgeois communists at the Guardian.

I must say it's quite entertaining to see the number of irrelevant
things you try to blame on politics, such as use of colloquial language.

Few ordinary newspaper-reading people on the Clapham omnibus today,
whether they read some hard-line authoritarian right-wing Murdoch rag or a
slightly liberal middle-of-the-road paper like the Graun, are concerned
about the hundred-year-old history of how each individual line was
built in order to inform them of what they should be calling it. It's a
unified system these days. Unfortunately, when the Underground Group
were publicising the Tube back in the first quarter of the last century,
they seem to have omitted to tell people that this word wasn't to be used
for the sub-surface lines, so now you're stuck with it like it or not.

Plus London Underground issue Tube Maps which show the whole system (and
the Overground) not just tube shape lines.

All of which mean that the notion that steam has been running on the tube
really isn't incorrect in modern general language.

People think they're being clever when they point this out when in fact
they're being utterly boring.