On Thu, 18 Aug 2005, David Spiro wrote:

Having grown up in NYC and being a user of its subway for all my life, I
was wondering about some of the differences between it and the London
tube. Both systems are some of the first ever constructed, with London
being the oldest, IIRC.

You do remember correctly.

I have traveled the London tube, and found it superior in some ways to
NYC, even with its problems, and not as good in others.

Interesting - would you like to expand? We've had at least one thread on
this comparison in the past, but it'd be interesting to hear you opinions.

As a history buff, I am curious as to how the London system started, and
where the first line or lines were. NYC's system started as a private
enterprise, the Interborough Rapid Transit system, and the only line it
ran was from City Hall in Lower Manhattan up to 116th Street, in what is
now Spanish Harlem. Back then, (in 1904) this was the upper limit of
urban NYC, at the end of Central Park.

I refer you to:

http://www.davros.org/rail/culg/

A somewhat terse but authoritative treatment of this subject.

Briefly, though, London's history is similar to New York's - there were
several separate, and indeed competing, companies to begin with, which
were only brought together later (first when some American called Yerkes
bought most of them, then when they were nationalised). A lot of the early
companies were relatives of the mainline railway companies that had
termini in London (and i include the Metropolitan in that!).

The biggest physical difference between the networks is that London's
lines are mostly in deep tunnels - 'tubes' - in the clay layer (or
something) ~20 metres below the surface; only a few lines (the Circle
line, the lines coming off it at tangents, and the East London line) are
built at shallow depth using cut-and-cover. AIUI, New York's lines are all
shallow (except for PATH and such). This means that stations are rather
different in structure, and the tunnels, and thus the trains, are smaller
(i assume because digging wide deep tunnels was ruinously expensive).
Conversely, London never had the el-to-subway transition that built a lot
of the NYC system (there are one or two examples of this happening in
London, though).

Another interesting difference is the almost complete lack of underground
line in south London - here, the suburban surface rail network was very
well-developed early on (and extensive urbanisation was later than in the
north, i think), so the need for tubes never arose. I don't know if
there's a a parallel in New York - are there any boroughs with surface
rail lines rather than subways?

tom

--
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