London Transport Museum exhibition - "Selling the suburbs" (BBCNews)
 

On 14 Oct, 16:36, Bruce wrote:
On Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:06:16 -0700 (PDT), EE507
wrote:





On Oct 14, 1:35*pm, Bruce wrote:
As the tentacles of the London Underground network started to spread
out at the start of the 20th Century, thousands of new homes were
built - and suburbia was born.

Very clever marketing - guarantee your travel market by over-selling
suburbs which (still) have few local jobs and are so bland that
residents will want to escape at every opportunity!

It was almost the whole basis of the prosperity of the Metropolitan
Railway, which purchased vast tracts of cheap land to the north west
of London then hyped up its value by promising fast and frequent rail
services to central London. *

The housebuilders all fell over each other to be the first to build.

Hey, presto! Metro-Land was born. ;-)

What changed to make commuter service become unprofitable? BR and
their successors have always been moaning about how much it costs them
to provide service to meet a demand in peak hours only, with rolling
stock being idle the rest of the time, and have required large
subsidies to maintain services.

Did the increase in the number of commuters over the years change the
economics of the operation?