THE STORY OF SUBWAYS

by Ari Charles

About the Author

Ari Charles is an eighth grade student at the Humanities and Communication Magnet program at Eastern Middle School in Silver Spring, Maryland. He is interested in transportation (obviously), writing, reading, and drawing. He lives with his family, which includes a cat and a dog, also in Silver Spring, Maryland.

This book is dedicated to the select bunch of train nerds everywhere who appreciate the role of public transportation in our daily lives. AC

Text and layout 2013 by Ari Charles. All images used are in the public domain or are the property of the author.

The images used on the title page are all those of rapid transportation systems worldwide. From left to right, they are: ndergroundbahn, Berlin New Jersey Transit, New Jersey DART First State, Delaware Skokie Swift line emblem, Chicago, Illinois Regional Transportation Authority, Cleveland, Ohio G line emblem, New York, New York Red line emblem, Washington DC Tube Roundel, London ndergroundbahn, Bonn Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, Pennsylvania DART Light Rail, Dallas, Texas

1 - London
London, the capital city of the United Kingdom, started it all on January 10, 1863. On that day, the Metropolitan Railway opened, connecting Farringdon Street and Paddington via Kings Cross Station and Baker Street. It was the worlds first underground railroad line, and was an instant success. On its first day of service, the Metropolitan Railway carried 38,000 passengers, and by the end of the year 22 million people had taken a journey over the four-mile long route. Frequent service and low fares contributed to the rise in popularity of this new underground form of transportation. Trains were originally pulled by wide-gauge steam locomotives lent from the Great Western Railway, but smoke pollution problems eventually led to the lines electrification in the 1890s.

Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, other underground railroads opened, following the Metropolitans lead. One of the first new lines was the District Railway, which linked Kensington and Manor House via Charing Cross, Westminster, and Victoria. At this point, a nearly circular loop in central London was in operation. However, rivalry between the Metropolitan and District lines led both to argue over the completion of the line, and the two companies instead invested their time and money in branching out to the suburbs, including Harrow, Hounslow, Richmond, and Ealing.

The city finally intervened in 1884, and the Metropolitan and District lines were connected at Aldgate, forming a circular route through central London, jointly operated by the Metropolitan and District lines, an arrangement both eventually came to live with and soon found quite profitable.

By 1908, four other private railroads had opened their doors for business, including the City and South London, Waterloo and City, Central London, and Bakerloo, all hoping to cash in on the tube craze, so named because the tunnels were dug out in their namesake shapes. The different companies often operated lines in close proximity to each other but with no physical connection between them. These setups were confusing to passengers and often resulted in petty disputes between the separate operating companies.

While these companies did agree to a unified branding scheme: UNDERGROUND, with combined maps and joint ticketing operations, they still did not operate in anything close to resembling harmony. For the time being, however, there had been no major breakdowns in relations.

The Bakerloo and Central lines once again undertook expansion efforts in 1913, but the outbreak of World War I, the very next year, which Britain played a major role in, led to the halting of construction until 1917. During the time, many deeper-level stations in central London were used as bomb shelters to protect from enemy air raids.

By the time 1922 rolled around, the Metropolitan Railway in particular had become the dominant forerunner in the underground race. The company even invested in the development of suburban commuter housing near the termini of their routes--each known only as Metro-land.

The next eleven years were relatively quiet. No further lines were built, and the different operating companies had finally reached a tenable peace that allowed for day-to-day operations to carry on smoothly but still festered distrust and corporate backstabbing.

1933, however, brought a radical change not only to London, but the rest of the worlds subways--at the time, many other systems had opened, such as in Budapest, Boston, Paris, and New York--that began with one man, one pencil, and one very large sheet of drafting paper.

6 That man was Harry Beck, and with that pencil and very large sheet of drafting paper, he, just for fun, drew his own map of the various underground subway lines in the London area, being displeased with the jumbled and hard-to-grasp maps that were currently published under the UNDERGROUND banner.

The result was one of the first examples of modern, twentieth century graphic design, and an icon still used today with almost no alterations--bold, straight, colored lines, rounded fortyfive degree angles, and little tick marks for stations with larger hollow circles for interchanges.

Becks map spurred on the formation of a city agency, which was creatively named London Transport, which aimed to once and for all consolidate the operation of the underground lines, using the map as a sort of common ground for negotiation.

The city planners, thanks to the new advent of relatively inexpensive cars, which could be attributed all the way back to Henry Ford and his Model T assembly line in Detroit across the pond, got their way. It had become more difficult to operate the trains at a profit, and as such the multitude of companies eventually folded into the new umbrella agency.

Following the original UNDERGROUND vision, London Transport applied the name to Becks map, received his permission to use it, and immediately went to work posting it in stations and on trains. Afterwards, it was back to another drawing board, this time to complete more expansions all the way out to the new ring road being constructed around Greater London that would function similarly to modern beltways in the American Interstate Highway System.

Those plans, however, were quelled when the bullets began flying again in 1938 with the outbreak of World War II. The Emergency Powers Defense Act authorized the British government to once again repurpose the tube tunnels are bomb shelters, and, as a new addition to the list of ways the system could be repurposed, aircraft factories.

During the height of the German Luftwaffes blitz attacks on London, much of the citys residents either fled to the countryside or took a 125-foot journey deep into the earth to ride out the explosive inundations on the platforms, the stairs, and even lying on the trackbeds. It was from the twisting network of tubes that General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who would later go on to become the 34th President of the United States, plotted the allied landing at the beaches of Normandy, France on D-Day.

8 Though the war ended in 1945, London waited until 1967 for its first completely new Underground line since 1907--the Victoria line--though it had been on the books since before the war. Featuring new automatic train control technology (faults in which would be attributed much later to a fatal 2009 crash on the Red Line of Washington, DCs Metrorail), the Victoria pushed both north and south to link up more parts of the ever-growing metropolis with the center city area.

Twelve years later, in 1979, the Jubilee line also opened its doors for business, running east to west across the city and opening service to the Greenwich peninsula, home of the O2 arena, and the new financial hub of tall glass skyscrapers then being built on the Canary Wharf peninsula.

The 1980s, however, saw a period of declining investment and neglect. Though the systems two newer lines were still in relatively working order, many of the systems more aged relics began to rust and fall apart, literally, and ridership diminished with the continued rise of cars and higher speed commuter trains that reached far beyond the range of the Underground, and almost all spare funds that didnt go into system operation went into finishing construction of the Jubilee lines grand expansion plan.

Thankfully for the Underground and its four million daily riders, an aggressive rehabilitation and reinvestment program put into place by the city in the 1990s helped to improve the systems conditions enormously--including a total rebuilding of the venerable Northern line complete with skylights and new trackage, and a five-storeyed express station at Heathrow Airport, complete with the unlikely additions of an indoor botanical garden, multiplex movie theater, and upscale boutiques.

Today, the London system, now 150 years of age, comprises eleven lines running over 250 miles of track and through 270 stations. Despite recent concerns about overcrowding and lengthy commutes, the Underground will continue to be the primary mode of rapid transportation for Londoners in the future.

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2 New York
New York Citys subways, while younger than those of London (though not by much), still have a long and colorful history. In addition to being the largest in the world by track mileage and stations, the system is also one of four to operate all day, every day (the others being the nearby Port Authority Trans Hudson, or PATH, system, portions of Chicagos El, and the PATCO High Speed commuter line outside of Philadelphia), and is known for its unique, express-local track setup and relatively low fares--one ride, no matter how long, costs just $2.25.

Given the United States firm rooting and belief in the power of democracy (and mindnumbing red tape bureaucracy), the construction of New Yorks famous system was marred by one particular person--William Marcy Tweed, nicknamed Boss, at the time the current emperor of Tammany Hall, a prominent Democratic political alliance with a large amount of clout in the New York state legislature in Albany--which needed to approve any and all construction plans.

Tweed and his cohorts were naturally from wealthy backgrounds, and as such managed to bribe enough state officials to block the construction of three separate proposed subway systems-those of Hugh B. Willson, Charles T. Harvey, and, most famously, Alfred Ely Beachs--as building their own system would only make a small dent in their coffers.

Beach, inspired by Londons relatively new system, knew Tweed would interfere with his plans to construct a pneumatic-powered subway line under Manhattan--he found the London system of steam power unattractive-- and so reasoned that he would have to build at night, in secret.

He put up $350,000 of his own money, brought his son and a few other construction workers aboard, and began to hack away at the ground below Broadway. Completed in 1870, Beachs subway stretched from the basement of a clothing store on Warren Street 300 feet north to Murray Street.

Beach invited a select group of reporters to tour the system, which was furnished with features such as grand pianos and fish tanks, hoping that the positive press generated from having an actual working system would be enough to trump Tweeds influence.

The press sure enough gave rave reviews, which led Beach to promise to extend the line northwards until it arrived Central Park. Tweed, however, vowed that the tunnel would not grow another inch and was able to convince the state to halt approval of the system. Beach called it quits in 1873.

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New York would instead gain a system of horse-powered elevated transportation lines and not see the benefits of underground rapid transportation until the turn of the century. In 1900, multi-millionaire August Belmont was able to break ground on the Interborough Rapid Transit system, or IRT.

Belmont planned a thirteen mile routing starting at the southernmost tip of Manhattan and meandering under Broadway for a time until ending at 145th street, with plans for extension into the Bronx and Brooklyn.

Construction took about four years, and while there were mishaps and locals had to suffer from their streets being dug up, the end result was exactly what Belmont set out to create. On October 27th, 1904, opening day, 150,000 people paid a nickel to descend into the opulent station constructed beneath City Hall and ride the brand new trains.

Over the next ten years, the IRT extended its reach like tentacles all over the city, reaching to the other three newly unified boroughs of the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn. Critics who had at first scoffed New Yorkers will never descend into a hole in the ground to get around were quickly silenced.

The IRT maintained its monopoly on underground transportation in New York throughout that period, until a new company sprung up--the BRT, Brooklyn Rapid Transit--in 1915. The BRT, which already operated trolleys throughout Brooklyn, build tracks extending from the southern terminus of the existing IRT lines all the way to the beaches of Coney Island and the Rockaways.

As in London, the IRT and BRT (soon to be renamed BMT, Brooklyn Manhattan Transit) competed fiercely for passengers, but unlike in London, the city did not mediate relations between the two rivals--instead, it responded by starting up its own company, the IND, Independent Subway, in 1925.

The IRT was built in Victorian style, featuring wood-paneled cars outfitted with plush velvet seats and tile mosaics decorating the platform walls, while the BMT aimed to be more practical and instead ended up with a melange of subway, elevated, trolley, and bus lines. The city hoped to rectify these opposites by combining both style and beauty when building the IND lines, and in the end put both the IRT and BMT out of business.

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14 While the IND is still impressive in its design, it did not succeed in bankrupting its privately-run competitors. In fact, 1940 saw the unification of the three under the banner of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a corporation chartered by the State of New York to operate bridges, buses, and commuter railroads throughout the New York City metropolitan area, in addition to the citys subway lines.

In the 1960s, New York encountered a similar situation to that of London--that of cars. While they had been around for quite a time by that point, New York was never a city suited to driving--and still is notorious for having terrible traffic.

Urban planner Robert Moses had been brought on board by the city to help increase New Yorks car friendliness, and he masterminded the construction of the areas extensive parkway system stretching into the northern suburbs of Westchester County and the eastern ones on Long Island, as well as the Triborough Bridge. Moses was also a staunch opponent of public transportation.

While Moses was unable to fully achieve his dream of converting New York into a carbased city such as newer Los Angeles, he did manage to increase the popularity of car travel in the city. Just like had happened in London, subway ridership dropped as many who relied on the subway for daily transportation bought cars and took to the streets.

The subway didnt even stand a chance in the 1970s. Only four days into the new decade, fares were raised from twenty to thirty cents. A deferred maintenance program begun in the previous years to help cut costs was beginning to rear its ugly head as the stations crumbled, crime ran rampant, and the cars became increasingly covered in graffiti. Hundreds of track sections were red-flagged, which meant that trains had to slow to ten miles per hour or less-and that was if the trains even ran. On the off chance they did, the cars were usually dark and emitted constant squealing noises.

In Brooklyn, the elevated Culver Shuttle line was literally falling down to the point that blocks of concrete regularly dislodged themselves from the overhead structure and the line wouldnt operate if the wind was in excess of thirty miles per hour. Headlines proclaimed All El is breaking loose! A lack of funding to repair the worn infrastructure--partly perpetuated by the high rate of fare evasion throughout the system--led to the lightly used lines closure in May 1975.

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16 Public opinion of the subway dropped tremendously, falling lower than that of the citys deplorable public school system. The 1974 heist film The Taking of Pelham One Two Three depicted four heavily armed men taking a subway train hostage and holding seventeen passengers in the first car for a ransom of $1 million--an amount the city couldnt afford to pay due to a budget crisis, leading to the deaths of two of the passengers. Shortly afterwards, passenger Bernard Goetz defended himself from four teenage panhandlers armed with screwdrivers who had asked him for five dollars by shooting them on board a crowded rush hour train, creating even more panic about the systems safety.

In 1984, photographers Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant published the book Subway Art, a collection of photographs they had taken of the heavily graffitied trains over the past years, thanks to connections with local artists, such as Donald Joseph Dondi White, Andrew Zephyr Witten, and Sandra Lady Pink Fabara, all of whom later went on to have successful professional careers. While drumming up positive press for the artists and their work, the city also took more interest in rehabilitating its dated fleet of cars.

Almost a billion dollars were requisitioned to solve the transportation emergency, used to purchase shiny new cars from Japan-based Kawasaki and finally overhaul the systems broken track--some of which had not seen any form of maintenance since 1915.

The mythic Second Avenue line--which had started construction in 1967--finally came to fruition to help relieve overcrowding on Manhattans east side, and more capital improvements such as the construction of new stations and extending the existing lines, began to start up again. The system finally cleaned up its poor image just in time for the 2004 centennial celebrations, and, as the MTAs public relations campaign proclaimed in response to the still-dwindling ridership: Were coming back, so you come back!

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3 Washington DC
Washington DCs Metrorail system is among the newest in the nation, conceived and built during the 1960s and 70s to replace a proposed network of freeways struck down by Congress in an effort to keep smog out of the capital city.

Clean, safe, and relatively efficient, the Metro has grown to a 106-mile-and-growing network connecting both DC and its Maryland and Virginia suburbs, serving both important commuter hubs and popular tourist destinations in the city at speeds of up to 75 miles per hour. While not as famous as New Yorks, the Metro is still the second-busiest subway system in America, with an average weekday ridership of about 750,000.

Encouraged by Dwight D. Eisenhower and urban planner Harland Bartholomew, the Metro was originally conceived in 1960 as a supplement to the planned freeway network. When those plans were scrapped in favor of a beltway around the city, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, or WMATA, broadened their plans to serve even far-away Baltimore.

Though these dreams of far-flung dominance never surfaced, the Metro did open its first line--the Red line--for business on March 27, 1976, with termini at Farragut North and Rhode Island Avenue. December saw the opening of Gallery Place between the existing Union Station and Metro Center stops due to an earlier court order hinging on the stations lack of accessibility.

The next year, the Red line was extended one more stop to Dupont Circle, and the Blue line first ran between Stadium-Armory near Robert F. Kennedy Stadium and the DC National Guard Armory, and National Airport in Virginia along the banks of the Potomac River. 1978 saw the Red line again increasing its range with an expansion to Silver Spring, marking the first service to Maryland.

Throughout the 1980s, the Metro continued to lay track at an impressive rate, with new expansions opening every few months. By the end of the decade, the Red line from Glenmont to Shady Grove was complete, as was the Orange from New Carrollton to Vienna. The Blue line had received an extension to Addison Road in Prince Georges County, Maryland, and the Yellow line had been inaugurated from Huntington to Gallery Place.

Construction slowed to a more moderate pace come the 1990s, and when the new millennium rolled around the original system was nearly complete, with the last planned line, the Green, opening from Anacostia to Greenbelt, another Maryland suburb. In 2004, an infill station opened at New York Avenue between Rhode Island Avenue and Union Station and the Blue line was extended to the commercial hub at Largo Town Center.

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20 Despite its relatively young age in comparison to more weathered systems such as New Yorks or Londons, Washington DCs Metro has had plenty of time to make its mark in the history books.

The system is widely renowned for its unique style of architecture. The 1970s were known for their heavy use of modern brutalist design elements such as exposed concrete and utilitarian uniformity. The systems underground stations largely use large, coffer vault arches with waffle-like perforations. This, combined with the often dim lighting and sleek white trains, often give off a science fiction atmosphere, receiving both praise and criticism for evoking the era and being downright ugly.

Additionally, though in much less of a good way, the Metro is also known for having its fair share of accidents, most famously a previously mentioned one in 2009 in which one Red line train crashed into and telescoped on top of another parked outside of the Fort Totten station, killing nine. The accident was attributed to faults in the systems automatic train control system first pioneered in London in 1967. A similar accident occurred in the Woodley Park station in 2004, though there were no fatalities.

Another notable accident happened during a blizzard in January 1982, which when combined with the unrelated nearby crash of Air Florida flight 90 just thirty minutes earlier, crippled the regions transportation network. Many other derailments and other incidents have also transpired over the years, leading to the writeoff of millions of dollars of equipment and the loss of over thirty lives.

In June 2012, in response to growing complaints about overcrowding during rush hours, particularly along the busy Orange line corridor in Arlington County, Virginia, Metro launched a new, unique service pattern known as Rush Plus, which also served to ease congestion in the overcrowded Rosslyn Tunnel for proposed Silver line service to Dulles International Airport in Sterling.

The initiative met a positive response from those benefited by more frequent service, but many saw increased headways between trains and as such abandoned the system for commuting via car. Various watchdog groups such as Unsuck DC Metro and Fix WMATA have aimed to rectify these issues.

Into the future, the Metro plans to complete the Silver line all the way from Largo to the airport, and will then turn its attention to the Purple line--a proposed light rail route under review in conjunction with the Maryland Transit Administration--that would link up the U formed by the Red line and provide a key east-west link across Montgomery County.

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22 For all of its shortcomings, the Metro still succeeds in its most basic capacity--and that is of providing public transportation to residents of the Washington DC area. It succeeded so well, in fact, that it inspired the creation of San Franciscos BART and Atlantas MARTA.

4 - Tokyo
Tokyo has always been well-known and loved for its chaotic, fast-paced way of life--and subway system in which platform attendants wearing white gloves and armed with twirling batons shove commuters, quite literally, like sardines into packed trains during the height of rush hour.

In 1927, Tokyo was already a large, tightly-packed metropolis home to five million people and counting, and the crush of urban life necessitated a rapid transportation solution. In that year, the Teito Rapid Transit Authority opened its doors for business with the Eidan line connecting the neighborhoods of Asakusa and Ueno over a route of just about two miles. Teito continued to grow until the outbreak of World War II in 1939, in which Japan played a crucial role as an ally of Nazi Germany and Mussolinis Italy. At the time, the rechristened Ginza line ran from Asakusa to Shibuya over a dozen miles of track.

The current system now encompasses twelve lines operated by two companies--the older Tokyo Metro and the Toei Rapid Transit, formed in 1960--and around 200 stations, with an average weekday ridership of about 6,350,000 out of inner Tokyos total population of around 10,000,000. Many stations boast some unusual quirks such as shopping malls, movie theaters, and even sit-down restaurants.

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Overcrowding still remains an issue despite the systems attempt to fight it with more frequent service, new, higher-capacity cars, and the platform attendants. The high stress environment of keeping to strict schedules (a standard part of Japanese culture as it is) and the sensation of being pressed up against a glass window for an entire commute have been proven to be unhealthy, despite claims made to the contrary by local officials.

An April 2005 accident outside of Amagasaki station saw small reforms made after the driver of a train derailed after traveling too quickly around a curve and not applying the emergency brakes, due to heavy pressure to make up a delay of thirty seconds incurred earlier and the threat of termination for using the brakes. Studies conducted afterwards uncovered a curious affliction suffered by many in the Tokyo area--known as Karoshi, it literally means working to death, and is caused by the intense work environment surrounding the region and that its economic prosperity is built on.

Despite concerns over health and safety, the system has also branched out into other projects, such as a high-speed commuter rail system extending far into the citys vast exurbs, and a monorail connecting the downtown area to nearby Haneda Airport.

Overall, Tokyos subway, while definitely confusing on a map and far from perfect, is among the most efficient in the world, and throughout the years will remain on the forefront of the worlds many underground rapid transportation systems.

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