Abstract
Almost a year ago, I had the pleasure of reviewing Mike Horne’s first volume on the District Railway. It was a rigorous and highly detailed work that covered the District Railway in the nineteenth century, and this volume provides an effective sequel. Like the first, there’s a vast amount of content, with an exceptionally wide range of topics such as electrification, signalling, finances and personnel to name but a few. Detailed text is well supported with a great array of photographs. Like the first, the depth of the content means this is something of a compendium on all things of District, and the kind of book that will provide a go-to resource on this fascinating urban railway system.
The book picks up where the previous volume left off, with the District facing the desperate need to electrify its system but unable to make much headway in deciding how to do it. The fraught relationship with the Metropolitan Railway, the District’s partner in the operation of the Circle line services, is given a healthy outline, along with the huge impact that American influence had on the District system. The influence that Charles Tyson Yerkes and his team had on the Underground as a whole is well known, but through the viewpoint of the District Railway Horne provides some fresh perspective. Here was a 30-year-old suburban full-sized railway system run on very British lines suddenly exposed to a brash and headstrong way of doing things keen to utilise well-established and seemingly superior American technology. The sight of an electric train more at home on the elevated urban railways of Chicago whizzing its way through rural Edwardian backwaters like Hounslow must have been a sharp contrast for all involved. Happily we get a good flavour of how those changes landed. Horne’s book is again replete with an excellent range of photographs capturing these machines and some excellent vignettes from the contemporary press highlighting the British public’s initial apathy to the “American” way of doing things, perhaps more rooted in nationalism than reality.
What follows is a detailed history of the District into the 1900s until 1933. We see the transition from Yerkes to the equally well-known Albert Stanley (Lord Ashfield) and Frank Pick, but with a much more detailed insight into their wider teams than one usually gets. We follow the District into the 1908 creation of the Underground brand and the wealth of advertising materials, roundels, and marketing that followed. The focus remains on the District itself, as it found itself increasingly integrated into the wider Underground governance, keeping the book’s raison d’etre intact.
There’s a comprehensive survey of the various station improvements that occurred in the early twentieth century, with track realignment, re-building and re-naming well covered. Perhaps my only nit-pick here is the lack of diagrams explaining some of these, as these seemed more numerous in Volume 1. We then move into looking at improvements to the engineering side of the operation, such as rolling stock and signalling, and some of the more unusual services provided by the District. There’s an excellent picture of two District locomotives hauling a train out of London for the through Southend service that operated for many years (whereby steam locomotives of the London, Tilbury & Southend Railway took over from Barking), a sharp contrast to a world where the District reaches as far as Upminster. There’s also a great overview of the “longest electric train in the world”. This involved coupling up two ordinary trains to form a ten-car monster set (for context, once the Elizabeth line trains are extended in the next year or so these will be mere nine-car sets). Once again a photo gives the reader a wonderful view of this train appearing to stretch into the horizon.
Horne highlights in his introduction that this history only really runs until 1933, when the District was merged into the London Passenger Transport Board (quickly known as London Transport). As such, you can appreciate just how much detail on those 30 years is packed into a book of this length, though it’s a little sad that the following 70 years receives only ten pages in an appendix. If you’re interested in the District in the second-half of the twentieth century then you’ll be looking elsewhere. There other books that Horne himself has written or been involved with that cover this later period, but I feel there remains room for a similarly comprehensive volume covering the District line from the 1930s to today.
To sum up, Horne once again has produced an encyclopaedic guide likely to find a very receptive home on the bookshelves of anyone with an interest in London’s public transport system, not just the District railway. For historians, there’s a wealth of material to tease out into a range of other areas, such as urban, local, engineering and business history. For the more casual reader, the vignettes and the comprehensive photographs provide a great inducement to getting hold of the book, even if it’s likely to be something to dip into every so often rather than read cover to cover. It’s certainly worth the RRP of £35 for the content within. I sincerely hope that Horne is planning to produce similar volumes for the other Underground lines, and I’d expect there’s a wide readership out there hoping for the same.
