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But the same technical developments that made possible the practical
steam railway also made the atmospheric railway, if not certainly
practical, at least worth a try. And it offered the prospect of
considerable advantages. Since the trains wouldn't have to carry
their prime mover, they would be lighter; therefore the track could
be built cheaper, and the trains' performance would be better.
The trains wouldn't trail smoke wherever they went (and into the
passenger cars in particular), and they would also be quiet.
And if one section of the route was hilly and required more motive
power, all that were needed would be more or larger pumping stations
along that section; no need to add extra locomotives. In short,
very much the same advantages that electricity gave a few decades
later. (Plus one more: a derailed train would tend to be kept near
the track by the pipe and piston.)
The success of the 1830's railways gave rise to the Railway Mania
of the 1840's, when interest in railway shares reached absurd levels.
In that climate the proposers of atmospheric lines could find the
backing they needed, and four atmospheric lines opened in a period
of about 3 years. In order of opening, these were:
The next underground line to open was the City & South London,
now part of the Underground's Northern Line. Its first section
(from Stockwell to a now disused terminus at King William Street,
replaced by the present Bank station) opened in 1890. It used
the new deep-level tube tunnels, with more limited ventilation
than on the Metropolitan Railway, so steam was out of the question
in any case. The original plan was for cable haulage, but instead
the new electric locomotives were tried and the line has always
been operated electrically. The line was first built with 10'2"
diameter tunnels, forcing use of rather small cars. (The cars
also had only tiny windows, on the grounds that there was nothing
to see -- so they got the nickname of "padded cells".)
All of the later lines in London, opened from 1900 onwards, were
built on the same general pattern as the C&SL, with deep-level
tubes and electric traction -- first by locomotives and then by
multiple-unit trains. The other tube lines vary from 11'6" to
12-foot diameter tunnels, and the C&SL was enlarged in the 1920's
to match. This is still rather small compared to most other
subways in the world, and is the reason for the distinctive
shape of the tube trains.
With the success of the electric lines, the Metropolitan and
District faced the loss of traffic, and they too were converted
to elecricity -- at least for the underground sections in central
London in 1905. The first line of the present New York subway
system opened in 1904 and this, too, has always used electricity.
(This was the original Interborough Rapid Transit route, from City
Hall station along the present Lexington Avenue, 42nd Street shuttle,
and 7th Avenue lines to, um, somewhere around 120th Street). Beach's
tunnel had been almost forgotten when the crews constructing the
new subway broke into it in 1912.
Meanwhile, the humble original concept of the pneumatic dispatch tube
continued to develop. The first of them, 1.5 inches in diameter,
had been built in 1853 by J. Latimer Clark; it connected the
Electrical and [sic] International Telegraph Company's office in
Telegraph Street, London, with their branch 675 feet away at the
Stock Exchange.
The key invention was J. W. Willmott's double sluice valve of 1870,
which allowed rapid dispatching of successive capsules. It was also
possible, as had been done on the pneumatic railways, to use both
positive pressure (on the order of 1 atmosphere) and vacuum, to
drive the capsules both ways from a single pumping station. The
tubes became quite common; many miles were built in various European
and North American cities. By 1886 London had over 34 miles of them
for the Post Office's telegraph service alone. In the Paris system
a person could pay a fee for a message to be sent specifically by
the tube.
They were also used within large buildings, and some survive in
use to this day.
Finally, in 1990, the Brazilian company Sur Coester stunned the
world by opening at a fair in Djakarta, Indonesia, a demonstration
line of their Aeromovel system. This is nothing more nor less