LR Answers: The Pre-War ‘Second Works’ Programme

In LR Answers, we take an occasional look at topics that have come up in comments on other articles and are worthy of a bit more attention on their own. Here we look at some of the details behind proposals for the ‘Second Works Programme’

Commentor: [I] am aware of the Northern Heights project and the Bakerloo extension to Camberwell, otherwise wondering if there was anything new considered in the additional tube extensions mentioned the 1938-1939 discussions for a second New Works Programme that did not make it into later schemes as well as the early beginnings of proposals that were later fleshed out a bit more in the 1946 and 1949 London Railway Plans?

LR answers: There were two starting points for the Second New Works Programme.

One was the potential for other Tube extensions and main line improvements – the main line suburban operations were part of the pooled revenues and planning of the Standing Joint Committee. An ambitious 10-year programme was foreseen in a detailed paper presented by JP Thomas, the London Passenger Transport Board General Manager (Railways), to the 4th November 1937 Second Annual Conference of the Members and Officers of London Transport.

This provides a useful summary of the schemes being thought about, but it is best not to assume that all of them would have been achieved by 1950, even without a war occurring.

A similar compilation of schemes did exist in 1946 with the Standing Joint Committee (SJC). These had a separate and parallel existence to the better known 1946 Railway (London Plan) Working Party plans. It is believed that the person who advised the SJC about the ‘1937’ schemes at least during wartime was the same JP Thomas, now working as a consultant. A £60m+ project bill was expected then. This would be roughly £36bn now (allowing for RPI and real-world railway construction cost inflation). During the war, Thomas had also ensured that the alignment of some deep-level tube shelters matched his longer-term strategy for several express tubes which were mentioned at the 1937 Conference.

Given that this question was asked in the comments of our look at the relationship between London and New York, it is perhaps appropriate to quote Mr Thomas from 1937 on express services:

“…the public urge for speed does not diminish… [including] the passenger moving frequently about town. So far no complete study and estimates have been made of the practicability of express lines within the central area. It is probable that no reliable estimates could be made, for London has no such experience to draw upon. The experience of New York, however, tells us that the underground travel habit in that city has been built up upon the system of express services. The Central Line between Marble Arch and Liverpool Street, with its heavy all-day traffic, would be the most fertile ground upon which to carry out such a scheme in London.”

JP Thomas

The second starting point for a Second Programme – and particularly the reason for raising more funds as soon as possible – was that the First New Works Programme was busting its budget.  The belief was that if you could wrap the additional fund raising needed within even a modest Second Programme – particularly for schemes that would be profitable reasonably quickly – then there were merits in pressing for a second round.

The 1935-40 Programme had suffered from poor costing and price inflation. The original basis of the Programme had been a £30m initial estimate (roughly £18bn today) for which a £5m margin was considered adequate. It had included a Bakerloo extension to Camberwell. However strong lobbying from North London councils such as Finchley, had led to a more expensive project being added and the Bakerloo deleted, with a revised version of a Northern Heights electrification and through running scheme.

That project and the others had undergone many previous project mutations. This pushed the nominal costs towards £35m at the Programme’s starting point in 1935. Estimates were produced in a hurry, also with differing views on technical requirements between the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB) and the main line companies. In 1936 two other extensions were added, to Denham (supposedly self-financing in the medium term provided extra housing materialised), and from Edgware to Aldenham because the planned North London train stabling and maintenance situation was considered unsatisfactory (this extension also depended on extra housing).

Revised estimates were prepared in October 1937, when some options were contemplated for project cut-backs.

A 20th June 1939 draft LPTB memorandum to HM Treasury goes into significant detail:

“An additional sum of roundly £10,000,000 is now required to complete the construction of works which are attributable, directly or indirectly to the Programme”. It goes on: “The original estimate of the cost of the Programme were produced rapidly at a time of considerable pressure, and in most cases were of a very arbitrary nature. Many of the schemes had not been considered, much less worked out, in any detail. Neither was material available upon which reliable estimates of actual expenditure could be based. It was therefore not possible, apart from the subsequent rise of prices [Author’s note: inflated partly by spending on war preparations], to ensure that the total cost of the Programme was covered.”

LPTB Memo

Allowing for other transaction and project costs, the estimated final Programme cost was foreseen as £45,159,000, so nearly £5.2m more than raised (roughly £27bn now). A further significant reason for extra cost was the progress of the tram-to-trolleybus conversion programme. LPTB had committed to “not less than 148 route miles of tramway” to be converted. 223 route miles were to be “completed by the end of the current year [Author’s note: financial or calendar is unclear] and the conversion of the remaining 88 route miles south of the Thames has become imperative. The estimated cost will be roundly £5,000,000.”

The memorandum lobbied in favour of this expenditure, noting that the trolleybuses were very popular, and had created “a public demand for the substitution of trolleybuses on the whole of the remaining tram routes”. Like-for-like vehicle revenues had fallen by 2½% on non-converted tram routes, year on year, and risen by over 5% on conversion, notwithstanding 28% more trolleybus service miles. Meanwhile, trams were not longer covering their bare working expenses, let alone depreciation or payment of interest on capital.

LPTB was not keen on enlarging the Programme funding, but it was impossible for the New Works as a whole to be self-supporting in the early years of their operation. Already the Board was not in a position to pay the full amount expected on ‘C’ stock. The Board, in the same memo intended for HM Treasury, concluded that:

“unless the further sum of £10,000,000 can be included with and form part of the New Works Programme, any further conversion of trams to trolleybuses must be indefinitely postponed and the Board compelled to make such arrangements with the Banks as may be possible for a loan equal to its proportion of the £5,192,000, with the result that the Board’s financial position will be worsened and the date when it may be on a self-supporting basis and capable of financing its capital needs out of its own resources or on its own credit further delayed”.

LPTB Memo

In reality Lord Ashfield then advanced arguments that if £5.2m was needed for Programme financial stability, and another £5m for completing trolleybus conversion, then it would be more palatable to look at a larger loan on the basis that the other millions could be directed towards worthwhile new railway works. I am not aware of a specific list; however it might be expected that schemes would be drawn from the ‘1937’ projects.

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16 comments

  1. Thanks for further elaborating on the Pre-War “Second Works” Programme, based on the forecast map for the new tube lines/extensions had it been achieved by 1950 can see definite similarities with what later appeared in the 1946 Railway (London Plan) Working Party plans based on the information available online on the latter.

  2. Still waiting for that express service between Marble Arch and Liverpool St…..

  3. @ Roger B

    Two small parts were built – the deep-level shelter tunnels at Chancery Lane and part of another at St. Paul’s. See here for a substantial reference in Subterranea Britannica: https://www.subbrit.org.uk/features/deep-level-shelters-in-london/ .

    The Chancery Lane site is referenced here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsway_telephone_exchange . The alignment is clearly adjacent to the Central Line tunnels, It became a government-run secure telephone exchange. There also used to be a subsidiary access from the station escalator shaft.

    The works at St. Paul’s were abandoned in August 1941, apparently because of concerns about the proximity to the cathedral foundations, although this hadn’t prevented construction of the Central London Railway and Post Office station in the 1890s.

    Now, there is a new express railway being completed broadly along JP Thomas’s priority corridor – Crossrail 1.

    The better-known Northern Line deep level shelter tunnels were intended for other JP Thomas objectives, with an express line from Golders Green to Tottenham Court Road, and, as a separate or the same scheme, onwards via Oval to Tooting Broadway for Morden Line relief. This could have enabled 4-tracking of the Northern Line between Kennington and Tooting Broadway, with two fast and two (existing) stopping tracks, with cross-platform interchange between the two at Kennington.

    This is a difference from the ‘1937’ option referenced during that Conference and shown in the mapping above, which had a tube via Victoria to South London to relieve the Morden corridor.

  4. Back in the early 60s I was told by someone who was not an expert, or with any reasonable connections, that the reason the tram to trolleybus conversion in South London was abandoned was that diesel buses rather that trolleybuses would give a large fleet available to evacuate London in the event of a nuclear threat. This seemed at the time quite a rational point although how far the buses could get in four minutes was questionable.

    Any comments from our knowledgable correspondents?

  5. @ Jim Jordan

    An interesting proposition, presumably a lengthier and longer-planned evacuation would have been needed if true. Surely some trams could have hid in the Kingsway Subway – though one suspects minimal viability there, a no.16/18 high-capacity Feltham express service to Purley might have been more use… But why bother! Anything involving a refugee process by bus (or tram) would have had to presume some plans about what to do with people once dumped in the vicinity of, say, the North or South Downs. Is anyone aware of anything? It would have been a different order of logistics compared to rushing a select group of the Royal Family, senior Cabinet and officials to Box Mines national redoubt or alternate locations.

    It should also be recalled that in the immediate post-war period there was a critical shortage of buses for main fleet service, so that topic was the most urgent issue for ‘road services’. In 1948, the BTC Annual Report stated that LTE would receive 1,500 new buses during 1949. “Once that has been accomplished, attention can be directed to the problem of replacing the remaining trams in London by buses, which will take some 1,100 vehicles”. The same had applied to trolleybuses, with the 1948 BTC report noting that “76 eight-foot wide 70-seater trolleybuses ordered soon after the end of the war were delivered during the year”, in turn enabling disposal of the original 1931-vintage ‘Diddlers’.

    I had understood that the actuarial write-down of non-life-expired electricity distribution systems was part of the financial equation which favoured trolleybuses pre-war but, with further depreciation during succeeding years, was less of an issue post-war, when capital funding was also in short supply, while trolleybuses would have incurred more capital expenditure than buses because of the scale of conduit to overhead-wire conversion in South London.

    Somewhere along the way, there was also the question of the future use of Greenwich power station, which was the main LCC tramway power station. (I believe that North Met, in which the UERL had held an interest, continued to supply the outer north London trolleybus network, in its nationalised format). The future for Greenwich appeared to be the Underground.

    At some point (and I think I have seen a reference in Standing Joint Committee meeting papers), a decision was taken to convert the Greenwich output to 50 cycles per second (the National Grid standard) rather than 25 cycles per second or 33 1/3. That might be the technical point with electricity supply development when London’s trolleybuses could have been disfavoured. However that question requires further research, and Kew is closed though I can hope to search my own archives.

    Again the 1948 BTC Annual Report is useful: “In the sphere of electricity generation and distribution, work was started during the year at Greenwich generating station on the installation of a fourth 20,000 kW. turbo alternator, a further stage in the programme for the conversion of this station to operation on a frequency of 50 cycles, the standard of the National Grid”.

    Further conversion was reported as under way with auxiliary plant at Greenwich in the 1953 LT Annual Report. The 1954 Annual Report observes that “it was decided to replace in due course the 1,764 vehicles comprising the bulk of the trolleybus fleet by oil-engined buses, and the first of two prototypes of a bus of entirely new design – the 64-seater Routemaster – was built and placed on test”. This was exhibited at the Commercial Motor Show at Earl’s Court in September 1954. In the 1955 Annual Report, “work is well advanced on the installation of two new high-tension cables to supply current at 50-cycle frequency from London Transport’s Greenwich generating station to railway substations”.

  6. But ….. the electricity supply to the actual trolleybuses was “DC” – or at the very least “rectified”, in the same way as Southern Electric.
    So how could the change at Greenwich ( Which came as a shock – pun unintended – to me … I had not realised that there were different AC frequencies/voltages around .. ) affect the use of the buses themselves? Or was it the once-only, but expensive cost of changing the transformers & rectifiers to handle the different power-supply inputs that was the factor?

    Incidentally, I think the very last piece of Trolleybus visible infrastructure was removed in 2018 or 2019 – a couple of support poles for the overhead close by Tottenham Hale station, removed with the bridge rebuild there …
    This Google street view is from 2008 & the poles are clearly visible – if you update to the present (ish) – they have been removed …

  7. Aleks,
    I don’t know Chadwell Heath all that well, but I would venture to suggest that your pole might be a Stench pipe from the sewer, rather than a tramway pole. Further research from surviving tramway-era photographs would help to resolve this.

  8. Aleks
    As suggested, that is, indeed a sewer “breather” pipe, I’m afraid

  9. Agreed, there has been a street clean-up in the last decade. Was there an official reason?
    Salvage values were elevated during China’s commodities boom.
    Lighting pole conversions to LED.
    Corrosion potential with extended life.
    Street obstructions.
    Better space management.
    Lobbying to remove any potential for catenary reinstatement.
    Using up excess budgets on contractors for removal.
    Regenerative street-scape modernisation.
    Conservation areas have preserved other redundant Victorian features.

  10. Jim Adlam
    I think that’s a telephone-wire pole.
    Trolleybus poles were metal ….

  11. @Greg T

    Call me a pedant but that pole looks mighty rusty for a non-metal object.

  12. Greg/Peewee
    I can confidently say that the pole is ex-trolleybus. In my time I have surveyed traction poles, helped to move them around and helped to install overhead wires. All this in an amateur capacity.

  13. Well that really does look like an ex-trolleybus pole with its three-stage width reduction!
    Unfortunately that leads to another query, whether this is a pole (maybe THE remaining pole) from the 1931 original LUT trolleybus introduction, or a modified tram pole, or a later replacement of either of the above!
    Arguably it should now be listed and renovated, including the trailing wires, but by whom?!
    Maybe the LT Museum could be custodians?

  14. JR
    I’m afraid you are correct & I’m wrong (!)
    Re-studying the older versions of the “Google Street View” pictures of the previous trolleybus poles at Tottenham Hale, shows that they were almost identical to that pictured ….. ( Down to the rust coating )

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