Portal:Trains/Selected article/Week 48, 2009

The Baker Street and Waterloo Railway (BS&WR), also known as the Bakerloo tube, was a railway company established in 1893 that constructed a deep-level underground "tube" railway in London. Although construction began in 1898, the company struggled to fund the work and was then hit by the financial collapse in 1900 of its parent company, the London & Globe Finance Corporation, through the fraud of its main shareholder, Whitaker Wright. In 1902, it became a subsidiary of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London Limited (UERL) controlled by American financier Charles Yerkes. The UERL quickly raised the funds, mainly from foreign investors. When opened in 1906, the BS&WR's line served nine stations and ran completely underground in a pair of tunnels for 5.81 km between its northern terminus at Baker Street and its southern terminus at Elephant and Castle with a depot on a short spur nearby at London Road. Extensions between 1907 and 1913 took the northern end of the line to the terminus of the Great Western Railway (GWR) at Paddington. In 1915, it was further extended to Queen's Park where it connected to the London & North Western Railway (LNWR) to run on the surface to Willesden Junction and, from 1917, to Watford, covering a total distance of 33.34 km. Within the first year of opening it became apparent to the management and investors that the estimated passenger numbers for the BS&WR and the other UERL lines were over-optimistic. Despite improved integration and cooperation with the other tube railways and the later extensions, the BS&WR struggled financially. In 1933, it and the rest of the UERL were taken into public ownership. Today, the BS&WR's tunnels and stations operate as the London Underground's Bakerloo line.