SUBWAYS. Underground railways, now common in cities, have come to bear this name. Of all the difficult problems that have arisen as a result of the great and continuous concentra tion of population in cities, the most difficult and the most expensive to be satisfactorily solved is the furnishing of suitable and econom ical means of local travel. With the enormous vehicular traffic that congests the streets, the surface cannot be used except for lines whose speed, being limited*by the ordinary street con ditions, is too slow, except for short distance journeys. In some American cities, and in a few exceptional cases in European, elevated railroads have been constructed to furnish means of travel on which traffic, freed from surface conditions, could move more rapidly. Such railroads, although successful in them selves, are so unsightly and so objectionable to the abutting houses that they are disliked.
With the surface impossible for use for rapid transit purposes, and with the super-surface undesirable for such use, recourse is necessarily had to the sub-surface, and it is in the develop ment of sub-surface lines that there is the greatest activity. To this class of railroads, and regardless of the method of construction, whether by tunnel or by open excavation, the generic term of Subway has come to be ap plied. This name is now used to describe a railroad built beneath the surface, with stations at comparatively short distances apart, and pri marily intended to serve the needs of local tran sit in a thickly populated locality.
The first city in the world to feel the need of subways was London, where, in 1853, there was begun the construction of a two-track underground road from Edgeware to Kings Cross. From this beginning there were finally produced two lines, known as the Metro politan Railway and the Metropolitan District the greater part of whose construction was finished prior to 1870. These roads were not given a satisfactory location, a compromise route having been determined on by which it was attempted to serve as many districts as possible, the result being that the line lacked directness. This error in proper route selec tion, and the fact that the railways were neces sarily operated by steam locomotives — the only means then at hand — rendering them excee& ingly disagreeable for passengers, failed to pro duce satisfactory financial results, and, conse quently, to furnish any encouragement for an early repetition of a similar experiment in Lon don, or, even less so, in other cities, where the demand for transit facilities was less strong.
It was not until 1886 that any further attempt was made to construct a subway line; in that year the late J. H. Greathead, an eminent Eng lish engineer, designed a railroad circular in section, lined with cast iron, which it was at first intended to operate with a cable, such method of operation having proved successful in America for surface lines, avoiding the dis agreeable consequences of operation by steam locomotives. Before the line was completed it had been demonstrated that such railroads could be successfully operated by electricity, and so that power, instead of cable, was installed.
This tubular railroad, the first to be prac tically operated, the prototype of many others, having conclusively shown that by means of electricity subways could be operated not free from the objections of steam operated lines, and free from the objections to the construc tion of elevated lines, but also more econom ically than by steam, a serious study of the problem was at once taken up in New York, Boston, Paris, Berlin and Budapest. The last named city has the honor of having produced a new type of subway, which has influenced the most approved form of construction. This road was built with a flat roof, consisting of steel beams with arches turned between them, per mitting the whole structure to be brought close to the surface of the street, and was, therefore, in direct opposition to the Greathead method, in which the railroad was carried at a great depth below the surface of the street, necessi tating mechanical means of taking the passen gers from platform to street level. This line in Budapest was put in successful operation in 1893. In the meanwhile similar lines had been projected both in New York and in Boston, but owing to certain legal delays in the former city work was first begun in Boston. The latter subway was intended for the accommodation of the surface trolley cars in order to carry them through the congested centre of Boston, where, on account of the narrowness of the streets, the speed of the cars had been necessarily reduced to a rate that was intolerable.