Going overground: 150 years of train travelHere's a story about a new railway line, finished on time and within budget, which most transport-weary Londoners would therefore instinctively assume must be about to open in Singapore, or Austria, or Brazil.
If it doesn't sound like a London infrastructure project that is because it has gone entirely to plan, and the trains that are soon to begin service are brand new, airy and comfortable. And, most surprising and alien of all, each of the carriages is properly air-conditioned, rather than relying on the antiquated “forced air” system that makes Londoners sweat in summer all across the Tube network.
This was never a high-profile project with pretensions to save the planet through reduced carbon emissions. It lacks the unfunded grandiosity of Lord Adonis's multi-billion-pound dream of running European-style high-speed trains all the way from Barcelona to Birmingham, and then all points north.
Significantly, it is not a product of New Labour's fetish for PFI funding schemes, which takes infrastructure costs off the Government's books but condemns commuters to the nightmare of living through the extended upgrades of the Tube network's main arteries.
At its southern sources, TfL's new Overground railway intrudes upon existing Network Rail track in the depths of south London at West Croydon and Crystal Palace. As it heads north, the route nips and tucks, and cherrypicks disused Victorian viaducts around Hackney. It will stop at Dalston Junction until 2011, when it will continue to Highbury & Islington. It brings back to life Victorian track which, when Victoria ruled, carried 27 million passengers a year along the old Broad Street to Poplar line.
And most importantly for the connoisseurs of Victoriana, it snatches back from obsolescence the oldest underwater tunnel in the world — the Brunel masterpiece connecting Wapping to Rotherhithe which opened in 1843.
The new line's most sensational feature, the brand new station at Shoreditch High Street, sits entombed in a developer's cocoon, so that when the economy picks up, flats, businesses and shops can be built around and upon it.
The only way Transport for London could secure such a site in the City was by paying the developer for the right to use that land, even if it meant suspending the station and the rail track between the ground and a future massive development.
Though the train manufacturer, Bombardier, was late in delivering the 57 four-carriage trains, the service will start one day next month. The exact date is a secret, but will be factored around Mayor Johnson's diary, so Boris's grinning features can be shown on the local news riding at the front of the first train.
But political credit for the success of this project actually belongs to Ken Livingstone, who drove the plan forward when he was Mayor. The engineering credit belongs to the old-style London transport men who are quietly reconfiguring London's transport infrastructure.
Ian Brown, a career railwayman who has overseen the project from its start five years ago, is triumphant as he observes the final stages of track testing and driver training.
The MD of rail for Transport for London, he concedes the project was fortunate not to have to be funded through the “nightmare” of PFI funding.
Brown and his colleagues' answer to chronic overcrowding on the Tube was to set out to upgrade the ring of overground rail networks around the capital, rather than dig new tunnels for the Tube. When the Clapham Junction-Canada Water stretch is finished in 2012, it will complete the jigsaw of the Overground network begun with the Richmond to Stratford and Willesden Junction to Clapham Junction legs that have replaced and extended the old Silverlink routes.
The entire eastern project, including the new section of track between Hackney and Shoreditch and resignalling and upgrading disused Victorian track, cost the thick end of three-quarters of a billion pounds; the fleet of new electric four-carriage trains added a further £260 million.
“Ken took some convincing that this was the way to go, as initially it wasn't his preferred option,” says Brown. Livingstone had misgivings about a scheme which gave the running of the line to a private franchise holder — in this case the foreign-owned LOROL — but relented when he realised it was the only way to secure the funding.
Central to London's claim for Whitehall money was the resort to “social inclusion” — in other words, Transport for London was getting the money to build the line because since Victorian times, the residents of south-east London around New Cross and north from there have been so badly served by public transport.
The Tube network has long discriminated brutally against south and south-east Londoners. In the past this did not matter so much because the overground railways picked up the slack, but many of them fell into disuse, particularly in areas such as New Cross where there were few commuters to take into town for work.
The engineering jewel at the heart of the new East London line is the Thames tunnel, built by Marc Brunel and his son Isambard. In 1818 Brunel senior, an Anglo-French Londoner, had patented the tunnelling shield, a revolutionary advance in engineering which sliced through the earth like a pastry cutter.
Five years later, Brunel conceived the plan to dig a freight tunnel between Rotherhithe and Wapping. The Duke of Wellington put in a huge amount of capital, and as the project mushroomed in scale, Marc brought in his son, Isambard.
The tunnel was an engineering triumph, but a commercial catastrophe. Isambard almost drowned in a tunnel burst which killed six workers and was forced into convalescence in Bristol, where he got the idea of building the city a grand suspension bridge.
The Duke of Wellington was just one investor who was to lose his shirt, and the tunnel only opened because, in an early example of public money salvaging failed private infrastructure projects, the government tossed in £200,000.
It was conceived as a freight tunnel, but there was no money left to build the approaches that would have allowed carriages through. So it became a foot tunnel, a sort of subterranean version of the London Eye, for which locals and tourists would pay one penny to walk through and marvel at the engineering verve.
Londoners called the first tunnel to run under a river the Eighth Wonder of the World. Shops under the arches of the tunnel sold booklets and postcards detailing the engineering achievement.
But it made huge losses and eventually the Brunel tunnel had to be sold to the railways for the first incarnation of the East London line in 1865.
The Brunel tunnel was later absorbed into the Tube network, until it was closed down for refurbishment four years ago when TfL took it over for reincorporation into the mainline rail network.
Next month, trains that are part of the mainline rail network will run through the tunnel for the first time since Victoria's day, and take commuters from Croydon, without having to change, into the City at Shoreditch High Street.
And even those left cold by splendid stories of London engineering ingenuity can just sit back and watch how property prices in Dalston, New Cross, Crystal Palace and West Croydon head north.
www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/article-23822518-going-overground-150-years-of-train-travel.do 
