More than one line in the suburbs

So, it was partly to do with competition? Makes sense if I think about it.

Kinda wish Moscow was as interconnected as London is. Their suburbs only have one line - can only imagine what would happen if the line is not working.

The GC is actually the exception - as a Johnny-come-lately (opened in 1899) it had to penetrate suburbia using the tracks of an existing railway. For obvious reasons none of its direct long-distance competitors would co-operate: it actually used the tracks of the Metropolitan.

One cold cite the London & Greenwich (from Londin Bridge), the London & Blackwall (from Fenchurch Street) , and the North London Railway (from Broad Street) as initially suburban railways, but they soon got absorbed into longer distance routes ( respectively to Brighton, Dover and beyond, to Tilbury and Southend (not then "suburban" in any real sense), and to Birmingham via the LNWR).

Indeed even the extensive suburban networks of the SER, LBSCR, LSWR and GER came subsequent to the main lines to Dover, Brighton, Portsmouth, Southampton, Cambridge and Norwich.

The "land grab" of competing lines serving the same area was most obvious in SE London and Kent, where most population centres have two stations on different lines (Maidstone, Canterbury, Penge, Bromley, Beckenham, Catford, Dulwich, Epsom Downs/Tattenham Corner) and many more used to (Greenwich, Lewisham, Brockley, Crystal Palace, Chatham). See also Enfield, Hertford, Stanmore, Romford, Windsor, Brentford, Hounslow (particularly tactless of the District to show iuts hand in wanting to extend beyond Houn;sow Town into LSWR territory, given that it relied on LSWR tracks to get beyond Hammersmith!) The parallel branch lines between Watford, Croxley, and Rickmansworth are another example, only now being joined together.

The land grab still continued into the 1920s, with the St Helier line opened by the Southern in 1930 - built largely to keep the Combine out of Sutton (which had plans to extend both the Northern Line and the District Line into the area)

norbitonflyer - a propos the GC, well, to start with, but later also over its own lines and no interest in suburban traffic at any time (even now,the non-Aylesbury services have no suburban traffic worth mentioning. )

revupminster- The L&B'smain original purpose (as I understood it) was to enable City clerks to get to their shipping offices quickly. Again,no commuter traffic as we now know it.

Most of the GC passenger traffic on the GW&GC Joint was local as there was little room for GC expresses after accounting for the heavy GC freight and GW expresses.

There are actually three, built respectively by the Midland, Metropolitan and North London Railways, in that chronological order. Although the NLR line was older than the other two, there was no station there until some years after the other two opened. Until 1975 it was known as West End Lane, despite being sandwiched by two stations both called West Hampstead.

Although that's true as far as it goes, there was precious little GC local traffic,either - my 1922 Bradshaw shows an approximately hourly (with big gaps) service, no arrival in Marylebone before 08.34 and only one departure after about 1800 - not really a suburban service at all. Very much a case of the line being built for the long distance traffic you describe, with anything local being incidental -which was my point,in fact.

Or as John Betjeman says in 'Metroland' "From Manchester to Paris, stopping at London on the way."

Remember that the High Barnet branch was part of the Great Northern Railway. As for the Piccadilly extensiuon, with joined up thinking, it is most unlikely that it would have been built at all, since its raisons d'etre were to pinch traffic off rhe LNER, and to relieve the congestion at Finsbury Park caused by the scuppering of the original plans for the GN&City and the GN&Strand to connect properly to the GNR

And New Barnet as well.

The benefit would be that passengers could just take the first train and change where necessary. So if GN and Picc line trains ran from the same suburban station (other than Finsbury Park), it would eliminate the problem of determining whether I should go via Arnos Grove or New Southgate if I want to go to Moorgate.

So it seems that competition has created the convenience for us passengers
Mostly, because the GN local stations beyond New Barnet start to diverge away from the tube lines (looking at it on a map). And people in areas like Brookman's Park and Welham Green are stuck with only one line, sadly.

@envy123 - there have been very few cases of genuinely competing lines in the UK (of course, there's always been somelimited competition at the margin - eg Exeter, or Aberdeen - but that's usually been an accident of geography rather than a deliberate attempt to build a rival line). The GC was the most obvious but hardly a model of success, and the S Wales valleys each managed to support at least a couple of profitable routes to the docks for the coal trade but the small numberof these emphasis the sheer capital cost of building competing infrastructure. If it couldn't be done between London and Manchester*, small settlements like Brookmans Park didn't stand a chance.

*The Midland hardly set out with the plan of building a new line between the two and its services struggled to compete with the LNW.

If there was no competition, I think that LU would be a lot more like the Moscow Metro is now, where the different lines are very much far apart from each other - www.legendtour.ru/foto/rus/02metro.gif
So, if you lived in south of Moscow and near any station on Line 10, realistically you only had that line to use. And if Line 10 was to be disrupted, you have no other choice of line at least by walking/bus distance. I've experienced that problem in Moscow. And also stations are much further apart than in London. At least London lines did have some competition, unlike Moscow.

On the other hand, all lines interchange with each other, unlike in LU where the Jubilee Line is the only line to have interchanges with everything. Swings and roundabouts. I rely on the Northern, Piccadilly and GN local lines in my area and any shortcomings of a line (or disruptions) could easily be overcome by going to another line. So if I want to go to Hackney with one change, I just hop onto the GN line. And if I want to go to Harrods direct, I hop onto the Picc. I like it this way far more than when I lived in Moscow.

And in terms of the diverging, I meant why didn't the company who was responsible for the Cockfosters extension at least extend it to Potters Bar so it could compete with whoever was running the now GN line, instead of just terminating in the Barnet area? I realise that tube extensions are not the way to go in terms of better connecting London to its nearby commuter towns, but the tube does go to Hertfordshire after all.

In Harrow, it was to some extent the influence of Harrow School that prevented the London & Birmingham Railway passing closer than Kenton, or opening a station nearer than what is now Wealdstone (the settlement was originally called Station End; the Weald Stone is actually in Harrow Weald). While the School authorities had relented by the time the Metropolitan Railway reached Harrow, they still objected to the extension of the Middlesex County Council/Metropolitan Electric Tramways from Sudbury via Harrow to Watford.

You wouldn't like it down here in leafy Surrey then. Hobson's choice. (and it's not often Surrey is likened to Moscow!)


In 1933 the LNER ran the GN line, as the "Big Four" successor to the GNR, from which the modern service gets its name. It was the UERL "combine" that built the Picadilly extension, although Cockfosters was completed shortly after the formation of London Transport in 1933. Whether it had aspirations to go further I don't know - there were certainly plans to extend other lines, for example beyond Edgware and (on the Southern) beyond Chessington - but six years later war broke out, and shortly after that all the railways including London Transport came under state control, with full nationalisation in 1948. Green belt legislation put paid to any other extension plans.


Only the Metropolitan, independent until 1933 and with aspirations to be a main line (indeed they had a fight on theoir hands not to be absorbed into one of the Big Four in 1923), made it into Hertfordshire on its own tracks, although the Bakerloo ran over LNWR tracks as far as Watford until the 1980s.