A Journey to 1994 Trivia Quiz

The Metropolitan Railway, which originally ran from Paddington to Farringdon, opened on January 10, 1863. The brainchild of city solicitor Charles Pearson, it was not originally envisaged as doing any more than linking up London's existing railway terminals.

This line, which became today's District line, was opened, as its original name suggests, to work alongside the Metropolitan to complete the Inner Circle (today's Circle line). Things did not exactly go smoothly. The District line today has many branches and serves a total of 60 stations, though it once served even more - the Piccadilly line took over some of the west London routes that were run by the District.

The Inner Circle, made up of central portions of the Metropolitan and District, was seen as a way of linking up train routes around the capital.

In transport terms, it came to define the centre of London's Underground network.

It took 20 years from the creation of the company that was supposed to assist with the completion of what became the Circle line for that to actually happen. The two companies quarrelled bitterly over the years, to the point of one chaining up the other's locomotives, and it took political intervention to get them to do what they were supposed to.

This created a circular route from the central portions of the two original lines. As it developed, the Metropolitan built much of the northern part of the route, while the District built much of the southern part from South Kensington to Mansion House.

The remaining sections were eventually built to link the two railways and complete the circle. There are two important junctions where the Circle line connects the Metropolitan and District routes: between Gloucester Road and High Street Kensington in the west, and between Aldgate and Tower Hill in the east.

The Wotton Tramway, running from Quainton Road (already then in use by the Metropolitan for services to Verney Junction) to Brill in Buckinghamshire, which is 51 miles from Baker Street. The Metropolitan at this stage in its history saw itself (and was seen by its manager, Edward Watkin) as a mainline railway. Mr Watkin had a vision of his three favourite cities, London, Manchester and Paris, being linked by a railway network, and wasn't all that far from making it happen (he was prevented from building a tunnel under the channel, which had to wait almost another century).

The City & South London Railway had opened in 1890, which started a new era, as with the aid of the development of electric locomotives it was possible to go deeper below ground, meaning that the building work was less disruptive. The Central London Railway was another follower of this trend, and since the C&SLR was extended the same year the CLR opened, they each had stations at Bank.

Although the Waterloo & City line had opened in 1898 and was a deep-level tube railway, it did not become part of London Underground for many years, being regarded for much of its history as an adjunct to the London & South Western Railway, providing commuters from leafy Surrey with an onward connection to the heart of the city.

Part of the reason for the Piccadilly opening was to provide an alternative to the District line, which is why these two lines share several west London stations. The Bakerloo was an entirely new construction, on the other hand. The year after these two lines opened, the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead, forerunner of the Charing Cross and Edgware branches of the Northern line, also opened.

The Victoria line was built with practicality front and centre - some of the older lines included curves tighter than the ideal in order to avoid paying 'easements' to owners of premises on the surface - for example, the Bakerloo line follows the curve of Regent Street between Piccadilly and Oxford Circuses.

The Victoria includes no very tight curves, and thus avoids many of the speed restrictions other lines have. A conscious effort was also made to create convenient cross-platform interchanges - Stockwell, the change to the Bakerloo at Oxford Circus, the change to the Bank branch of the Northern at Euston and that to the Piccadilly at Finsbury Park are all such.

It opened in stages between 1968 and 1971.

The Jubilee line was intended to open in the year of Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee, but ended up opening two years later. It included three new stations, all with interchanges to other lines, and from Baker Street to Stanmore took over a branch of the Bakerloo line that was putting too much stress on that line (as it had 40 years previously on the Metropolitan, which first ran services to Stanmore).

The original southern terminus at Charing Cross brought together two previously separate stations, Strand on the Northern line and Trafalgar Square on the Bakerloo line.

For some time what was then known as the Hammersmith & City section of the Metropolitan line had been running effectively separately from the rest of the Metropolitan, and in 1990 this was officially acknowledged, with the Hammersmith & City line being coloured pink instead of magenta.

This means that although its name is closest to the original, the Metropolitan does not actually serve all the stations on the section that opened in 1863 - Paddington and Edgware Road are served only by the Circle and Hammersmith & City lines, while the Metropolitan uses different platforms at Baker Street (numbers 1-4, two terminal and two through platforms) from the H&C and Circle (5 and 6, the 1863 originals).

The story of London Underground is not one of continuous expansion. In 1994 two branches disappeared from the map. The eastern end of the Central line beyond Stratford had started life as part of the Eastern Counties Railway, which was subsumed into the Great Eastern, and then became part of London Underground after World War II.

The Ongar branch, operated as a shuttle service to and from Epping, never had many passengers. The Aldwych branch of the Piccadilly line was a spur southwards from Holborn, and it too struggled to attract the numbers.