Until 1898 Smitham Bottom remained a fortuitous concourse of some twenty mean houses on a windswept natural platform, ghastly with the chalky "spoil-banks" thrown up when the South Eastern Railway engineers excavated the great cuttings in 1840; but when the three railway-stations within one mile were established that serve Smitham Bottom--the stations of Coulsdon, Stoat's Nest, and Smitham--the place, very naturally, began to grow with the magic quickness generally associated with Jonah's Gourd and Jack's Beanstalk, and now Smitham Bottom is a town. Most of the spoil-banks are gone, and those that remain are planted with quick-growing poplars; so that, if they can survive the hungry soil, there will presently be a leafy screen to the ugly railway sidings. Showy shops, all plate-glass and nightly glare of illumination, have arisen; the old "Red Lion" inn has got a new and very saucy front; and, altogether, "Smitham" has arrived. The second half of the name is now in process of being forgotten, and the only wonder is that the first part has not been changed into "Smytheham" at the very least, or that an entirely new name, something in the way of "ville" or "park," suited to its prospects, has not been coined. For Smitham, one can clearly see, has a Future, with a capital F, and the historian confidently expects to see the incorporation of Smitham, with Mayor, Town Council, and Town Hall, all complete. It is here, at Marrowfat, now "Marlpit," Lane, that the new link of the Brighton line branches off from Stoat's Nest.[8] One of the first trials of the engineers was the removal of three-quarters of a million cubic yards of the "spoil," dumped down by the roadside over half a century earlier; and then followed the spanning of the Brighton Road by a girder-bridge. The line then entered the grounds of the Cane Hill Lunatic Asylum, through which it runs in a covered way, the London County Council, under whose control that institution is carried on, obtaining a clause in the Company's Act, requiring the railway to be covered in at this point, in case the lunatics might find means of throwing themselves in front of passing trains. Leaving the asylum grounds, the railway re-crosses the road by a hideous skew girder bridge of 180 feet span, supported by giant piers and retaining-walls, and then crosses the deep cutting of the South Eastern, to enter a cutting of its own leading into a tunnel a mile and a quarter in length--the new Merstham tunnel--running parallel with the old tunnel of the same name through which the South Eastern Railway passes. At the southern end of this gloomy tunnel is the pretty village of Merstham, where the hillside sinks down to the level lands between that point and Redhill.