Plans, it is said, have been submitted to the Board of Trade for a mono-railway between Edinburgh and Glasgow. The proposed construction is similar to that of the Behr mono-railway between Liverpool and Manchester. It is quite unlike the canny Scot to rush into sensational experiments for a speed of 117 miles per hour, especially as a few years’ waiting for the completion of the Liverpool line would prove or disprove the possibility of the scheme. CHAPTER V _REJUVENATING THE METROPOLITAN INNER CIRCLE_ “So that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s.”--Ps. ciii. 5. CONSTRUCTION OF THE METROPOLITAN AND METROPOLITAN DISTRICT RAILWAYS Can anything be satisfactorily rejuvenated? Is there any truth in the Medean story that old age can revert to the vigour of young manhood? In 1903 the usual reply is “No.” If a theatre becomes dilapidated, it is pulled down. If a railway-station gets much out of repair, the company proceeds to reconstruct, and not to patch up. If a macadamised thoroughfare gives signs of too much wear and tear, it is broken up and relaid with wood blocks. In fact, rejuvenation on a large scale is so seldom attempted that the scheme for renovating and electrifying the Inner Circle Railway may be regarded as something remarkable. For convenience we will call it the Inner Circle, but, as we all know, it is a dual concern controlled by the Metropolitan and the Metropolitan District, both of them old enough to have a respectable history. Fifty years ago railways within the boundaries of Inner London were non-existent, the nearest points approached by the country lines being at Battersea, Euston, St. Pancras, Shoreditch, Paddington, London Bridge, and Waterloo--miles away from the central districts. It was an ideal time for omnibus companies, who charged pretty well what they liked: and for cabmen, whose fare was nominally restricted to eightpence a mile, but who were masters of the situation when passengers with luggage had to be conveyed from the termini. Yet, although many suggestions were made, including that of a great central station where all the lines might converge, the travelling world was considerably startled in 1854 by a proposition laid before Parliament to construct an underground line from Farringdon Street to Bishop’s Road, Paddington; and so astonished were capitalists that although the bill passed, the money was so slow in coming in that work could not be begun until six years later! In planning the route a golden opportunity was lost of anticipating the Twopenny Tube; but the opposition of Oxford Street was so fierce that the line had to be poked away beneath the Marylebone Road in the north-west of London, convenient for residents in Paddington and Bayswater, but useless to other districts, and, what was more important, it did not go to the Bank, the centre of the business world.