This folding wall map of London shows the full complexity of the city’s railway network at the start of the 20th century. Each railway line is coloured and named on the map, though the sheer number of lines makes this a complicated map to use. It was issued by the Railway Clearing House, presumably more for administrative purposes than to aid passengers, as it makes the task of navigating across the city almost impossibly complex. Dozens of individual railway companies are noted on the map, and the same colours are often re-used for completely distinct lines. Dashed lines are used to indicate where a stretch of track was shared by two companies, while unfinished dashed lines indicate tracks which are still under construction.

The first 8 underground lines are all marked on this map, though one line had not yet been completed at the time of publication.

• The Metropolitan Railway (light blue) extends from Mansion House to South Kensington on the Inner Circle, with branches reaching out to Uxbridge and Aylesbury.
• The District Railway (orange) starts at Bow in the east and travels along the southern half of the Inner Circle to Putney Bridge, Hounslow Barracks, Ealing, and South Harrow.
• The Central London Railway (green) terminates at Shepherd’s Bush in the west and at Bank in the east.• The Waterloo & City Railway (dark blue), predictably, connects Waterloo and Bank.
• The Baker Street & Waterloo Railway (purple) extends from Elephant & Castle to Baker Street, with a further section to Paddington still under construction.
• The Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway (red) connects Finsbury Park to South Kensington.
• The City & South London Railway (yellow) begins at Clapham Common and curves its way to Euston via London Bridge and Bank.
• The Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead Railway (yellow dashes) is still under construction from Charing Cross to Golders Green.

The Railway Clearing House was an organization founded in 1842 by a loose conglomerate of railway companies to establish a system for fairly allocating joint revenues between the companies. For example, if a passenger or goods wagon travelled along lines owned by more than one company, any revenues would need to be split between those companies. With such a complicated network of tracks developing across Britain, this was a frequent occurrence, and customers were often required to purchase multiple tickets for a single journey. In the end, revenue sharing was generally calculated based on mileage, which is why this map shows the length of every section of track in miles and chains.

In general, the underground railways of London kept themselves apart from the nation’s mainline railway system and never joined the Railway Clearing House. However, they did face similar difficulties with ticketing and revenue sharing as some sections of track were operated by more than one company. The Inner Circle, for example, was jointly operated in places by the Metropolitan and the District Railway, forcing some customers to buy a clockwise ticket from one company and a counterclockwise ticket for their return journey from the other company. Eventually, the underground railways came to a similar conclusion as the mainline railways: cooperation was needed. This led to the formation of the Underground Electric Railways of London Company (UERL) in 1902 and, eventually, the creation of the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933, the predecessor of our modern Transport for London (TfL).

Printed colour. Folded. [LDN6049]