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London’s Underground

Bands were playing and the gentlemen in hats were preparing to make speeches about their great achievement. They made the first underground railway travel in the world—a distance of almost four miles.

It was the year 1863 and on that first historic day 30,000 Londoners used this new and strange way of travel. Now a hundred years later the London Underground carries two million passengers every day over its 273 stations. Five hundred trains carry a total of 675 million passeng­ers each year.

The deep-level tubes came later, in 1890. Tunnelling a tube through miles of clay, and sometimes sand and gravel, is no easy task, and it was James Henry Greathead who developed the method which was to make most of London's tube tunnels possible.

London transport's experience with tunnels brought them another record. The longest continuous railway tunnel in the world is the 17 1/2 mile tunnel in the Northern line.

There are numerous escalators which help to keep the traffic mov­ing. The first was installed in 1911. Now there are 188 and they can carry 10,000 passengers an hour at a maximum speed. The longest at Leicester Square is over 80 feet in length. On long escalators the speed is changeable. The "up" escalator runs at full speed when carrying passengers, but when empty it runs at half speed.

An entirely automatic driving system is now being tested. The driver will be in charge ofstarting the trains at stations, but speed and safety signalling will be controlled by coded electrical impulses.

The air in the Underground is changed every quarter of an hour, and the temperature all the year round is maintained at 69-79 degrees by Fahrenheit.

Britain’s Energy

Britain has the largest energy resources of any country in the European Community and is a major producer of oil, natural gas and coal. Other primary sources of energy are nuclear power and, to a lesser extent, water power.

Before the 1970s Britain depended on imports of oil from abroad but the discovery of large oil and gas reserves in the North Sea changed this dramatically: by 1986 about 2.2 million barrels of oil were extracted per day, making Britain the world's fifth largest producer. There are over thirty offshore oilfields from which oil and gas are piped to the mainland. Natural gas has replaced coal in the public supply system.

Britain has large reserves of coal, and coal mining played a very important part in the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By 1913 the coal industry employed over a million workers. Coal is still an important source of heat for both private houses and power stations, but in recent years the industry has greatly reduced the numbers of mines and miners while increasing efficiency. There was a long and bitter industrial dispute in 1984-85 as miners reacted to the beginning of this new phase in the development of the coal industry. Britain has fourteen nuclear power stations in operation. There are other nuclear installations too, such as reprocessing units and research centres. Since the original power stations started operations in 1956 there has been much discussion over the best design; pressurized water reactors are planned for the future and the government's eventual aim is to have 20 per cent of Britain's electricity produced by nuclear power.

All proposals for new power stations meet with public opposition, and this has increased since the disaster at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986. There are fears that the reactors themselves are unsafe, and that the problems of waste disposal have not been solved. While those in favour of nuclear power claim that it is clean, safe and efficient, opponents argue that the dangers are too great and that other sources of energy have not been sufficiently researched because of lack of government funding or interest. The privatization of the electricity industry has also raised the question of who should own and operate nuclear.

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