The Times of India reports on The Old London Underground Company

News of The Old London Underground Company reaches Delhi, home to the newest underground train service in the world, and the Times of India runs a short piece interviewing Ajit Chambers on May 22nd 2011.

The Old London Underground Company - meets the Director of the Brunel Museum.

The Old London Underground Company have offered assistance with sponsorship and financing to the Brunel Museum to make sure that this feat of engineering is protected historically and not solely used as a transport link.

The first tunnel, the Thames Tunnel, which opened on March 25th 1843, was hailed as the "Eighth Wonder" of the world. It connected Rotherhithe with Wapping, and was built between 1825 and 1843 by Marc Brunel, father of the more famous Isambard.

The tunnel measures 35 feet (11 metres) wide by 20 feet (6 metres) high and is 1,300 feet (396 metres) long and runs at a depth of 75 feet (23 metres). Its excavation was extremely hazardous: the tunnel was prone to flooding, and six men died in 1828, it also exposed its workers to "foul air" which caused fevers. The work was then abandoned for seven years, until in 1834 Brunel succeeded in raising sufficient money to start work again. It cost a fortune to build and was never a financial success. Designed initially for use by horse-drawn carriages, lack of funds meant that it ended up as a foot tunnel only.

In 1865, it was bought by the East London Railway Company and was eventually absorbed into the London Underground (Tube) network and is today, after its re-modelling and reopening in 2010, as part of the East London line extension - and, bizarrely, an underground part of the new London Overground.

The Thames Tunnel is, however, one of at least 20 tunnels that run under the river today -more than in any other country or capital. There are 12 London Underground tunnels (9 in use, and 3 disused), three road tunnels, two foot tunnels (the Woolwich foot tunnel and the Greenwich foot tunnel), eight service tunnels, and two BT tunnels.

In the beginning...

It's easy to forget that there was a time before the London Underground transport system, when traffic was even more congested than today, and pollution from horse droppings and industrialisation meant that 19th century London was a filthy city almost at a standstill.

London has always had an underground life, from its many crypts and tunnels to its numerous underground rivers, since the Romans, and this can be seen in the remains of a military fort beneath the Museum of London. To go underground in an attempt to ease the disastrous effects of the post-industrial revolution on London, when as a city its population more than doubled from under 1 to over 2.5 million in 50 years between 1800 and 1850, seemed an obvious solution.

Historically, the person credited with the first idea for underground transportation in London was one Charles Pearson who, in 1845, published a pamphlet that suggested using the Fleet River, which runs underground from Hampstead via Kentish Town and Farringdon to join the Thames at Blackfriar's Bridge. In fact, Farringdon Road is the Fleet valley under which the river runs, and Holborn Viaduct was built to cross it. Pearson's idea was that passengers would be transported by trains in some sort of fantastical glass tunnel.

Engineering was a big feature of progress in Victorian England. Following the "Big Stink" of 1858, civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette designed an underground sewage system of 450 miles of main sewers, and 13,000 miles of interconnecting local sewers, which remains the mainstay of our system today. Bazalgette, by then knighted, went on to work on the Blackwell tunnel, now borrowing under the Thames itself.

The scene was set. Finally, the parliamentary bill received Royal Assent, but funding was still to be found. The work was to be executed by one John Fowler, from Sheffield who had cut his teeth on the railways of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and finally in 1860 work began on the world's first underground railway system, the Metropolitan line.

Using a system of "cut and cover" roads were literally dug up, railway tunnels cut out, and then covered up and the roads replaced. Hugely labour intensive and disruptive, it took three years to complete the first track which ran from Bishop's Road, Paddington to Farringdon Road, finally opening to the public on Saturday January 10th 1863.