Tube Choo

It was the tourists at Paddington who looked most surprised. Fresh off the Heathrow Express, they were quietly waiting for a Circle line train on Sunday when we came puffing through in an authentic Metropolitan Railway steam train. "I'd heard about their deficit, but didn't realise things were this bad..." 

The train was the first steam train to run underground through the centre of London for 100 years and I was privileged to be onboard.

I was in third class in the final coach. The carriages, dating from 1898, were wonderfully opulent. The interior was wood, brass and leather. The windows, of course, opened allowing steam and smoke to filter through as we passed through the dark, enclosed tunnels. Looking out into the tunnels through an open window made the whole experience much more intimate (though it took me a while to work out how to open the window - it turns out old train windows use a leather strap with brass notches which is completely incomprehensible to those of us from the age of air-conditioning).

The train ran from Kensington (Olympia) to Moorgate, and the whole thing was over far too quickly. While intended to be, it didn't feel like a recreation of long-vanished Victorian London. Quite the opposite: the joy was the incongruity. Our maroon steam loco with her wooden carriages was running on the tube on a normal day past normal trains. We chugged through the newly rebuilt Kings Cross St Pancras, finished up at the 1960s utilitarianism of Moorgate and waved constantly at brand-new Metropolitan line trains, shining from the factory. It was gloriously absurd.

Being on the train had a downside: we didn't actually get to see it moving. It's running again this coming Sunday, though, and I may go and have a proper look. If you do want to get a sense of what the world's first underground railway was like, pop down to Baker Street after seven in the evening. Platforms 5 and 6 are the most perfectly preserved on the original 1863 line. Gloomy Victorian brickwork, gleaming wooden carriages and the tang of smoke; you'll get a much better sense of Victorian tube travel than I did last Sunday, and you'll be seeing something that no-one had previously seen for a century.

For everything you could possibly want to know about the tube's 150th birthday, see the legendary Diamond Geezer.