Victorian High-Tech: The Pneumatic Railway
Current efforts at pneumatic transport have a past
If one walks along Holborn in London, the street name changes to “Holborn Viaduct,” and railings appear. If you look over a railing, you’re on top of this:
Engineering Timelines reports:
Holborn Viaduct is 427m long and 24.4m wide, and is a complex structure mainly of masonry. It incorporated subways for a sewer, a gas main, telegraph wires, the pneumatic despatch railway used by Royal Mail and an Edison electric power station.
It was built in 1869. Sewer, gas main, telegraph — all this we know was happening. And an Edison power station would have been a bit later, in the 1880s. But what was the “pneumatic despatch railway”? It must have been commonly known to have been included in the planning of the Viaduct.
The Pneumatic Despatch Railway Company was created to build it. Formed in 1859, the company raised money for this railway of the future through individual investors. Improvement of business was the goal, with cars carrying mail and packages across London through an underground tube. It was tested above ground at Battersea in 1861.
People could fit inside it.
And they experienced “no ill effect.”
The following was printed on February 7, 1863, in the London News:
“The Pneumatic Dispatch Company having laid down a tube from the Enston railway station to the North-western post-office in Eversholt-street, an official inspection of it was made on the 2nd inst. by the Postmaster-General, Lord Stanley of Alderley, Sir Rowland Hill, of the Post Office, and several other gentlemen. The working of this novel mode of transit was satisfactory to those present, the letter-bags brought up the North-Western Railway, which occupy ten minutes in the carriage to the Eversholt-street post-office when conveyed in the usual way, having been blown through the company’s tube in about a minute. Two men accompanied the carriage on one occasion, and they said that they felt no ill effects from the lightning-like rapidity of their transit. The company propose to carry their tube to the General Post Office.
A human-sized line was run from Crystal Palace in Sydenham so people could try it and see how it worked.
It worked very well. You put your mail (or intrepid investor) into the car and sealed up the end, forming a vacuum. One direction pushed, the other sucked. A straight section of tunnel was designed from the Euston Station packages depot to Holborn, but the Duke of Bedford didn’t want the digging under land he owned, so it had to have a turn. Another line was run from the General Post Office. Telegraph wires ran alongside for signaling. Some reports said it got up to 60 miles per hour; other estimates were more modest. Either way, it got the mail there in minutes and avoided the streets above, which were overcrowded with unregulated traffic, including carts, horses, pedestrians, and cabs.
There were approvals for more branches of the “atmospheric railway,” but not enough money. A few technical problems arose, such as the mail getting wet, but those were solvable. It didn’t save as much time as was hoped, but speed and efficiency would have improved over time. London was growing rapidly; the worsening traffic would have made the pneumatic railway even more useful. The main problem was cash. By 1874 the adventure was ended. The railway of the future was a relic of the past.
A few years ago, the New Statesman published an article using the pneumatic railway to tease Elon Musk. This invention was slated to run all over London, underground, over 150 years ago. Infrastructure was part of the plan. Even though it ran out of money and was left derelict, pneumatic tubes for papers would become part of businesses and banks into this century.
So while it seems like a steampunk invention, the pneumatic railway was a reality for a decade. Current criticism of Virgin Hyperloop doesn’t go back far enough in noting the TGV and a similar Chinese line built seventeen years ago. The hyperloop was a fascinating Victorian invention.
