Baker Street and Waterloo Railway
The Baker Street & Waterloo Railway of Hamilton House, Victoria Embankment, London
later called the Bakerloo Line.
1893 Company incorporated to construct an electric underground railway. [1]
1904 Financed by the mining entrepreneur and company promoter Whitaker Wright, who fell foul of the law over the financial proceedings involved and dramatically committed suicide at the Royal Courts of Justice after being convicted in 1904.
1906 The line was constructed by the Underground Electric Railways Co of London Limited and opened in 10 March 1906. The contraction of the name to "Bakerloo" rapidly caught on, and the official name was changed to match.
By 1913, the line had been extended from its original northern terminus at Baker Street to the west with interchange stations with the Great Central Railway at Marylebone and the Great Western Railway at Paddington, and a new station at Edgware Road.
1915 the line was extended further to Queen's Park, where it joined the electric (DC) lines of the London and North Western Railway (LNWR) that ran alongside the LNWR's main line as far as Watford Junction.
1917 From its opening until 1917, the line operated with the polarity of the conductor rails reversed from the other lines, the outside rail negative and the centre rail positive, because it shared a power source with the District Railway. On the Bakerloo, the outside conductor rail tended to leak to the tunnel wall, whereas on the District Railway, the centre rail shared a similar problem. The solution was to reverse the polarity on the Bakerloo line, so that the negative rail leaked on both systems.
1917, the two lines were separated when the LNWR commenced its 'New Line' service between Euston and Watford Junction, which the Bakerloo would share north of Queen's Park. As a result, normal operation was restored. [2]
By the mid 1930s, the Metropolitan Line was suffering from congestion caused by the limited capacity of its tracks between Baker Street and Finchley Road stations. To relieve this pressure, new sections of tunnel were constructed between the Bakerloo Line's platforms at Baker Street and the Finchley Road and the replacement of three Metropolitan Line stations (Lord's, Marlborough Road and Swiss Cottage) between those points with two new Bakerloo stations (St. John's Wood and Swiss Cottage).
1931 An extension at the southern end of the line to Camberwell and Denmark Hill was proposed and approved. Apart from the extension of the sidings south of Elephant and Castle, no work on the extension took place before World War II
1933 As with the other London Underground lines, the Bakerloo Line was incorporated in the London Passenger Transport Board.
1939 The Bakerloo Line took over the Metropolitan Line's service to Stanmore on 20 November.
1960s Bakerloo services to Watford were reduced in the 1960s and withdrawn in 1982, with Stonebridge Park the new terminus.
1979 The Stanmore branch remained part of the Bakerloo Line until 1 May 1979, when congestion problems for the Bakerloo Line caused by two branches converging at Baker Street led to the opening of the Jubilee Line which was initially created by connecting the Stanmore branch to new tunnels bored between Baker Street and Charing Cross.