Baker Street Tube Station - History

History

Baker Street station was opened by the MR on 10 January 1863 (these platforms are now served by the Circle and Hammersmith & City lines). On 13 April 1868, the MR opened the first section of Metropolitan and St John's Wood Railway as a branch from its existing route. This line, serving the open-air platforms, was steadily extended to Willesden Green and northwards, finally reaching Aylesbury Town and Verney Junction (some 50 miles/80 km from Baker Street) in 1892. The MR station mainly competed for traffic with Euston, where the LNWR provided local services to Middlesex and Watford, and later with Marylebone, where the GCR provided expresses to Aylesbury and beyond on the same line.

Over the next few decades this section of the station was extensively rebuilt to provide four platforms. The current Metropolitan line layout largely dates from 1925, and the bulk of the surface buildings, designed by architect Charles Clark, also date from this period.

The Baker Street & Waterloo Railway (BS&WR, now the Bakerloo line) opened on 10 March 1906; Baker Street was the temporary northern terminus of the line until it was extended to Marylebone station on 27 March 1907. The original station building stood on Baker Street and served the tube platforms with lifts, but these were supplemented with escalators in 1914, linking the Metropolitan line and the Bakerloo line platforms by a new concourse excavated under the Metropolitan line.

On 20 November 1939, following the construction of an additional southbound platform and connecting tube tunnels between Baker Street and Finchley Road stations, the Bakerloo line took over the Metropolitan line's stopping services between Finchley Road and Wembley Park and its Stanmore branch. The current Bakerloo ticket hall and escalators to the lower concourse were provided in conjunction with the new service. The Jubilee line added an extra northbound platform and replaced the Bakerloo line service to Stanmore from its opening on 1 May 1979.

On 23 August 1973, a bomb was found in a carrier bag in the ticket hall. The bomb was defused by the bomb squad. A week later, on 30 August, a member of staff found another bomb left on the overbridge. Again, it was defused without any injury.

Read more about this topic:  Baker Street Tube Station

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    Anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the “anticipation of Nature.”
    Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)

    ... that there is no other way,
    That the history of creation proceeds according to
    Stringent laws, and that things
    Do get done in this way, but never the things
    We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
    To see come into being.
    John Ashbery (b. 1927)

    What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.
    Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)