Line to the past has new future

The subterranean railway is a forgotten relic, opened in 1927 to feed the Royal Mail trains that once criss-crossed the country. Photo / Thinkstock

In a deserted station, about 20m below the streets of London, engineer Ray Middlesworth turns his great brass key and the Post Office Underground Railway roars into life. The sound of the 1920s locomotive engine bounces off the peeling century-old brickwork as we rattle along the two-gauge track.

This subterranean railway is a forgotten relic, opened in 1927 to feed the Royal Mail trains that once criss-crossed the country, immortalised in W H Auden's poem Night Mail. After 76 years of service, it fell out of favour and was mothballed in 2003.

Today, compared with the steam locomotives of Auden's imaginings, the Mail Rail is a rattling old beast. It groans as we trundle through tunnels only 2.7m in diameter, the sounds magnified by the train's lack of a roof. Damp, dripping walls whistle past. At least, I am assured, there are no rats.

"You get the odd wanderer passing through, but we don't have any living down here," says Middlesworth, who has worked for Royal Mail for 40 years. "It's because there's no food here for them any more."

So even vermin give the tunnels a wide berth these days. Since its closure, the Mail Rail, which once transported four million parcels a day beneath the crowded streets of the capital, has truly become a ghost railway. Only a skeleton staff is kept on to maintain its tunnels and keep out intruders, but that could be about to change. What was the world's first driverless, electrified railway could soon be opened to the public as part of a new, £22 million ($44.5m) national postal museum. The only snag is that the British Postal Museum and Archive needs another £2 million in donations to get the line running.

If the money, which will be match-funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, is forthcoming, the line will be reopened in 2016 as a visitor ride through Mt Pleasant. The opening of the Mail Rail marked the completion of one of Britain's last major projects before the Great Depression struck. During World War II the trains offered a means of communication, while bombs rained above.

A precursor to the railway, which used air pressure to force mail cars through tiny tunnels, had opened in 1863. That closed a decade later, not least because Victorian gentlemen began using it for sport after an evening's drinking. Then in 1911, an electric railway with driverless trains was recommended instead, and work to construct its tunnels began soon after.