Sir Edward William Watkin, 1st Baronet was a British Member of Parliament and railway entrepreneur. He was an ambitious visionary, and presided over large-scale railway engineering projects to fulfil his business aspirations, eventually rising to become chairman of nine different British railway companies.
Watkin by Augustus Henry Fox now in the National Railway Museum
"The Railway Interest". Caricature by Ape published in Vanity Fair in 1875.
Watkin's high-speed Great Central Main Line
The first and only completed stage of Watkin's Wembley Tower (c.1900)
The Metropolitan Railway was a passenger and goods railway that served London from 1863 to 1933, its main line heading north-west from the capital's financial heart in the City to what were to become the Middlesex suburbs. Its first line connected the main-line railway termini at Paddington, Euston, and King's Cross to the City. The first section was built beneath the New Road using cut-and-cover between Paddington and King's Cross and in tunnel and cuttings beside Farringdon Road from King's Cross to near Smithfield, near the City. It opened to the public on 10 January 1863 with gas-lit wooden carriages hauled by steam locomotives, the world's first passenger-carrying designated underground railway.
Montage of the Metropolitan Railway's stations from The Illustrated London News December 1862, the month before the railway opened
Construction of the Metropolitan Railway close to King's Cross station in 1861
The cutting at Farringdon following the flooding from the Fleet sewer in June 1862
Metropolitan Railway A-Class 4-4-0T No 23 in Covent Garden
