A 1912 trip from South Harrow to Uxbridge

A District line ride through the Middlesex countryside

Social media is quite an unfair place. We’ve all done posts upon which we poured our energy into crafting an important post. Then your friendly local algorithm fails to pick up on that post nearly completely and spreads your message about raising money for cancer - a cause dear to your heart and important to the world - to the notice of five people or so. Meanwhile a particularly funny video of a dog on a surfboard - utter mental floss - goes to hundreds of thousands.

In that vain, I wish to post a video today. It’s not my video and the video has spent a year being shown to only 822 people at time of writing. I was one of those, so it’s only 821 really.

A YouTuber called Anthony Guter recreated the 1912 world between South Harrow station and Uxbridge station on the then newly-opened Metropolitan railway branch. He mapped every hill, dale and river over six miles either side of the track. He located every farm, every house, every sewage works and every gas works. He found the boundaries of every meadow we pass and where all the trees were in each of them. He found the location of every signal beside the track. And more.

Booking hut as seen from a 1912 train at Eastcote halt (Anthony Guter/Transport Fever 2)

We are taken back to a world over a century ago and, to make it exciting for underground train nerds and history buffs like you and me, he then runs a District Railway train - and yes it would then have been a District service - through the former fields of Harrow, Eastcote, Ruislip and Uxbridge. And, like a fantastic tour guide, who has travelled forward over a century in time to show us 1912 Middlesex, highlights of the things we pass are pointed out

It is quite an amazing recreation of a rural world beside the London Underground and, in making all this countryside accessible to commuters, destroyed by the London Underground.

NOTES

1. The means to create such a thing is a game called Transport Fever 2. I’m not a gamer myself but I’m waiting for Transport Fever 3 to appear. I am desperate to recreate the Golders Green of 1904 but want to wait until traffic is allowed in the game to drive on the left. Call me a purist.

2. I called it the ‘Metropolitan Railway branch’. Eagle-eyed viewers will point out in the comments that South Harrow isn’t on that branch. But, by the time we’re at Rayners Lane, we are on the Met. Don’t know what am I supposed to call it otherwise.

3. Only 822 views for such a work is unbelievable. What is the world coming to? etc.