The Tube is the closest thing to London life, with its yellowing platform paving that gleamed over a hundred years ago, and has seen the world's oldest tube develop over the years, accompanying people in their hurry and in their various outfits as they come and go.

The London Underground was the first tube in the world to be built, carrying millions of people around London every day, and the wooden steam locomotive fitted with a gas lamp started running on the six kilometers of railway between Paddington and Farringdon in London in January 1863.

It was a great success in less than three years. Today, the line is part of the Greater London underground network and much of the sturdy infrastructure from the Victorian era are still in place.

The current London rail network is over 400 kilometers long, making it the third longest underground system in the world and the first in Europe, and it carries record numbers of passengers - 1.4 billion a year - more than the entire national rail network combined.

A Steam Locomotive Underground

The proposal for the world's first underground was made against a backdrop of explosive population growth and growing traffic congestion in London, which in the 19th century became one of the world's largest and most prosperous cities as a world port and commercial center.

In 1801, London had just under one million permanent residents, a figure that grew to over 2.5 million just 50 years later. Then, in 1851, the first World's Expo was held in London, and with thousands of visitors flocking to London from all over the world.

The city's roads were brought to a near standstill by numerous horse-drawn carriages, street vendors, cattle, and daily commuters, and a solution to London's traffic congestion was imminent.

The first person to think of moving the railway underground was Charles Pearson, a social campaigner, and lawyer from the City of London, who kept lobbying the authorities for an underground railway.

But his opponents considered the idea impractical as the level of construction at the time was nowhere near the capacity to go through the entire city center.

This is where the "cut-and-cover" technique was developed, a technique whereby huge trenches were dug, capped with bricks, and the trenches were then backfilled.

As this method would have destroyed the surface and the buildings above, most of the underground lines were built underneath the existing road surface, thus reducing the impact on the overall operation of the city.

London's first underground line which opened in 1863, caught the world's attention. Excavation and installation of tracks under the city were considered unthinkable at the time.

Most people thought that the project, which cost over a billion dollars, would never work, but it did.

On 10 January 1863, 38,000 people took a test ride underground in London on the world's first four-mile underground railway, which ran from Paddington to Farringdon and carried passengers in wooden carriages pulled by steam locomotives.

After three years of construction, the Metropolitan Railway went into operation, with 900,000 passengers traveling on the London Underground in its first year alone.