A deeper look at the Tube’s Spiral Escalator

One of the enduring mysteries of the Underground is the Spiral Escalator at Holloway Road station – did it actually function? And if so, did it carry any passengers? How did it work? There has been no definitive proof of any of these questions, but we take a deeper dive into the lift shaft with much help from the late Mike Horne

One of the joys of covering transport in London is finding sometimes brilliant technology from over a century ago, hithertofore forgotten. A case in point. It is a well-known fact to Underground aficionados that the first escalators on the Underground were installed at Earl’s Court in 1911, and ridden by the one-legged ‘Bumper’ Harris to demonstrate their safety. But what’s less well-known is that there was an earlier, spiral escalator installed when the Piccadilly Line opened in 1906. We explore why it was built, and why it was (probably) never operated for passengers.

At Holloway Road Underground station you may have seen locked doors and grills next to the lift shaft at the base of the spiral staircase and the cross passage at the southern end of the platforms. These are the locked-up entrances which used to lead to an experimental spiral escalator that was installed in 1906. Blogger Achyut Chaudhary took photos of the bedevilled escalator’s location, which are reproduced here. And his notes formed the inspiration and basis for this article.

Jesse W. Reno – the father of the escalator – and a co-inventor designed and installed a bi-directional spiral escalator at Holloway Road. Called ‘The Reno Circular Escalator’, the ascending and descending tracks were intertwined and looked like a double helix of DNA, discovered some 50 years later.

These would have led up to where the station offices and the BT payphones are today:

This is just behind the ‘Exit’ sign at the front of the Leslie Green station building, now closed off:

Some people believe it never opened to the public, others that it opened for the first day or a week but subsequently broke down frequently, so was removed from service and promptly forgotten. Unfortunately, no documentation has been found to determine if the spiral actually entered service, or even functioned at all.

The predecessor working spiral escalator

Mike Horne, the intensely curious and detailed researcher that he was, wrote a long post on the development of inclined and spiral conveyors (without steps) and escalators (with steps). For the sake of simplicity, we shall call the Holloway Road device an escalator, as that is the term it’s most commonly known as.

The first moving walkway was constructed in 1893 for the Chicago World’s Fair. A much larger one was installed at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900 – at 2.1 miles long, it served most of the site.

Enter American Jesse Wilford Reno, who built his first moving walkway at Coney Island, New York in 1896. Designed to lift passengers onto a pier, it was inclined at 47% (25 degrees to horizontal). From this and a few other demonstrator walkways, his company then installed inclined walkways into several larger American department stores, amongst other places, as its popularity took off. Notably, the Manhattan Elevated Railroad Company ordered 100 such inclines, to equip all of its stations.

A few years later, Reno moved to London and his Reno Inclined Elevator Company installed a 54 ft long demonstrator linear incline at 25 degrees at Crystal Palace in 1900. This led to the Liverpool Overhead Railway installing a Reno moving incline at its Seaforth Sands station.

The Spiral Escalator Patent

Notwithstanding his linear incline success, Reno had concurrently started to consider designing a spiral moving walkway – perhaps inspired by the opportunity to install them in London’s many new and abuilding Tube stations. At the same time, engineer William Henry Aston had filed a spiral inclined stepless conveyor patent in 1901 (below). Joining forces, the two inventors formed Reno Electric Stairways and Conveyors Ltd.

Mike Horne stated about this patent:

“The left hand section shows the arrangement of spirals, and if the trackway is about 2 ft wide then it suggests the whole arrangement would comfortably fit into a 23ft vertical shaft. The view on right shows the plan, and indicates how the spirals changed diameter at top and bottom. Chain and treads also indicated at the bottom.” [emphasis mine]

Earl’s Court 1902

Shortly after his patent application, Aston arranged to build the first installation for the Paris in London Exhibition at Earl’s Court in 1902. It was to move passengers upwards in the spiral form past mountain scenes, ravines, gorges, and waterfalls. The main tower was 100ft high, and Mike Horne calculated that the outer escalator spiral was about 30-32ft in diameter, larger than specified in Aston’s patent.

Despite the Exhibition opening on 7 May 1902, the Times stated that the ‘spiral moving way’ opened in its 22 August edition. The paper goes on to declare:

“The invention is interesting, too, from the mechanical point of view, and seems to be capable of all kinds of application. There is some idea of putting it forward as a substitute for lifts on deep-level railways. It would certainly save time, for it would be always moving, and it can be made to travel as quickly or as slowly as may be desired.”

This drawing (currently on sale at Maggs Bros. Ltd Rare Books & Manuscripts) had accompanied an article describing the new amusement ride, published in the Daily Graphic:

“The latest attraction at the Earl’s Court exhibition is a ‘scenic spiral moving way’. The apparatus consists of a narrow moving platform which ascends in spiral fashion to a height of 100 feet. The platform is so narrow that two persons cannot pass each other; a hand rail that moves at the same rate as the platform is on one side, and a stationary rail on the other. The moving platform is enclosed in a solidly-built tower, the interior of which is decorated with scenery to represent a trip through the Pyrenees… It is one of the pleasantest side shows in the exhibition.”

This drawing does give a good sense of this short-lived but original spin on the popular panoramas of the period.

Earl’s Court operated the spiral incline amusement ride for the next four years. The key to its operation was Aston’s patent for the flexible chain drive. Buoyed by their success, Reno Electric Stairways and Conveyors Limited saw the mechanism as the future of elevating devices.

Holloway Road station freebie Spiral Escalator

Given the durability and popularity of the Earl’s Court spiral, Reno and Aston were sufficiently confident that Aston’s machine would be successful. So confident in fact, that they offered to install a double spiral escalator at their own expense in a vacant lift shaft at Holloway Road station on the Great Northern, Piccadilly & Brompton Railway, then under construction.

Reno undoubtedly was hoping for follow on orders for other Tube stations, as he had had from the Manhattan Elevated Railroad Company. Reno’s company estimated that Holloway Road passengers would take only 45 seconds to ascend or descend, with the conveyance to open with the station in late 1906. It is important to note that the first linear escalator on the Underground did not open until 1911 at, ironically, Earl’s Court station.

The escalator was designed to rotate clockwise (looking down from the mezzanine), with its single conveyor reversing inclination at top and bottom.

Unfortunately for Reno and Aston, this installation presented some engineering difficulties. This installation had to fit a 23ft diameter shaft – but the Earl’s Court machine had a 30ft diameter. The Holloway Road treads also had to adapt to the track’s changing radius as the ascending and descending runs intertwined around each other. It is quite possible that chain mechanism that worked for the 30ft radius did not effectively scale down to the 23ft radius.

Vertical transport enthusiasts will be delighted (if they haven’t already been, repeatedly) to discover that there is indeed an Elevator Museum, north of Boston Massachusetts, and online.

Mike Horne’s provided this analysis of the escalator remains:

“The tread design appears to follow the Earl’s Court design, but the tread remains clearly show wheels at their extremities, as depicted in the patent. It looks as though the weight of tread and passengers was substantially carried on these outer wheels with the chain (which had its own wheels attached) supplying all the guidance and accommodating the outward thrust a spiral design would produce. Indeed the patent doesn’t show such a complicated arrangement and one might infer that this was an area where great innovation was necessary, and perhaps not adequately forthcoming.”

Horne continues:

“This was quite an undertaking, and it was not quite completed by the time the railway opened in December 1906. It was not sufficiently ready for service and evidently created sufficient doubts in the minds of all concerned that it was eventually just abandoned. There has been endless speculation about whether it ever went into service and there are no reliable sources to indicate either way. However, we know that the Board of Trade inspection prior to the railway opening had formally ‘noticed’ the machine and had been told it wasn’t ready; the inspecting officer specifically stated that it would need to be inspected before it was brought into use but there is nothing in the file to indicate it was ever done. In addition, this was going to be quite an innovation and one cannot help thinking that if it ever had been brought into use then it would have left some kind of definite trace. I think it is very doubtful that it ever carried fare-paying passengers. Quite what went wrong has yet to be determined. “

Horne suspected that the technical challenges simply overwhelmed a company that was struggling to establish itself in the UK. This failed gambit furthermore appears to have bled Reno’s company of finances, as it was wound up a few years later.

There was no published account of why the Holloway Road station installation was abandoned, after the initial Earl’s Court machine had been such a success. Any such company documents were likely lost when the firm was closed down.

The Great Northern, Piccadilly & Brompton Railway Company wanted to use this lift shaft for other purposes around 1912, so the spiral apparatus was dismantled and removed from platform level upwards. But below that, the escalator frame and components were left at the bottom of the shaft, which was then covered and floored over. As the only access was by an anonymous opening from the Tube track to the shaft base, the remains were not discovered until 1988. Unsurprisingly, they were in a bad condition.

The remains of a section of track and tread were taken to the London Transport Museum Acton Depot in 1993 for cataloguing and restoration. The LTM researchers discovered that the Holloway Road device differed from the patented design in an important respect. Again, we turn to Mike Horne’s detailed description:

“The patent shows the bottom landing was at the lowest extremity of the machine. At Holloway Road the lower landing was at the same level as the passages to the lifts, but the conveyor walkways continued down below floor level in order to negotiate the return path and engage with the driving mechanism. It is this return and driving arrangement that survived. Being under the floor this portion would never have had the balustrading so it is impossible to know whether it was ever fitted to the upper sections.”

In 2010. LTM restored a four metre segment of the Reno Electric Stairways and Conveyors Limited and put it on display at the LTM Acton Depot, where visitors attempt to figure out how it worked. As for its original home, the Holloway Road lift shaft now houses an emergency staircase, albeit a linear, not a spiral one:

In case you are wondering, curved escalators were re-invented some 80 years later, in 1988 by Mitsubishi for the San Francisco Shopping Centre. However, these are simply curved, rather than a full spiral like the ones at Earl’s Court and Holloway Road station.

Nevertheless, the only spiral movement device likely to be used at a Metro or underground station nowadays is the solution used at a Chongqin Metro station in China:

Even then, Health & Safety would like to have a word…