Taken from the Kearney Files
Suburbs of the future
To be on the seaside and connected with the city by a 120 miles an hour mono-rail.
Mr. Elfric Wells Chalmers Kearney, a young engineer is forming a syndicate to carry out a scheme which it is hoped will bring Londoners within half an hour of the seaside and thus end to a large extent in solving the housing problem of the overgrown metropolis.
The rapid increase of this mammoth octopus of London is making serious and far seeing people look forward with apprehension.
In a manner it may be said that the suburb pure and simple is ceasing to exist so far that it is becoming a corporate part the metropolis itself so far actually living is concerned. The demarcating line grows fainter every day and to be of London requires that you live within the radius. Today there is projected a gigantic scheme which if carried to effect may prove a solution to the housing problem.
This is the brainchild of a young Australian engineer to form a settlement on the south coast and there build a town to which city breadwinners can be transported by means of a high - speed electric railway in thirty minutes. In the vicinity of a tiny village at present this ground is given over to grow cabbages it is now intended to grow humans.
Being on the sea coast it will be in fact London's suburb. Villa's are to be built by a subsidiary company and the yearly rental will include a season ticket at any time on the whole line.
The system of electric traction which the syndicate intend to present to adopt is on the mono-rail principle and the invention of the Reverend Robert Riach Thom.
Mr. Kearney explained Riach Thom's idea but the inventive engineering is mine. A working model of the railway is now at Kilmarnock. There are two rails, a convex surface rail and ac line overhead the cars run between these two by means of wheels fitted to the bottom and the roof. The upper which will be kept in position by upright supports at fifty feet intervals will supply the current which will return by means of the other line.
The estimated speed for the single journey to be done in half an hour. We have two alternative plans either to tunnel down beneath the City and South London railways at Bank and proceed underground for three miles. Or make Cannon Street our starting point and construct the entire line overground.
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