 The idea of building an underground railway along the approximate route of the BS & WR had been put forward well before it came to fruition at the turn of the century. As early as 1865, a proposal was put forward for a Waterloo & Whitehall Railway, powered by pneumatic propulsion. Carriages would have been sucked or blown a distance of three-quarters of a mile (about 1 km) from Great Scotland Yard to Waterloo Station, travelling through wrought-iron tubes laid in a trench at the bottom of the Thames. The scheme was abandoned three years later after a financial panic caused its collapse. Carl Wilhelm Siemens of the eponymous German engineering company served as electrical engineer for a later abortive scheme, the Charing Cross & Waterloo Railway. It was incorporated by an Act of Parliament in 1882 and got as far as constructing a 60 feet (18 m) stretch of tunnel under the Victoria Embankment before running out of money.
