With an exploding population, and no substantial bus or underground network to speak of, getting around London in the early 1900s was a difficult business.

As people, horses and early automobiles competed for space on the capital’s roads, the increasingly important movement of mail around the city was hampered by serious delays.

Much like Crossrail, the solution dreamt up by the Victorians was to build an underground railway from east to west, 70 feet below ground, connecting Paddington and Whitechapel, with eight stations between.

Although the first attempts at designing a “Mail Rail” were begun in the 1850s, it took until 1926 for first of London’s letters to be transported on the network.

In its own time, the London Post Office Railway was a technological feat, the very first driverless electric railway in the world, “like having a giant train set”, according to one of its engineers. But the advent of the internet made the Mail Rail redundant, and it delivered its final post in 2003.

With trains lying idle in the stations and old rotas still hanging on the walls, today the Mail Rail is an eerie relic, with engineers occasionally visiting to ensure the pumps are still keeping water out of the system.

Next year all this will change when the Mail Rail opens to visitors as part of the Postal Museum in 2017. Much of the existing line still uses the 90-year-old oak and jarrah sleepers installed when the track was first laid down, and is in real need of restoration. So while you wait for the museum to open, you may want to visit their website and “Sponsor a Sleeper”.

The Mail Rail is not the only London train line to have been abandoned as technology improved. Remarkably for a European city that would later turn its back on trams entirely, London in 1914 boasted the largest tram network in the world. London County Council regarded its trams as vehicles for social change, as their relatively cheap fares allowed London’s labouring poor to move around the city for work.

Completed in 1898, the Kingsway Tramway Subway in Holborn was built to connect major tramlines in the north and south of the city. It could easily be mistaken for a disused slipway, or the entrance to an underground car park, but the cobbled surface and rail tracks give away its original purpose as a key component of London's tramways.

Public visits to the subway are rare, but you can experience a piece of London’s tramline history at the London Transport Museum in nearby Covent Garden, where they have an accessible double decker tram as part of their collection.

"And only footsteps in a lane, and birdsong broke the silence sound and chuffs of the Great Northern train for Alexandra Palace bound". So said the poet and railway enthusiast John Betjeman, reminiscing in 1955 about a London railway line that was silenced and closed for good in 1952.

Widely credited with having saved St Pancras station from demolition, Betjeman was referring to a stretch of line between Finsbury Park and Alexandra Palace that is now part of the 5.2 mile Parkland Walk. At its very peak, a Whit Monday in the 1870s, the line carried around 60,000 people. The tracks are gone, but much of the more substantial railway infrastructure remains, including old platforms, tunnels and embankments.

Passing through Stroud Green, Crouch End, Highgate and Muswell Hill, the Parkland Walk is the best known of a few footpaths around the capital that make use of routes created by the closure of old branch lines. Elsewhere the Lyndhurst and Mill Hill Old Railway Local Nature Reserve forms part of a path left by the removal of a steam railway running west from Mill Hill East up to Edgware. The Belmont Trail is a footpath following the route taken by a single track line between Harrow and Wealdstone Station and Stanmore Village. In the south of the city, Addiscombe Railway Park in Croydon follows the path once taken by trains between East India Way and Blackhorse Lane.

It wasn’t just the overground lines that experienced closures during the 1900s. Despite a growth in passenger numbers, many Tube stations were found to be too unpopular to justify keeping them open. A focus of much of London’s folklore and legend, these ghost stations now sit in darkness, broken occasionally by the trains that continue to pass by. One of the oldest myths is that the disused British Museum Station is haunted by the daughter of the Egyptian pharaoh, Amen-ra, whose nocturnal screams can be heard from the remaining stations on the Central Line.

For anyone willing to brave the ghosts, London Transport Museum offers tours of decomissioned stations, but you will have to act quickly, tickets for these trips are high in demand. One of the sites on the museum tours is Down Street tube station, in Mayfair.

Opened as part of the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway in 1907, it ran for only 25 years, but then became the bomb-proof nerve centre for coordinating Britain’s railways during WWII and once had Winston Churchill stay overnight. You can find out more information on pricing and up-to-date Hidden London tour times here, or even sign up for the museum's enewsletters to stay in the loop.



While the bulk of this infrastructure lies underground, London has retained at least some of these sites above ground. At Hyde Park Corner, the distinctive ox tongue red tiles of the Wellesley boutique hotel are a clue to its original purpose as the above-ground section of Hyde Park Corner Station. Elsewhere, there are disused stations at Euston, York Road, Bermondsey, Camberwell, Plaistow, and a few remaining heritage features from a major goodsyard at Bishopsgate.

These sites, as well as the footpaths, have been documented extensively online by enthusiasts, so if you are planning on a railway-themed day out, take a look at the urban adventures of Derelict London, Underground-History.co.uk and Londonist.

Follow Going Out on Facebook and on Twitter @ESgoingout