Two stations turn one hundred next month. The returns tell you everything wrong with how we build infrastructure today.
Transport for London is planning celebrations for Watford and Croxley stations on November 2, 2025. The Metropolitan Line extension opened exactly a century ago. Tours, exhibitions, a postcard design competition.
I looked at what a century of operation actually produces.
The Compounding Effect
When the Metropolitan Railway pushed northwest in 1925, it catalyzed population growth. Harrow Weald went from 5,000 residents to 11,000. Pinner jumped from 3,000 to 23,000 in three decades.
Reliable transportation reduces friction. People move where they can move easily. Communities form around access points. Economic activity follows.
A century later, the Metropolitan Line carried 94 million passenger journeys in 2019 alone across its 34 stations. One decision in 1925, still paying out.
The Long Game
Public transportation investment yields a 4 to 1 economic return, generating 50,731 jobs per billion dollars invested.
Those returns compound over decades, not quarters.
Parliamentary approval came in 1912. World War I delayed construction until 1922. The project took thirteen years from approval to opening, cost £300,000 (tens of millions in today’s money), and faced engineering challenges crossing the River Gade and Grand Junction Canal.
Thirteen years looked like forever then. A century later, it looks like nothing.
Infrastructure planning rarely thinks in century-long timescales. We optimize for election cycles, budget periods, quarterly reports. We’re measuring the wrong timeline.
What Holds
The 1925 stations opened with both electric and steam trains. The technology changed. The infrastructure stayed.
Investment that serves genuine mobility needs generates returns that extend far beyond initial projections.
The centenary celebrations will showcase historical elements, original architecture, period design. Valuable cultural preservation.
But the real story is economic. A century of service. Millions of journeys. Communities built around access. Economic development that traces back to a decision made before anyone alive was born.
We build for quarters. These stations have been compounding for a century.
The returns are still growing.