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The Central London Railway was a railway company established in 1889 to construct a deep-level underground "tube" railway in London. Funding for construction was obtained in 1895 through a syndicate of financiers and construction work took place from 1896 to 1900. When opened in 1900, the railway served 13 stations and ran completely underground in a pair of tunnels between its western terminus at Shepherd's Bush and its eastern terminus at the Bank of England. After a rejected proposal to turn the line into a loop, it was extended at the western end to Wood Lane in 1908 and at the eastern end to Liverpool Street station in 1912. In 1920, it was extended along a Great Western Railway line to Ealing. After initially making good returns for investors, the railway suffered a decline in passenger numbers due to increased competition from other underground railway lines and new motorised buses. In 1913, it was taken over by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, operator of the majority of London's underground railways. In 1933 the two companies were taken into public ownership and, today, the railway's tunnels and stations form the central section of the London Underground's Central line. (more...)

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July 30: Independence Day in Vanuatu (1980)

• 762 – The caliph al-Mansur founded Baghdad along the River Tigris as the new capital of the Abbasid Caliphate.
• 1419 – Hussite Wars: Jan Žižka and others threw several town councillors out of the window at the First Defenestrations of Prague.
• 1619 – The first representative assembly in the Americas, Virginia's House of Burgesses, convened for the first time.
• 1825 – Malden Island (pictured), now one of Kiribati's Line Islands, was discovered.
• 1864 – American Civil War: Union forces failed to break Confederate lines by exploding a large mine under their trenches at the Battle of the Crater in Petersburg, Virginia.
• 1975 – American labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa mysteriously disappeared after last being seen outside a restaurant near Detroit.
• 2006 – Lebanon War: The Israeli Air Force attacked a three-story building near the South Lebanese village of Qana, killing at least 28 civilians, including 16 children.

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