Cornhill terminus dropped and a new station proposed at the Royal Exchange. The proposals received assent as the Central London Railway Act 1892 on 1892. The money to build the CLR was obtained through a syndicate of financiers including Ernest Cassel, Henry Oppenheim, Darius Ogden Mills, and members of the Rothschild family. On 1894, the syndicate incorporated a contractor to construct the railway, the Electric Traction Company Limited (ETCL), which agreed a construction cost of £2,544,000 (approximately £ today) plus £700,000 in 4 per cent debenture stock. When the syndicate offered 285,000 CLR company shares for sale at £10 each in June 1895, only 14 per cent was bought by the British public, which was cautious of such investments following failures of similar railway schemes. Some shares were sold in Europe and the United States, but the unsold remainder was bought by members of the syndicate or by the ETCL. Construction, 1896–1900 To design the railway, the CLR employed the engineers James Henry Greathead, Sir John Fowler, and Sir Benjamin Baker. Greathead had been the engineer for the Tower Subway and the C&SLR, and had developed the tunnelling shield used to excavate those companies' tunnels under the River Thames. Fowler had been the engineer on the Metropolitan Railway, the world's first underground railway opened in 1863, and Baker had worked on New York's elevated railways and on the Forth Railway Bridge with Fowler. Greathead died shortly after work began and was replaced by Basil Mott, his assistant during the construction of the C&SLR. Like most legislation of its kind, the act of 1891 imposed a time limit for the compulsory purchase of land and the raising of capital. The original date specified for completion of construction was the end of 1896, but the time required to raise the finance and purchase station sites meant that construction had not begun by the start of that year. To give itself extra time, the CLR had obtained an extension of time to 1899 by the Central London Railway Act, 1894. Construction works were let by the ETCL as three sub-contracts: Shepherd's Bush to Marble Arch, Marble Arch to St Martin's Le Grand and St Martin's Le Grand to Bank. Work began with demolition of buildings at the Chancery Lane site in April 1896 and construction shafts were started at Chancery Lane, Shepherd's Bush, Stanhope Terrace and Bloomsbury in August and September 1896. Negotiations