service worked from Liverpool to ; carriages were taken to Rock Ferry, and there attached to a GWR Paddington express train; the carriages were slipped at Reading before being taken on to Folkestone attached to another train. Connecting ferries and trains allowed Paris to be reached in under 15 hours. Electrification The traffic peaked in 1890, when ten million passengers were carried, and then declined. Two years previously the company had been declared bankrupt and receivers appointed, because it was unable to pay the charges on its debt. Steam locomotives running at five-minute headways left a dirty atmosphere in the tunnel that the mechanical ventilation was unable to remove, so many passengers preferred the ferries. Some other urban railways had been constructed for electric traction: in 1890 the City and South London underground tube had opened with electric traction, followed in 1893 by the more local Liverpool Overhead Railway. Plans for electrification of the Mersey Railway in 1895 were shelved because the company and its investors were fighting in the courts. In 1897 a new board of directors was elected, and in 1898, £500 was released for further expert advice that recommended electrification at a cost of £260,000 (equivalent to £ in ). By then, the railway had attracted the attention of George Westinghouse, an American in the UK looking for business for his UK works, the British Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Co. Ltd, that opened at Trafford Park in 1899. Westinghouse considered the railway would be profitable with electric traction and undertook to fund the project, promising to complete in eighteen months. Electrification was approved by Parliament in the Mersey Railway Act of 1900, which also terminated the bankruptcy, and in July 1901 the Westinghouse contract was signed. All electrical equipment was shipped from the US, including power system plant equipment. A power station was built at the Shore Road pumping station and was designed to accommodate the extension of electrification to the Wirral Railway, although that did not occur until 1938. The conductor rails were fed direct, without any distribution. Four-rail 600 V DC electrification was installed, with the positive outer rail set from the running rail. The new electric multiple units, initially marshalled as 2-car or 4-car sets, had British-built wooden bodies on US bogies. 24 motor cars and 33 trailer cars were provided. The driving positions controlled all the motors on the train by the means