The coming of the railways had a profound effect on the development of Ealing with the Great Western Railway arriving in 1838 and the District in 1879. What we now know as the Central Line was originally built as a freight line for the Great Western Railway connecting Ealing with the West London Railway near Shepherds Bush, but with electrification and a connection to the Central London Railway at White City, passenger services started in 1920. It seems that the Great Western Railway considered itself to be primarily an "Inter-City" route rather than a commuter line, and their terminus at Paddington was still some way from the commercial centre of London. The opening of the Metropolitan line from Paddington to Farringdon in 1863 would have helped, but the housing boom in Ealing did not really take off until the arrival of the District. Classic "Victorian" style houses, built of brick with pitched and gabled roofs, bays and large sash windows, went up in great numbers between about 1880 and 1910. There were long terraces of relatively small houses usually with three bedrooms, larger semis perhaps with accommodation for a live-in maid, and larger detached houses seen in the grander roads of the borough. As the expansion was mostly into what was until then open country, all the houses would have had gardens, some of them quite large. There were some Maisonettes, usually providing two flats, one on the ground floor and one on the first, and these buildings had a very similar external appearance to the normal houses. Even flats such as these had their own gardens formed by dividing the plot. This is in stark contrast to the 21st century building policy which consists mostly of large blocks of flats with no outside space.