THE RAILWAYS OF ENGLAND.*
Mn. ACWORTH has chosen well in isolating the year 1843, and comparing it with the present time. It was a period when the ideas of the early engineers were beginning to assume definite shape, yet before the great mania of '46 had driven sober people crazy. The public at large, though grateful, were far from appreciating the revolution which steam was to make. In that year, some 1,800 miles of rail- way existed. To construct more than this, it was thought, would not pay. The authorised capital was £70,000,000, the total weekly receipts 2100,000, and the number of passengers 300,000. To-day, to give a rough comparison, "there are nearly 20,000 miles of line, the paid-up capital exceeds £800,000,000, the annual receipts are more than the whole capital of 1843, and the passengers have increased more than fortyfold." Even the existing lines were thought too numerous, and ridicule poured in from all sides at the bare notion of even one more. The Lancaster and Carlisle could, it was said, expect no passengers, "unless the crows were to contract with the railway people to be conveyed at low fares." The East Coast route excited even more ridicule. "A line of railway by the coast," said one gentleman, "seems almost ludicrous, and one cannot con- ceive for what other reason it can have been thought of, except that the passengers by the railway, if any. might have the amusement of looking at the steamers on the sea, and reciprocally the passengers by sea might see the railway-carriages." All this, one must remember, was written in sober earnest. State control was strongly advocated, though, to propitiate English ideas, the French system was recom- mended, which guaranteed dividends while not interfering with the control of the lines. Not less absurd were the benefits which some expected from railways. "Engines should employ their superfluous power," one enthusiast declared, "in impregnating the soil with carbonic acid and other gases, so that vegetation may be forced forward despite the ordinary vicissi- tudes of the weather, and corn be made to grow at railway speed."
The early struggles of the railway-engine gave birth to a host of chimerical inventions,—steam-carriages, flying-machines, and manumotive cars. One of these fanciful ideas, the aerial steam-carriage, was alluded to somewhat ironically by the Spec- later:—" With body stretching for many a yard, with tail lifted far aloft, with wings of copper like revolving shields, and with fire and smoke issuing from its head, no griffin it was the lot of St. George to encounter ever presented form so vast and terrible." Though aerial, according to Samuel Rogers it only resembled a bird in one respect—it had a bill in Parliament. Some of the recommendations for the improvement of rail- ways quoted by Mr. Acworth show, to us at least, decided if unconscious humour. Le Count proposed to increase the biting power of the wheels by the use of a galvanised magnet, though he rather despised the suggestion of making the rails hollow, and filling them with hot water for snowy weather. Nor were the humours of actual travelling less amusing. Important persons frequently, when they missed their trains, chartered specials, and started in pursuit. Such a race mast have been no less exciting to the humbler mortals in front than to the great personage behind. The result on one occasion certainly justified this conclusion. The third-class passengers were enabled, from the position of the
engine, tender foremost, to warm their hands on the smoke- stack. The open carriages of that period were a great hard- ship, irrespective of the fact that third-class passengers were conveyed only when it suited the convenience of the Railway Company to carry them. This was generally at night, along with cattle and other beasts of the field. The carriages
• The Railways of England. By W. N. Acworth. London: John Murray.
were roofless, and the sides only two or three feet high, with no railing. There was thus some reason in the objection made to a shareholder who protested against the slowness of the journey from London to Taunton (163 miles in sixteen hours), "that the passengers would not be able to stand the exposure to the weather" if the speed was increased. The simple construction of the waggons—one can hardly call them carriages—accounts partly, perhaps, for the ex- traordinary nature of the accidents, though they were due much more to criminal recklessness and ignorance. Passengers jumped after their hats, often with fatal results ; some fell off, riding on the sides of the waggons ; some riding on the tops of carriages (when they had any) collided with bridges, and naturally smashed their skulls. The un- fortunate guards were often killed in this manner, as the following report, sententious in its brevity, shows :—" Guard's head struck against bridge, attempting to remove a passenger who had improperly seated himself outside." The trains sometimes ran over persons drunk or asleep on the line. "Not a few of the accidents had an element of comedy in them," says Mr. Acworth. "A man, brought up for placing an obstruction on the line, urged in his defence that he had a right to do it, having lost his leg in an accident two years before." The comforts of travelling were, however, on the increase, else we should not hear of superior persons exciting public indigna- tion by travelling third-class, a meanness to which the Companies retaliated with "the soot-bag system,"—sweeps entered carriages in which these mean wretches were riding. and scattered the contents of bags of soot. Le Count recommended many conveniences which we now consider common luxuries. Some of Le Count's suggestions were adopted, but the spectacle of a train with a look-out man with a telescope on the engine, the two guards, "pre- ferably old seamen," in wire spectacles, facing each other, the one to see if his train was following, the other to see if the engine was still in sight, and perhaps an occasional individual throwing himself off the train in pursuit of a hat, would have amused even our fathers. The old seamen, we should say, "being used to lashings," were to be chosen on account of the luggage. One dangerous habit, that of locking doors, still remains, and needs, as Sydney Smith said, "the sacrifice of a Bishop" to explode it.
But those days are past; the great battle of the gauges is over ; the South-Eastern is no longer the" go-ahead Company" (in spite of what a recent visitor to our shores called its "in- sensate speed ") ; and "that unfortunate concern" refers, not to the Taff Vale, but to another line. Of the great Corn- Companies, the London and North-Western has ever preserved an undimmed reputation. With this Company, accordingly, the largest of any corporation, Mr. Acworth begins his tale of the great railways. It is literally a State in itself, and manu- factures, with one or two exceptions, all that it requires. A visit to that hive of industry, Crewe, impressed Mr. Acworth more than anything with the resources of the Company. The management of the goods traffic is really wonderful; it would be difficult for the ordinary reader to either understand or pro- perly appreciate the sorting of trucks by gravitation and other triumphs of mechanical ingenuity. Next in order come the Midland and Great Northern. All these three Companies derive most of their profits from goods traffic ; but that branch of the subject being disposed of with the first-named Company, we are introduced to the history and theory of expresses. The celebrated "race to Edinburgh" resulted in what was prac- tically a dead-heat, though the Great Northern can claim, as it always has done, the fastest run. On that particular journey, the whole distance to Edinburgh was run at the rate of over fifty-seven miles an hour, with, of course, much higher speeds for short distances. This, indeed, is phenomenal, and the greatest speed with which travellers are now conveyed on the two lines from Easton or King's Cross to Edinburgh is, for the whole journey, about forty-seven miles an hour, with single runs of fifty-four miles an hour. This is quite sufficient, even for the business man, whose time we all know is so valuable. The highest speed obtainable by such trains with an ordinary load, seems, from what Mr. Acworth says, to be about seventy-five miles an hour, and this, of course, is never maintained for more than two or three minutes at the most. He has himself timed such a speed on the Midland, and that too, he adds, when nervous people had forsaken the East and West Coast lines for a slower and less dangerous route. The I:treat Western, there can be little doubt, did at one period rim at speeds not inferior to those flashes of Macaulay's to mislead us. M. de Meaux's hero is reached last year, but for short distances only. The famous Henry IV., and his work has for its central interest the "great West Shore run, from East Buffalo to New York, is not so design" of that greatest of French statesmen,—a far-seeing phenomenal after all ; it was done under exceptional circum- scheme of politics which, maimed as it was by the crime of stances, and, in fact, barely reaches the express Midland speed Ravaillac, laid the basis of the new Europe on which Richelieu to Glasgow. So the palm still remains with English lines. And knew how to fashion the pre-eminence of France, and, um- now some may well ask : What is to be the end of these fortunately for her internal condition, the absolutism of her high speeds ? The question is, one would say, definitely Monarchy. Each chapter of this book might give materials answered. After showing the world what could be done, the for a separate review. We can but mark its most salient Companies have kept things much as they were before. points, and perhaps first of them is its witness to the People, indeed, travel quite quick enough, and are satisfied if dominant share civil considerations had in what we have their trains keep time. What the "race to Edinburgh " showed honoured by the name of religious struggle after truth. The was not so much the pace at which a train could go, as the Singular surrender of conscience to the Tudor claim of dog- perfection of detail shown by the signalling system, and the matic infallibility resulted probably from the exhaustion of the smoothness of the permanent way. Not, indeed, that the English people after the Wars of the Roses, and of the clergy, lesson conveyed by the exhibition of the power of steam who had never recovered the ravages of the Black Death, was less striking. To the artistic sense of many, the which reduced their colleges to skeletons, and obliged mere railway-engine may not appeal; but at least it has the boys to fill the ranks of the priesthood. The domestic cir- elements of utility and strength combined to such a degree as camstances of England drew her apart from the rest of must appeal to those who see beauty in the just proportions Europe, but she moved on the same lines until the Rebellion. of a perfected machine. Few of us can see one of Mr. .As abroad, the makeweights and restraints of the civil powers Stirling's "eight-foot driving-wheel singles" without a thrill were swept away by the new doctrines which made Princes of admiration ; nor watch the great wheel, first quickly, then arbiters of their subjects' faith. The doctrine of divine right slowly, revolve, without feeling something of the force, the became tenable, and creeds were held not because of their energy, and the enormous strength which drags with so little truth, but because they were patriotic. The Channel stood effort so heavy a load. These monarchs of metal seem, by- England in good stead by isolating her struggle. The state- the-way, to have a long life. The Cornwall,' on the London craft of the first Stuarts, the patriotism evoked by the State and North-Western, still runs its fifty miles an hour ; and the Church, the persecutions which ensued, roused in us a 'Iron Duke,' on the Great Western, doubtless runs with all political vigour which was not wasted or coerced by Con- its old dash. As Mr. Acworth says, "no passenger, unless he tinental interference. All that is familiar to us; but while should also happen to be a shareholder, will see without a recognising that by compromise rather than by dogma we pang the stately Iron Duke,' the Tartar,' and the 'Swallow' are what we are, it is interesting to see in M. de Meaux's disappear from the road which has known them for forty panorama how little creeds had to do with the contentions of years." One grief will always remain, to which there can be the day, though the rupture of theoretic unity had political no reserve, the death of the great coaching traffic. "A few results further-reaching than any dreamt of by Luther or years since," said a writer in 1842, "ninety-four coaches ran Calvin. Entirely new problems of society had to be solved, through St. Albans daily. On Saturday last, the Sleepy and it was difficult to recompose relations with Rome, and at Leeds,' which has been on the road upwards of a hundred the same time to assume an uncontrolled nationality, or to years, ceased running." We can hardly realise now what this re-create political unity in States such as France, where there
simple announcement meant to many people at that time. was grave religious dissidence. Spain and Italy, as the author
Mr. Acworth does not forget the other principal lines, faithfully points out, cut the knot by putting aside the new wor- though, indeed, they are not, from the point of view of speed ship; but Spain stifled freedom of thought within her borders, at least, so interesting to the general reader. He has a good and sterilised her faith. There was but a dream of national life word to say in praise of the Great Eastern, "the poor man's in Italy—a dream, indeed, always present with the Popes, and line," and it well deserves it. "A young man who took a cherished by them—and the Transmontane novelties were ticket for Cambridge at Liverpool Street" would not now be easily eliminated, while the reform and revival of Christian considered "rash," and we do not need Thackeray's assurance discipline, which had its centre at Rome, preserved a spiritual "that even a journey on the Eastern Counties must end." vitality to which the actual world bears witness. In Denmark With this Company the book concludes. The Railways of and Sweden, as in England, the new doctrines associated them- England is really a most readable volume. The writer has selves with patriotism, to be splendidly illustrated in Gustavus seized on the points most likely to interest his readers. He Adolphus as in Cromwell. In France, the old and new faiths gives but few details and no statistics, nothing to prevent met on more equal terms, and from the conflict she issued any one obtaining a clear grasp of the subject. He looks at Catholic but tolerant as was no other contemporary Power. railways from an outside point of view, and is yet acquainted It is M. de Meaux's main theme to show how, through with a variety of details and their practical working.' And, this happy tolerance, which, however, was not indifference, above all, he shows us how little we really have to complain the nation attained its legitimate preponderance in the of, and how immeasurably better off we are, both as to speed seventeenth century. Unlike the English tameness before and fares, than either the Continent, with its Orient express the Tudors, the French had sufficient energy of conviction to and the Italian " Treno lampo," or America, with her boasted impose their faith on their greatest King, who in his turn
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