1HE CONFUSION OF THE RAILWAY.
ALTHOUGH we are fully aware that the demands of the traffic on the principal railways often exceed the means of meeting them fairly, we are convinced that much of the worst consequences might be prevented by only a little more pains to keep order. The great cause of vexation, loss, injury, and death, is confusion ; and it is a confusion which might be obviated without any increase to the permanent works, by introducing better discipline and more hands.
The bad accident at the Vauxhall station of the South-western Railway, en-Thursday last week, was manifestly owing to the sending off too many trains simultaneously, to the want of that exactness which would mitigate the risk of so hazardous a practice, and to the confusion. It was a collision in broad daylight : a Richmond train ran into a Hounslow train which was waiting at the Vauxhall station. A correspondent of the Times notes that there were " three trains appointed to leave the Waterloo termi- nus at the same hour daily, 11 a. m.--namely, to,Southampton, to Richmond, and to Hounslow." A correspondent of the Morning Chronicle condemns the general management of theline-
" Not a train leaves Waterloo at its appointed time, within even ten or fifteen minutes. There is now atiiminense traffic on the line, and the com- pany has not half a complement of servants. One person delivers tickets to the whole enormous traffic to Hampton Court; the other clerks standing by, and, with the police and porters, amazingly enjoying the spectacle of the shouting, cursing, screaming, and fainting mob, who may be daily seen— but especially on Sundays—fighting and toiling for tickets. I have myself appealed to the police to keep order, and have received a bland smile in answer. The station is too small, the porters too few, the trains too many. Not one train leaves the station at its time—not one arrives at its time. Hence the accident of Thursday, as everybody knows, and as everybody might have foreseen. There is not an inconvenience or annoyance con- ceivable on a railway which is not of daily occurrence on this line. Your luggage is thrown into a van, and heavy packages of merchandise are smashed into portmanteaus and hat-boxes. If ladies and children travel alone, they are separated. If you have a portmanteau, you are left to stow it as you can, and where you can. The carriages are dirty and covered with vile advertisements—the porters few and uncivil—the clerks few and inso- lent. The trains are unpunctual, the engines unserviceable, and the same staff and train power is doled out for trains which last year consisted of six carriages and now often consist of six-and-twenty."
This statement is too sweeping, and we must confess that we do not believe it in full—it is evidently. exaggerated. But it repre- sents the feeling with which railway management is viewed by the public ; it portrays the kind of treatment which the.public under- goes-
A " Constant Reader ", cifinplithis to the Times, on the following
day, that " no precaution has been taken by the company to prevent a recurrence of such -mischief; for this evening I was witness to the departure of three trains from the terminus within 8 minutes —namely, the 5 o'clock in. at 7 minutes past 5, the Guildford train at twelve minutes past, and another (I think Chertsey, or Hampton Court) at 14 minutes peat 4." The Ranelagh case was an explosion of disorder in another form. It is scarcely necessary to determine whether Lord Ranelagh did or did not use the words or violence ascribed to him. The Com- pany had sold:him tickets, which involved the right of admission to the platform, and the refusal of that admission was an incon- sistency in the arrangements of the Company which involved the- germ of disorder. Such inconsistency is not confined to the Greenwich Railway. A gentleman complains in the Times, that he attended to send off a passenger by the York train, on the North-western Railway, which was advertised to depad at 6.45 in the morning ; there was no train at that hour, no secretary, no stationmaster; about 8 o'clock it was announced that the 6.45 train would not start till 11 ; meanwhile, the station -was full of passengers, some of them women with children. The confusion is not limited to any one station or time. Tinder ordinary circumstances, at busy parts of the day, the rule is con- fusion. You buy your ticket ; you are ushered on to the platform ; more than one train is departing, each train having sections for Various places ; you ask some servant in green velveteen for the carriage to which you are destined, and he cannot tell you; a more peremptory demand extorts attention, a porter conveys you to one end of a long train, and then finds that he does not know his busi- ness; you are then sent to the other end, and there you learn defi- nitively that your carriage is at the end from which you have just come. We are recalling a case within our own knowledge, at the Dover station, simply as a specimen of one that may habi- tually be seen at almost any of the London stations. Many simple contrivances might be suggested to obviate this source of confu- sion.
It is a mercy on these occasions if the railway-officers are civil., We know that they sometimes are so under trying eireunistanees we know that sometimes they are eminently the reverse of civil. -without the smallest provocation of violence or imperious language. Possibly it may be difficult to deal strictly with men who are to few in number for the duties which they have to perform. But the English public is of an imitative disposition, and when once it finds that intolerable behaviour of this kind is not always tolerated, the imitative public will cease to tolerate it ; especially as Mr. Seeker has dismissed the charge against Lord Ranelagh.
That we have not raked up all the instances of the anarchy, nor the worst, the most cursory glance at the news of the week will prove. The reader, we are sure, will go along with us, and be witness that we are not overcharging the tale. Neither are we now tracing the specific causes of the several accidents ; partly be- cause we aye done so before, and in the present week the reader will see the working of the same causes to one or other or all of which we have almost invariably traced the so-called " nod- dents,"—over-traffickiug, under-manning of the lines, deficiency of apparatus, inexactness, and indiscipline. It is very impolitic in the companies, no doubt, to make the railway an objeet of terror— to treat passengers as thrifty husbandmen treat birds of .prey, when they exhibit dead bodies on the barn-door. Bid *the evil does not abate.
What, then, is to be done to check this growing confusion'? It is clear that neither Ministers nor Railway Companies intend • to reform the system at present; and although the poor public is very' patient under the inflictions which it endures, it will be -rather vexed if it be left to the present buffetings and bruisings,lhe losses of time, limb, and life, until the official mind can screw 'itself up to the point of effective interference. Can nothing be done, then, to check the mischief in the mean time? We think there might. We would borrow a suggestion from a Useful official contrivance introduced into practice within these few years. Near the en- trance of public parks and, gardens, may be, a paper posted, about the size of half a. sheet of fooscap folio: on It is a table setting forth the offences against police-Id-Ws or park- regulations committed in the ground, with the manner in which the cases were disposed of, and the punishment inflicted. This same practice might be applied still more hopefully to checking railway irregularities. Let all railway companies be bonnd to re:- port every casualty occurring on their lines 3- let such casualties he investigated by Government-officers ; and, When it is needful, let them be brought before the Police or Law Courts. Then let all ascertained cases be set forth in a general table, applicable to all railways, with the name of the authority by whom they ate in- vestigated, and the punishment, if any ; and finally, let that table, which might be corrected weekly or monthly, be posted up, not only at public places accessible to the police or parish officers, but at every railway station —the railway companies being bound, under penalty payable half to the informer, to post up those tables in a conspicuous place. Companies might feel a responsibility thus brought home to them, and might be emulous in the endea- vour to keep their own lines out of the list.
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