On Saturday Lord Rosebery, at a dinner of the emplOyAs
of the Caledonian Railway, made a speech in extenuation of railway unpunctuality. Railway passengers, he said, had doubled in number in twenty years, and of course the accommodation provided twenty years ago was insufficient. It would cost millions adequately to enlarge the Metropolitan stations, and he thought the public in forgetting such cardinal facts a little unfair to directors. That the great railways, like London, have become apoplectic with prosperity is true enough, but we do not know that it is much of an excuse. They resist competition none the less, and avoid extending their terminal stations in a way which the proprietor of a big shop or a growing newspaper would consider very spiritless. We rather wish sometimes when stopped some three miles out of town that individuals could obtain a " controlling interest " in railways here, as Lord Rosebery says they do in America. A good dictatorial president with a habit of dismissing sluggards could, we fancy, compel trains to keep pretty accurate time. Is it, by the way, scientifically impossible to utilise the fact that rail. way boards own their properties "up to the sky and down to the centre of the earth"? In other words, is it impossible to run the suburban traffic under the ground and the through traffic above it ? A second story into the air is, we suppose, hopeless, though one has heard of elevated railroads, but the earth seems to have been constructed to tempt engineers into tunnelling.
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