Sir Edward Watkin, says the Paris correspondent of the Standard,
has, on behalf of the Metropolitan Railway Company, offered the manager of the Water-Railway a piece of ground near London on which to lay down a line two miles in length. We shall, therefore, soon have an opportunity to try what, if the accounts are true, must be the very poetry of motion. The carriages run on skates or slides, but between the slide and the rail is forced a film of water which prevents all jolting, bumping, and shaking, and, in fact, makes the carriages skim along as a boat does on the sea. Then, too, the pace is a hundred miles an hour. If the new railway is really practicable for long distances, all England will be a suburb of London, and Surrey will be saved from becoming a chess-board, covered with what the auctioneers call "villa residences standing in their own three acres and a half of park-like grounds." A hundred miles an hour would make Bath as accessible as Brighton is now, while Manchester could be reached in an hour and fifty minutes.
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