SCOTTISH RAILWAY ENTERPRISE.* THE completion of the Forth Bridge, and
its formal opening the other day by the Heir-Apparent, have given to the Scottish railway system an air of distinction which neither it nor, for that matter, any other railway system in the country possessed up to that date. Mr. Acworth's volume, therefore, appears at the most opportune of moments. His book of last year on The Railways of England had prepared us to give a favourable reception to this smaller work ; and Mr. Acworth has, so to speak, a better hereditary right to speak of Scotch than of English railways, as his grandfather was among the original directors of one of the smaller provincial lines which have of recent years been absorbed by the large " systems " that promise to be a more remarkable feature of Scotland than even of its larger neighbour. Mr. Acworth's style is animated almost to a fault. He rides along like the Flying Scotchman' itself, and apparently cannot help giving an almost schoolboy whoop of delight at his own rapidity. He tells us in one page : " The lust of battle, in the language of Horace, crescit indulgens sibi."
That is true of Railway Companies as of soldiers, but is not " in the language of Horace " superfluous in this connection ? Again, Mr. Acworth says :—" The Postmaster-General with his omnipresent mail-bags, and his yet more obtrusive parcel- post hampers—I saw six huge ones landed from the Orkney steamer one evening last 'June—is a far more efficient repre- sentative of the central Government than any Secretary of State for Scotland, and is doing more to cement the Union.
than any Scottish Home-rule League can do to break it." This, too, is true ; but it is truth in the wrong place. The efforts of Scottish Home-rule Leagues and such like Associa- tions to establish—this is the least of their demands—a Scotch Parliament and Executive in Edinburgh, deserve no sympathy, but the strongest opposition, as calculated to injure the best interests of the Empire, and especially of Scotland. Still, Mr.
Acworth need not have gone oat of his way to introduce a, controversial innuendo into a noncontroversial book. No more serious faults than these, however, can be found with Mr. Acworth's style, which occasionally rises into something superior to mere animation, as in this passage descriptive of an experience on Speyside, which besides is deserving of atten- tion for other than merely literary reasons :—
" As the train ran into Aberlour Station, there was an unusual number of people and an unusual excitement on the platform, with an amount of luggage that even in August would have been considered respectable. The large square wooden boxes, with their big printed labels, Anchor Line—not wanted on voyage,' soon told their own tale. It was a party of emigrants en route for New York ; going away,' as the engine-driver phrased it with the pathos of simplicity. Not, indeed, as friendless outcasts, for the laird himself—who probably knew something as to the con- tents of those substantial boxes—had come down to see them off, and wrung their hands as he wished them God-speed ; and when, a moment afterwards, the train sped unconcernedly on its way, all along the line for several miles, at the door of every cottage, from which the blue wreath of peat-smoke curling up showed there was some one at home, friends had gathered to wave their hands and wish them once more good-bye. It was well, no doubt, that they should go. The divine discontent,' if one may borrow the expression, which forbids the peasant of to-day to accept the condition of his ancestors—a century ago, so a Government • The Railways of Scotland : their Present Position. With a Glance at their Past, antra Forecast of their Future. By W. M. Acworth, Author of "The Railways of England." With a Map of the Scottish Railway System. London : John Murray. 1890. Inspector wrote at the time, the Aberdeenshire peasants used to' save themselves from starvation by bleeding their half-starved cattle at the end of a long winter—was thrusting them out into-a_ wider world, where fate is less stern than among the rugged Grampians. And beautiful though the valley might look, when the brilliant green of birch and larch stood out from the broom and the anemones at their feet against the dark background of firs, the scene in the long dreary months of winter, when the sun never tops the hills, and the firs claim the foreground,-With no background but snow, must be quite otherwise."
It is so far well for Scotland, and perhaps for Mr. Acworth also, that he should have published his boOk on English railways before—in the literary sense—travelling North ; he is able by means of prompt comparisons to show the peculiar features of the Scotch railway system.. The first and most notable of these is what he terms universal and ubiquitous competition. This is all the fiercer because it is confined within very narrow limits. The
traffic of Scotland is practically concentrated in the belt which stretches across the centre of the country from sea to sea. " Take out Ayrshire, Renfrew, Lanark, and Midlothian from the map of Scotland," says Mr. Acworth, " and you withdraw half the population and three-quarters of the traffic. Prolong the belt north-eastwards through Stirling and Fife to Forfar
and Aberdeenshire, and what remains of Scottish traffic —it consists for the most part of fish, flesh, and fowl (or at least grouse), for the good red herring goes mostly
by sea—is hardly worth fighting for." At the present moment, the two most important towns to which access is had by the lines of a single Company are Ayr and Oban. Yet to the one the Caledonian Company, one of the two leading Scotch railway concerns, has running powers ; while its great rival, the North British, is doing its very best to secure a share of the traffic to the other. Last year Parliamentary sanction was given to a scheme regarding which Mr. Acworth scarcely exaggerates when he says that it is almost as ambitious as the Forth Bridge itself. A new West Highland line is to be con- structed from the Clyde, near the thriving summer resort of Helensburgh, northwards along Loch Lomond, across the Moor of Rannoch to Fort William. Doubtless in time it will be ex- tended to Inverness and the coast of Ross-shire. This line will be worked by the North British, and is meant to be a rival to an existing railway in the Highlands. The most ambitious of the Scotch railway proposals at present before Parliament is that for amalgamation between the North British and Glasgow and South-Western Companies. It is being fiercely opposed by the Caledonian Company, which claims to be already, to some extent, a partner with the Glasgow and South-Western. In fact, the great railway event of the present time in Scotland is the struggle for supremacy between the Caledonian and the North British. The policy of the latter Company has of late been characterised by Dantonesque audacity, if not Napoleonic aggressiveness ; and the great engineering feat of the time, with whose praises the world has been ringing for the past fortnight, is but the outcome of this policy. What the Forth Bridge really means—to reproduce Mr. Acworth's figures, which, however, he himself gives subject to official correction—is the reduction of the East Coast routes from
London to Perth and Ab erdeen respectively, from 462 and 552 miles to 441A and 523. To put the matter in another and more
comparative way, the East Coast route from London to Perth, which was 12 miles longer than the West Coast route, will in future be 81 miles shorter ; and the East Coast route from London to Aberdeen, which was 12 miles longer than the West Coast, will be 17 miles shorter. And to accomplish this seemingly small result, we have an expenditure of close upon four and a half millions sterling. Yet looking to the increase in holidays, and in the numbers of those who spend them in travelling, Mr. Acworth says :—" If the working classes who are steadily cutting down the drink-bill, only come to ex- pending half their economies in railway-fares, this alone would suffice to pay handsome dividends on a whole series of Forth Bridges."
In spite of this fierce competition, there are really only five —nominally there are six—Railway Companies in Scotland, the smallest having over three hundred miles of line. While " from the Humber to the shores of Cardigan Bay, and from Yar- mouth beach to the bed of the Mersey, England is strewn with
the wrecks of the luckless little Companies which, oblivious of the old adage as to the fate of earthen pots which swim down, the stream alongside of brazen vessels, have been shattered in I pieces in the vain attempt to compete with the overwhelming forces of their great rivals," there is, among independent Companies, not a pound's worth of railway capital in the whole of Scotland which is not in receipt of dividend. What seems to a certain extent the disadvantage of the Scotch railway system may have, indeed, been its advantage. While " the English railway system is the result of fully a generation's growth, the Scotch system, in plan if not always in actual execution, sprang full-grown from the brain of the projectors of '46." The Scottish railway system is, therefore, not quite a mighty maze, without a scientific plan. In carriage-heating, in the build of locomotives, in thoughtfulness for their customers, the Scottish Railway Companies can give many suggestions to those of England. " The lessons to Londoners " that Mr. Acworth reads from Glasgow, which is most admirably served —is, indeed, almost infested—with railways and steamboats, are painfully numerous ; and it is to be hoped some of these will be taken to heart without delay, especially in the interests of our working-class population. Scotch railways are, in a sense, a photograph of Scotch character, Scotch energy, Scotch capacity for struggling with Nature and poverty; and Mr. Acworth's self-imposed task as a photographer could hardly have been discharged with greater skill, and certainly not with greater enthusiasm.
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