COLONEL YOLLAND ON LONDON RAILWAYS.
COLONEL YOLLAND'S Report on the coming railway inva- sion of London has been presented to Parliament, and reveals a most unsatisfactory state of affairs. The principal impression it leaves is, that the existing Administration is wholly incompetent to enforce unity of system or comprehensiveness of design, and that unless roughly checked by Parliament, it will allow London to be tunnelled, and bridged, and carved, without attention to anything except the interests of the railways, and certain facilities for loco- motion. No less than seventeen years ago a Royal Commission discerned the coming danger, and recommended that, "under no circumstances should the thoroughfares of the metropolis be sur- rendered to separate schemes, brought forward at different times, and without reference to each other." Yet the surrender would, unless checked by the coarse device of the Peers for rejecting every bill, have been already accomplished. Since that time dozens of ex- tensions have been authorized, and the Victoria Station and Metro- politan Railway constructed in direct defiance of the Commission's leading idea. So little has the notion of uniformity penetrated the official or engineer mind, that stations have been sanctioned, such as the Metropolitan and London City Branch, not 330 yards apart, but on levels differing by thirty-eightfeet, thus rendering intercommuni- cation rather more hopeless than if they had never been built. The Great Eastern, at this moment, proposes to erect a station inFinsbury circus, with "rails eighteen feet above the surface, within 220 yards of the Metropolitan Terminus, nineteen feet below it." The en- gineers, indeed, seem to fancy that London was built for them to spoil. The London, Chatham, and Dover Board propose, with an impudent disregard of every human being but themselves, to cross Ludgate hill by a bridge only eighteen feet from the ground, stop- ping up no man knows how many streets the while ; and, as Colonel Yolland kindly explains, this bridge must be screened, lest horses should be frightened by the trains. Why not run through St. Paul's at once, and establish the principle once for all, that the rights of railway jobbers are superior to any considerations of con- venience, or taste, or beauty, or common sense ? The bridges, says the Government engineer, need not be quite so ugly as they are, but what is to prevent it, if the department will not take such a point as the view of St. Paul's into consideration. People capable of that degree of contempt for beauty must be quite capable of covering London with squinting bridges, and then (-Idling them an improvement to the aspect of the metropolis.
We do not like Colonel Yollands sub-tone of despair. The railways, he says, must come, and nobody doubts the accuracy of his opinion. The half-dozen Peers who own half London are using their enormous power just now very beneficially, to compel Government to consider whether London is to be ruined by mere administrative imbecillity ; but they do not, we imagine, intend to keep the railways out altogether. If they do, they will be defeated ; but they know their own interests a great deal too well, and are too deeply concerned in rents and the price of leases, to engage in any contest so hopeless or so protracted. London is choked with traffic, and the patient must be relieved. We should like to see an estimate of the mere cost in money per annum inflicted [on trade by the permanent " lock " in the principal streets of the City. We believe it would be found to be the heaviest local charge exacted in any city in the world, and the only alternative for railways, the absolute prohi- bition of heavy traffic between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m., would be almost as expensive, and twice as annoying. The railways, too, suffer heavily from the additional charge thrown upon their passengers. Shoreditch, for example, is about as accessible to the West End as if it were in another county, and it actually takes less time to go from London to Brighton than from Regents Park to the Brighton station. The railways must converge to their true centre ; but that is no reason why they should not converge upon some well- defined and convenient plan. Suppose, for example, a circular railway carried right round the metropolis, within as close a circuit as convenience would permit, and four lines from that railway made to converge, like the spokes of a wheel, to a central station in Farringdon street. Such a scheme would enable every railway in England, as it approached London, to debouche on the tire of the wheel, and thence :discharge its passengers into the very heart of the town. There is no reason for making either tire or spoke lines of two rails. Put six or sixty upon them, if necessary, rather than cut up London with poverty-stricken cross lines, built upon no plan, and in defiance of all the ends for which civilized men beautify their great cities. That plan may be too expensive, or too injurious to certain railways, or for other reasons impracticable; but why should not some such idea be fairly considered before the opportunity is lost ? Once the approaches were settled the internal communications could be carried out underground by a system as vast and as ramified as that of the sewers. The difficulty, then,, would be the gradients ; but gradients are bad, or bearable in pro- portion to speed, and high speeds within London are not imperative. Twice the pace of a cabhorse, i.e., twelve miles an hour, would be- amply sufficient, and engineers who have crossed the Summering at that pace can scarcely be daunted for ever by a steep incline.
But, remarks an engineer familiar with the railway world, how is all that, or any plan conceivable, to be secured by the present system? Parliament will not give up its power, and till it does. each line will marshal its own Parliamentary friends, conciliate its Parliamentary enemies, and do the best it can for itself. To organize a new system is to fight the whole Railway interests of Great Britain, and though the Peers dare defy' them, the Commons will not. There is force in that objection ; but if the Cabinet had not resigned the idea of governing, we might have an arrangement strictly ad hoc, and driven through the Houses by the same power- as infinitely less important bills. Suppose Colonel Yolland were ordered to prepare a plan, and that plan, accepted by the House of Commons as a Government measure, were added as a schedule to a broad Act for Metropolitan Railways, so rendering deviation. impossible. That would not take more time or demand more power than any other administrative measure—than the Divorce- Bill, for instance, or than the plan for not registering marriages in Ireland,—while it would save the Committees weeks of useless. labour, the witnesses a few thousand perjuries, the companies a few hundreds of thousands spent in preliminary expenses, and London from being turned into some such place as Camden Town now is, a cross between a railway station and a gigantic coal- hole. It is not this or that plan u hich alarms people, impudent as most of the companies are ; but the total absence of any plan, of all administrative force, of any defined idea as to what the Legis- lature wants, or how it intends to secure it. The question is the business of the Administration, and, like all other business at present, except taxation and talking about Poland, is totally neglected.
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