Читать книгу Rides on Railways - Samuel Sidney - Страница 5

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According to Mr. Punch, one of the greatest authorities of the day on all such subjects, the nearest way to Euston Station is to take a cab; but those who are not in a hurry may take advantage of the omnibuses that start from Gracechurch Street and Charing Cross, traversing the principal thoroughfares and calling at the George and Blue Boar, Holborn, the Green Man and Still, Oxford Street, and the Booking Offices in Regent Circus.

Euston, including its dependency, Camden Station, is the greatest railway port in England, or indeed in the world. It is the principal gate through which flows and reflows the traffic of a line which has cost more than twenty-two millions sterling; which annually earns more than two millions and a-half for the conveyance of passengers, and merchandise, and live stock; and which directly employs more than ten thousand servants, beside the tens of thousands to whom, in mills or mines, in ironworks, in steam-boats and coasters, it gives indirect employment. What London is to the world, Euston is to Great Britain: there is no part of the country to which railway communication has extended, with the exception of the Dover and Southampton lines, which may not be reached by railway conveyance from Euston station.

The Buckinghamshire lines from Bletchley open the way through Oxford to all the Western counties, only interrupted by the break of gauge. The Northampton and Peterborough, from Blisworth, proceeds to the Eastern coast of Norfolk and Lincoln. At Rugby commences one of several roads to the North, either by Leicester, Nottingham, and Lincoln, or by Derby and Sheffield; and at Rugby, too, we may either proceed to Stafford by the direct route of the Trent Valley, a line which is rendered classical by the memory of Sir Robert Peel, who turned its first sod with a silver spade and honoured its opening by a celebrated speech; or we may select the old original line through Coventry, Birmingham, and Wolverhampton, passing through a network of little railways leading to Warwick and Leamington, the result of unprofitable competition. A continuation of the Trent Valley line intersects the Pottery district, where the cheapest Delft and the most exquisite specimens of China ware are produced with equal success; and thus we reach Liverpool and Manchester by the straightest possible line.

At Stafford we can turn off to Shrewsbury and Chester, or again following the original route arrive at Crewe, the great workshop and railway town of the London and North Western. Crewe affords an ample choice of routes—1st, to Leeds by Stockport (with a branch to Macclesfield) and Huddersfield, or from Leeds to York, or to Harrogate, and so on by the East Coast line through Durham, Newcastle, and Berwick, to Edinburgh; 2dly, direct to Manchester; 3rdly, to Warrington, Newton, Wigan, and the North, through the salt mining country; and, 4thly, to Chester. At Chester we may either push on to Ireland by way of the Holyhead Railway, crossing the famous Britannia Tubular Bridge, or to Birkenhead, the future rival of Liverpool.

At Liverpool steamers for America warranted to reach New York in ten days are at our command; or, leaving commerce, cotton, and wool, we may ride through Proud Preston and Lancaster to Kendal and Windermere and the Lake district; or, pressing forward through “Merry Carlisle,” reach Gretna at a pace that defies the competition of fathers and guardians, and enter Scotland on the direct road to Glasgow, and, if necessary, ride on to Aberdeen and Perth.

A short line from Camden Station opens a communication with the East and West India Docks and the coast of Essex, and another, three miles and a half in length, from Willesden Station, will shortly form a connexion with the South Western, and thereby with all the South and Western lines from Dover to Southampton.

The railway system, of which the lines above enumerated form so large a part, is barely twenty-five years old: in that space of time we have not only supplied the home market but taught Europe and America to follow our example; even Egypt and India will soon have their railways, and we now look with no more surprise on the passage of a locomotive with a few hundred passengers or tons of goods than on a wheelbarrow or Patent Hansom Cab. Grouse from Aberdeen, fat cattle from Norfolk, piece goods from Manchester, hardwares from Sheffield, race horses from Newmarket, coals from Leicestershire, and schoolboys from Yorkshire, are despatched and received, for the distance of a few hundred miles, with the most perfect regularity, as a matter of course. We take a ticket to dine with a friend in Chester or Liverpool, or to meet the hounds near Bletchley or Rugby, as calmly as we engage a cab to go a mile; we consider twenty miles an hour disgustingly slow, and grumble awfully at a delay of five minutes in a journey of a hundred miles. Millions have been spent in order to save an hour and a half between London and Liverpool; yet there are plenty of men not much past thirty who remember when all respectable plain practical common sense men looked upon the project for a railway between London and Birmingham as something very wild if not very wicked; and who remember too, that in winter the journey from London to Liverpool often occupied them twenty-two hours, costing £4 inside and £2 out, besides having to walk up the steepest hills in Derbyshire—the same journey which is now completed in six hours at a cost of £2 5s., and in twelve hours for 16s. 9d., by the Parliamentary train in an enclosed carriage.

It may be perhaps a useful wholesome lesson to those who are in the habit of accepting as their just due—without thought, without thankfulness—the last best results of the industry and ingenuity of centuries, if, before entering the massive portals of Euston Station, we dig up a few passages of the early history of railways from dusty Blue Books and forgotten pamphlets.

In 1826, the project of a railway from Liverpool to Manchester came before a Committee of the House of Commons, and, after a long investigation, the principle was approved, but the bill thrown out in consequence of defects in the survey. The promoters rested their case entirely on a goods’ traffic, to be conveyed at the rate of six or seven miles an hour. The engineer was George Stephenson, the father of the railway system, a man of genius, who, although he clearly foresaw the ultimate results of his project, had neither temper nor tact enough to conciliate the ignorant obstinacy of his opponents; in fact, he was a very bad witness and a very great man. It is curious, in reading the evidence, to observe the little confidence the counsel for the bill had in their engineer, and the contempt with which the counsel for the opposition treated him. The promoters of the railway expected few passengers, hoped to lower the rates of the canals, and had not made up their minds whether to employ locomotives or horses; George Stephenson looked forward confidently at that same period to conveying the greater portion of the goods and passenger traffic by a complete railway system; but he either would not or could not explain the grounds of his confidence, and therefore we find Mr. Harrison, the most eminent Parliamentary counsel of that day, speaking in the following insolent strain of a man whose genius he and his friends were unable to appreciate:—

“Every part of this scheme shows that this man (George Stephenson) has applied himself to a subject of which he has no knowledge, and to which he has no science to apply. … . When we set out with the original prospectus, we were to gallop at the rate of twelve miles an hour, with the aid of the devil in the form of a locomotive, sitting as postillion on the fore horse. But the speed of these locomotives has slackened. The learned Sergeant would like to go seven, but he will be content with six miles an hour. I will show that he cannot go six. Practically, or for any useful purposes, they may go at something more than four miles an hour. The wind will affect them: any gale of wind which would affect the traffic on the Mersey, would render it impossible to set off a locomotive engine, either by poking the fire, or keeping up the pressure of the steam until the boiler burst. A shower of rain retards a railway, and snow entirely stops it.”

In reply, Mr. Adams modestly observed, “I should like my learned friend to have pointed out any part of the publication in favour of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, which justified his statement that we professed that goods were to be carried at the rate of twelve miles an hour; we have proved that they can be carried at seven miles an hour, and it was never intended they should be conveyed at a higher rate.”

In the following year the Liverpool and Manchester Bill was carried, and in 1830 the career of the civilizing locomotive commenced, but it took many more years to convince “Practical men” that the Railway would successfully compete with the Coach and Canal.

When, in 1831, the scheme of a Railway between London and Birmingham was made public, a very clever pamphlet appeared under the title of “Beware the Bubbles,” in which we find the following comical prognostications of the results of Railways:—

“After all, what advantage does the London and Birmingham Railway hold out? Only one—celerity of motion; and, after all, the ten miles an hour is absolutely slower than the coaches, some of which go as fast as eleven or twelve miles an hour; and, with the length of time that the engine and its cumbrous train requires ere it can stop, and the other contingencies, there would be little difference in the time of a twelve miles an hour coach and a fifteen miles an hour engine, supposing twenty or thirty stoppages, to pick up little parcels, between London and Birmingham. The conveyance is not so safe as by coach.”

After enumerating a series of theoretical dangers, he proceeds. “Another consideration, which would deter invalids, ladies, and children from making use of the Railway, would be want of accommodation along the line, unless the Directors of the Railway chose to build inns at their own expense. But those inns the Directors would have, in great part, to support, because they would be out of the way of any business except that arising from the Railway, and that would be trifling. Commercial travellers would never, by any chance, go by the Railroad. The occasional traveller, who went the same route for pleasure, would go by the coach-road also, because of the cheerful company and comfortable dinner.

“Not one of the nobility, the gentry, or those who travel in their own carriages, would really like to be drawn at the tail of a train of waggons, in which some hundreds of bars of iron were jingling with a noise that would drown all the bells of the district, and in momentary apprehension of having his vehicle broken to pieces, and himself killed or crippled by the collision of those thirty-two ton masses. Even if a man had no carriage of his own, what inducement could he have to take so ungainly a conveyance. Three hours is more than the maximum difference by which the ordinary speed of coaches could be exceeded; and it is not one traveller in a thousand to whom an arrival in London and Birmingham three hours sooner would be of the slightest consequence.

“Then as to goods. The only goods that require velocity in coming to London, are ribands from Coventry. Half the luggage room of a coach, on a Saturday night, is quite adequate to the conveyance of them. The manufacturers of Coventry will never be such fools as to send their property on an errand by which it must travel further and fare worse. For heavy goods, the saving by canal would be as twelve to one, beside the perfect safety. In the canal boat there is no danger of fracture, even to the most delicate goods; whereas, if fine China goods were to be brought by the rapid waggons, the breakage would probably be twenty-five per cent.

“As to the profits of the undertaking let us be extravagantly liberal. Suppose that the Railway was to get one-third of the goods, as well as one-third of the passengers, see what they would make of it:—

One-third of the Goods … £96,540

One-third of the Passengers . 30,240

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£126,780

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Annual expenses. … . £385,000

Returns … . … . 126,780

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Annual deficiency. … £258,220

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To meet an outlay of £7,500,000.

“But the probability is that canals would reduce their rates one-half; and thus, competing wholesomely, extinguish the railway. The coach-masters would do the same thing—run for twelve months at half the present fares, and then not one man in his senses would risk his bones on the railway. The innkeepers would follow a course precisely similar, and give nice smoking dinners, foaming tankards and bottles of beeswing at so cheap a rate, and meet their customers with so good humoured faces, and do so many of those kind offices that legions would flock to the hospitable road. And while all this was going on, and the thousands of men which the authors of this ridiculous scheme had expected to send upon the parish were thriving, the solitary stranger who had nobody to tell him better would go swinging at the tail of the engine, bumping first on the iron plates on this side and then on the iron plates on that side; and if he escaped being scalded to death by the bursting of his engine, or having all his bones broken by collision with another, he would be fain to rest for the night within some four bare walls and gnaw a mouldy crust which he brought in his pocket, or, as an alternative of luxury, wade some ten miles through the mire, and feast upon a rasher of rusty bacon and a tankard of the smallest ale at the nearest hedge alehouse.”

All this now sounds inexpressibly droll, and yet this prophet of evil was not entirely wrong; nay, in some important particulars he was more right than the railway promoters, whom he so heartily detested. The railway did cost nearly seven millions instead of four millions as calculated by the projectors, and the cost of working before the amalgamation with the Grand Junction did amount to £380,000 per annum: two figure facts which would have effectually crushed speculation could they have been proved in 1831; but then the per contra of traffic was equally astounding in its overflow, instead of one-third of the existing traffic, or £126,780 a-year allowed by the pamphleteer, the London and Birmingham earned a gross revenue of nearly £900,000, while still leaving a traffic in heavy goods on the canals sufficient to pay from £6 to £30 per cent. to the proprietors, in spite of a reduction of rates of upwards of £50 per cent. Indeed this traffic actually increased on the Grand Junction Canal, since the opening of the Birmingham Railway, from £750,000 in 1836, to £1,160,000 in 1847.

Perhaps on no point would the expectation of the most sanguine among the early projectors of railways been more satisfactorily exceeded than in regard to safety. Swiftness, and cheapness, and power, acute intelligent engineers foresaw; but that millions of passengers should be whirled along at a speed varying from twenty to fifty miles an hour with more safety than they could have secured by walking a-foot, would have seemed an anticipation of the very wildest character. Yet such is the case. In 1850, upwards of seventy millions of souls were conveyed by railway; when eleven passengers were killed and fifty-four injured, or less than one to each million of passengers conveyed.

Even at the risk of seeming trite, prosy, and common-place, it is right to remind the young generation who consider the purchase of a railway ticket gives them a right to grumble at a thousand imaginary defects and deficiencies in railway management, how great are the advantages in swiftness, economy, and safety, which they enjoy through the genius, enterprise, and stubborn perseverance of George Stephenson and his friends and pupils in 1825.