The local waterway interests maintained their supremacy and were, indeed, complete masters of the situation for over thirty years; but the days of their 200 per cent dividends were then numbered. Influenced by what the traders of Liverpool and Manchester were doing to fight the canal and river monopolists there, the Leicestershire coalowners got, in 1830, an Act of Parliament authorising them to build a railway from Swannington to Leicester. This line would give them the facilities they wanted for their coal; but it was to be a "public," and not merely a private, railway. By one of the clauses of the Act it was provided that "all persons shall have free liberty to use with horses, cattle and carriages the said railway upon payment of tolls." These tolls were arranged alike for passengers and for goods and minerals, and they varied according to whether the travellers and traders provided their own conveyances or used those of the railway company. In the former case passengers were to pay twopence halfpenny each per mile, and in the latter case threepence per mile, the tolls for goods and minerals being in like proportion. In a later Act, however, passed in 1833, it was declared that "whereas the main line hath been constructed with a view to locomotive steam engines being used, it might be very injurious to the said railway and {244}inconvenient and dangerous if horses or cattle were used," and the rights thus granted to the public under the first Act were now withdrawn. Opened in 1832, the Leicester and Swannington Railway restored to the Leicestershire colliery-owners the advantage in the Leicester market of which the canal companies had enabled their north-of-the-Trent competitors to deprive them for so many years; and it was now the turn of the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire coalmasters to consider what they should do to meet the new situation which had arisen. They first had conferences with the directors of the Loughborough, Erewash and Leicester Navigations, and sought to induce them to grant such reductions in tolls as would enable them to compete with the Leicestershire coal, now that this was no longer shut out from Leicester by the dry ditch in Charnwood Forest. But the only concessions the canal companies would make were regarded as wholly inadequate by the Nottinghamshire coalmasters, who, meeting at a little inn at Eastwood, on August 16, 1832, resolved that "there remained no other plan for their adoption" than to lay a railway from their collieries to the town of Leicester. They formed a Midland Counties Railway Company, obtained an Act, built their line, and so laid the foundations of the great system now known to us as the Midland Railway. Into that system the Leicester and Swannington was absorbed in 1846.