The speculation answered so well, that several private coaching companies were shortly after got up by innkeepers at Darlington and Stockton, for the purpose of running other coaches upon the railroad; and an active competition for passenger traffic sprang up. “The Experiment” being found too heavy for one horse to draw, besides being found an uncomfortable machine, was banished to the coal district. Its place was then supplied by other and better vehicles,—though they were no other than old stage-coach bodies purchased by the company, and each mounted upon an underframe with flange-wheels. These were let on hire to the coaching companies, who horsed and managed them under an arrangement as to tolls, in like manner as the “Experiment” had been worked. Now began the distinction of inside and outside passengers, equivalent to first and second class, paying different fares. The competition with each other upon the railway, and with the ordinary stagecoaches upon the road, soon brought up the speed, which was increased to ten miles an hour—the mail-coach rate of travelling in those days, and considered very fast. Mr. Clephan, a native of the district, has described some of the curious features of the competition between the rival coach companies:—“There were two separate coach companies in Stockton, and amusing collisions sometimes occurred between the drivers—who found on the rail a novel element for contention. Coaches cannot pass each other on the rail as on the road; and, as the line was single, with four sidings in the mile, when two coaches met, or two trains, or coach and train, the question arose which of the drivers must go back? This was not always settled in silence. As to trains, it came to be a sort of understanding that empty should give way to loaded waggons; and as to trains and coaches, that the passengers should have preference over coals; while coaches, when they met, must quarrel it out. At length, midway between sidings, a post was erected, and a rule was laid down that he who had passed the pillar must go on, and the ‘coming man’ go back. At the Goose Pool and Early Nook, it was common for these coaches to stop; and there, as Jonathan would say, passengers and coachmen ‘liquored.’ One coach, introduced by an innkeeper, was a compound of two mourning-coaches,—an approximation to the real railway-coach, which still adheres, with multiplying exceptions, to the stage-coach type. One Dixon, who drove the ‘Experiment’ between Darlington and Shildon, is the inventor of carriage-lighting on the rail. On a dark winter night, having compassion on his passengers, he would buy a penny candle, and place it lighted amongst them on the table of the ‘Experiment’—the first railway-coach (which, by the way, ended its days at Shildon as a railway cabin), being also the first coach on the rail (first, second, and third class jammed all into one) that indulged its customers with light in darkness.”