Railway Adventures and Anecdotes: Extending over More Than Fifty Years
History
Railway Adventures and Anecdotes: Extending over More Than Fifty Years
Railroads
The old lady frequently visits my home at H— and she is at all times a
welcome visitor at my fireside. Two of the children are attending school
at the same place.
—_Appleton’s American Railway Anecdote Book_.
A COUNTY COURT JUDGE’S FEELING AGAINST RAILWAYS.
In a County Court case at Carlisle, reported in the _Carlisle Journal_,
of October 31st, 1851, the judge (J. K. Knowles, Esq.) is represented to
have said:—“You may depend upon it, if I could do anything for you, I
would, for I detest all railways. If they get a verdict in this case it
will be the first, and I hope it will be the last.”
RAILWAY TICKETS.
A writer in that valuable miscellany _Household Words_, remarks:—“About
thirteen years ago, a Quaker was walking in a field in Northumberland,
when a thought struck him. The man who was walking was named Thomas
Edmonson. He had been, though a Friend, not a very successful man in
life. He was a man of integrity and honour, as he afterwards abundantly
proved, but he had been a bankrupt, and was maintaining himself as a
clerk at a small station on the Newcastle and Carlisle line. In the
course of his duties in this situation, he found it irksome to have to
write on every railway ticket that he delivered. He saw the clumsiness
of the method of tearing the bit of paper off the printed sheet as it was
wanted, and filling it up with pen and ink. He perceived how much time,
trouble, and error might be saved by the process being done in a
mechanical way; and it was when he set his foot down on a particular spot
on the before mentioned field that the idea struck him how all that he
wished might be done by a machine—how tickets might be printed with the
names of stations, the class of carriage, the dates of the month, and all
of them from end to end of the kingdom, on one uniform system. Most
inventors accomplish their great deeds by degrees—one thought suggesting
another from time to time; but, when Thomas Edmonson showed his family
the spot in the field where his invention occurred to him, he used to say
that it came to his mind complete, in its whole scope and all its
details. Out of it has grown the mighty institution of the Railway
Clearing House; and with it the grand organization by which the Railways
of the United Kingdom act, in regard to the convenience of individuals,
as a unity. We may see at a glance the difference to every one of us of
the present organized system—by which we can take our tickets from almost
any place to another, and get into a carriage on almost any of our great
lines, to be conveyed without further care to the opposite end of the
kingdom—and the unorganized condition of affairs from which Mr. Edmonson
rescued us, whereby we should have been compelled to shift ourselves and
our luggage from time to time, buying new tickets, waiting while they
were filled up, waiting at almost every point of the journey, and having
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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