Railway Adventures and Anecdotes: Extending over More Than Fifty Years
History
Railway Adventures and Anecdotes: Extending over More Than Fifty Years
Railroads
might seriously injure my credit with those highly respectable, but
certainly worldly minded tradesmen.” Mr. B— was not slow in recognizing
the full force of the argument, more particularly as the question of his
own liberality was involved, nor did he hesitate to give it a practical
application by immediately increasing the salary of his clerk; not only
to the amount of a first-class season ticket, but something over.
—_The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book_.
REMARKABLE WILL.
Some years ago an old gentleman of very eccentric habits, Mr. John
Younghusband, of Abbey Holme, Cumberland, died, and his will has proved
to be of the most eccentric character. The Silloth Railway runs through
part of his property, an arrangement to which he was most passionately
averse; and though years have elapsed since then, his bitterness was in
no way assuaged. In his will he leaves near £1000 to a solicitor who
opposed the making of the railway; the rest of his money he bequeaths to
a comparative stranger upon these conditions—that the legatee never
speaks to one of the directors of the railway, that he never travels upon
it, that he never sends cattle or other traffic by it; and should he
violate any of these conditions, the estate reverts to the ordinary
succession. To Mr. John Irving and the other directors of the Silloth
line Mr. Younghusband has sarcastically bequeathed a _farthing_.
IMMENSE FRAUD ON THE GREAT-NORTHERN RAILWAY.
In the _Annual Register_ for 1856, November 14th, we read, “Another fraud
connected with the transfer of shares and stock, but on a far grander
scale, and by a much more pretentious criminal, has been discovered.
“Of late some strange discrepancies had been observed in the accounts of
the Great-Northern Railway Company, and in particular that the amount
paid for dividends considerably exceeded the rateable proportion to the
capital stock. An investigation was directed. The registrar of shares,
Mr. Leopold Redpath, expressed a decided opinion that the investigation
into his department would be useless, and, on its being pressed,
absconded. The investigation developed a long-continued system of frauds
of vast amount, to the amount, it was said, of nearly £250,000.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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