If the railway companies were not entitled to charge terminals for the use of the stations, the insertion of such a clause in Acts of Parliament would be meaningless; the intention of the clause evidently was that the companies may not charge terminals in respect of any intermediate station or junction, and the fair inference is that they may do so at the sending or receiving station.[43] [43] Hall v. L. B. & S. C. Railway. Manisty, J., L. R., 15 Q. B. D. p. 544. The equitable mature of the claim of the railway companies to make terminal charges has been admitted on several occasions by some, if not by all, of the railway commissioners. Their refusal to consider terminal charges as legally justifiable has arisen only from the doubt which existed in their minds as to the strict construction of the words of the clauses; and that question has now been decided by the Queen’s Bench Division in “_Hall_ v. _The London Brighton and South Coast Railway Company_.” Some portions of the judgment of the Court in that case deal only with the construction of the sections of the particular Private Acts of the defendant company; but the remarks of the Judges upon the general principles which govern the railway companies, claim to make terminal charges, explain so clearly their natural equity as well as their legality, that they may not improperly be quoted:-- “This notion of the railway being a highway for the common use of the public, in the same sense that an ordinary highway is so, was the starting point of English railway legislation. It is deeply engrained in it. In the early days of railways it was acted upon at least occasionally, and in respect of goods traffic, and although it enters but slightly into modern railway practice, _no proper understanding of a good deal of our railway legislation, and pre-eminently of clauses relating to tolls or charges, can be arrived at, unless it is firmly grasped and steadily kept in view_. Those states of things were from this point of view to be expected and to be provided for by legislation. The company might be merely the owners of a highway and toll takers for the use of it by other people with their own carriages and locomotives. That state of things would be worked out by the railway company possessing the mere line of railway from end to end, and by the persons making use of it, buying or renting contiguous land whereon to keep their rolling stock, and have their offices, availing themselves of the powers of Section 76 of the Act of 1845, and getting on to the railway by means of sidings connected with the railway.