As the chairman truly said, “people require to be educated
in travelling, and that could only be done by holding out inducements
that would draw the masses to the railways.” It is to be hoped that
the thirty-four other boards of directors will adopt this liberal and
enlightened policy. It will, we are convinced, prove alike beneficial
to shareholders, and to the material interests of the country.
The Board of Trade did not obtain returns of rolling stock from the
companies until the year 1860. On the 31st December of that year they
possessed 5,801 locomotive engines. By the 31st December, 1865, they
had gradually increased to 7,414. The proportions have invariably been
a little more than one engine for each two miles of railway open. On
the London and North-Western, as already stated, the proportion is
a little more than one engine a mile. The passenger carriages on the
31st December, 1860, were 15,076; but there must have been a great
demolition of them in 1861, for on the 31st of December of that year
they were only 14,609. However, they speedily recovered their numbers,
for at the end of 1862 there were 15,366, and on the 31st December,
1865, 17,997, just a shade over a carriage and a third for each mile
of railway open. “Other vehicles attached to passenger trains,”—these
comprise break and luggage vans, travelling post offices and post
office tenders, horse boxes, and carriage trucks. Their number at the
end of 1861 was 5,737; on the 31st December, 1865, 6,853, a little
less than one for every two miles. The use of carriage trucks has
greatly diminished upon railways, but the use of horse boxes has not
diminished, partly because in recent years all over England, wherever
there is hunting, a “horse and his rider” can go to the field, each
with his return ticket, thirty, forty, and even fifty miles, making
an early start in the morning, and returning in the evening in time,
at all events, for the rider’s dinner. The other “partly” is, that
horse boxes have for some years been employed in a traffic for which
they were not originally intended; for the Time books of many of the
railways contain notices that they are available for the conveyance of
the remains of persons to their last homes and resting places; and they
are frequently used for this purpose.
Waggons, which comprise vehicles for the conveyance of every
description of goods and minerals, timber waggons, cattle waggons,
gunpowder waggons, bullion waggons, salt waggons, milk waggons, covered
waggons, high-sided waggons, low-sided waggons, in short the _genus_
waggon of every possible shape and conformity, were 188,623 on the 31st
December, 1860, and on the 31st of December, 1865, they had increased
to 226,407, or nearly 16¾ for each mile of railway.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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