A CENTRE-RAIL ENGINE AND TRAIN ASCENDING A STEEP GRADIENT AND GOING ROUND A SHARP CURVE 334 PATENT CENTRE-RAIL ENGINE—FRONT ELEVATION 337 MAP OF THE UNDERGROUND METROPOLITAN RAILWAY, LONDON 387 SECTION OF THE METROPOLITAN LINE 388 SECTION OF MR. REMMINGTON’S PROPOSED TUNNEL BETWEEN FRANCE AND ENGLAND 399 THE GREAT TUNNEL OF THE ALPS 401 SECTION OF THE MONT CENIS RAILWAY 401 RAMBLES ON RAILWAYS. CHAPTER I. TRAVELLING TWO HUNDRED AND ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO—THE LIVERPOOL AND MANCHESTER RAILWAY—THE FIRST LOCOMOTIVE, “ROCKET”—THE GRAND JUNCTION, LONDON AND BIRMINGHAM, AND BIRMINGHAM AND MANCHESTER RAILWAYS—THE MIDLAND RAILWAY—EARLY GRADIENTS, INCREASE IN THEIR STEEPNESS AND IN THE POWER OF THE LOCOMOTIVE—THE CARRIAGE ROAD-WAY PASSES OF THE ALPS—MOUNTAINS OF THE WORLD—THE SŒMMERING AND BRENNER RAILWAYS—THE ROUTE BETWEEN LONDON AND PARIS. WHEN, in 1672, Madame de Sevigny wrote of a journey she had just made from Paris to Marseilles, she was able to inform her correspondent that she had completed it, with great satisfaction to herself, in a month. She travelled over 530 miles of ground; she was therefore able to get over some seventeen to eighteen miles a day. The courier that brought Madame de Sevigny’s letter from Marseilles to Paris travelled twice as fast as she had done. He was only a fortnight on the road. In that year the course of post between London and Edinburgh—130 miles less distance than between Paris and Marseilles—was two months: one month going with a letter, and one month coming back with the answer. Ninety years afterwards the one stage-coach between London and Edinburgh started once a month from each city. But in nine-tenths of a century, speed had been accelerated. It only took a fortnight on the road in each direction. Seventy-five years afterwards—that is, in 1837—the year before any portion of railway between the two capitals was opened for traffic, the mail-coach completed its 400 miles in forty-two hours, or one day eighteen hours. Now-a-days, our limited mail (one of the few “limited” associations of very modern date that has not come to grief) is 7½ hours less time over the road than eighteen hours; and by the time the one day in addition has expired, a course of post from Edinburgh to London, and back again from London to Edinburgh, will have been nearly completed.