In return for these really valuable services, Pickford’s, and Chaplin and his coaching ally, Horne, who had been equally complaisant, acquired shares in the town and country carrying agencies for what in 1845 became an amalgamation of railway interests under the style and title of the “London and North-Western Railway.” Unused as these new railway people were to the business of handling goods, they were glad enough that Mr. Baxendale should organise that class of traffic for them, and, as we have already said, really welcomed the aid thus somewhat unexpectedly forthcoming, although outwardly adopting a self-sufficient and omnipotent attitude. He became organising goods-manager, and contributed the services of his staff to the work, but resigned when everything had been duly set going to devote himself to his own business. He it was who drew up the documents still used in the goods departments of railways to this day, in all essentials unaltered. [Illustration: PICKFORD AND CO.’S ROYAL FLY-VAN, ABOUT 1820. _From a contemporary painting._ ] Meanwhile his anticipations were justified by the course of events, Railways did but alter the methods of the carrying trade. They not only did not destroy it, but, in the altered shape it took, increased it fifty-fold. No fewer than twenty-one district managers became necessary to the conduct of the business, which at length gave employment to between three and four thousand people. The central figure of this successful reorganisation became, like William Chaplin, a power in the railway world. He was for some years Chairman of the South-Eastern Railway, and in that capacity strongly urged the purchase of Folkestone Harbour, an undertaking then in the market. His co-directors did not at the time agree with the proposal, but eventually came round to his way of thinking, and brought up the subject again. Meanwhile he had privately purchased the harbour. The high sense of duty that characterised him led to his considering that, as Chairman of the Railway Company, and as therefore trustee of the interests of the projectors, he could not retain the property, and he accordingly transferred it at the price he had given. He was at the same time a director of the Great Northern Railway of France, but was in 1848, in consequence of a severe illness, obliged to resign some of these activities, together with the detailed management of Pickford’s, which he then left in the hands of his three sons, but never gave up control of the business. He had in the meantime purchased an estate at Woodside Park, Whetstone, where he resided. He died there, March 24th, 1872, in his eighty-seventh year. The portrait of him, as he was in the full vigour of his manhood, hangs amid the old-time relics still cherished in the Gresham Street offices--among the muskets and the blunderbusses carried by the guards of his fly-vans in the old days of the road. CHAPTER VI ROBBERY AND ADVENTURE