What has become, we ask, of the _old_ London and Birmingham Railway (born only in 1836)--of the Grand Junction Railway--of the Manchester and Birmingham--the Liverpool and Manchester Railways--and of a score of others we could name? What has become of the civil, or rather uncivil, war which all these companies waged against each other; as well as against Messrs. Pickford, the most powerful carriers in the world? They have all lost the independence they respectively occupied, and, like the ingredients cast by Macbeth’s witches “i’ th’ charmed pot,” they have “boiled,” or, as it is now-a-days termed, amalgamated, into one great stock; and while this long continuous arterial line has been drawing from the public for goods and passenger traffic considerable receipts, it has been, and at various localities still is, draining its own life-blood by the forced construction of a number of sucking branch-lines, which, as far as we can see, are not likely ever to be remunerative. For some time railway companies deemed it their interest to compete against each other, but this ruinous system was gradually abandoned and is now reversed. The two lines from London to Peterborough, after competing for several months, now divide their profits. The two lines to Edinburgh will probably ere long do the same. But besides this transmutation of competition into combination, public notice was lately given that three of the large arterial lines, namely, the Great Western, the South-Western, and the London and North-Western, were meditating an amalgamation of their respective stocks into one vast concern. On this important project, which for the present has been abandoned, we will offer a very few observations. We believe it may be affirmed, without fear of contradiction, that the working details of a railway are invariably well executed in proportion to their magnitude:--that, for instance, in the management of the London and North-Western Railway the arrival and departure of trains are better regulated at their large stations than at their small;--that their great manufactories are better and more economically conducted than their little ones;--that the arrangements of Messrs. Pickford and of Messrs. Chaplin and Horne are better at Camden Town than at the small outlying stations;--in short, we most distinctly observed that wherever there was an enormous amount of important business to be transacted, _there_ were invariably to be found assembled superior talents, superior workmen, superior materials; and that, on the other hand, at small and secluded localities, where little work was performed, inferior men, inferior waggons, horses, &c., were employed.