It must be remembered that the conditions obtaining in England, widely different from those seen in the United States, were not such as to give much encouragement to the development of automatic signaling, while over and above this, the English conservative nature always looked askance at automaticity in railway apparatus. Automatic signals, worked on a track instrument plan, were put into regular work on the Liverpool Overhead Railway in 1893, but it was not till 1902 that automatic signals controlled by continuous closed track circuits were to be seen in operation on an English main line railway. Before this, however, track circuits had made some progress, though not very much; the most important instance of its application was in the Kings Cross tunnels, just outside the London terminal of the Great Northern Railway, in the early nineties. This installation, which was used under none too favorable circumstances from the point of view of successful operation, proved to the English what the track circuit could do and heralded the day when its place in the safe working of railways should be better appreciated. By this time in the United States, largely under the influence of the pioneer work of Dr. Robinson, automatic signaling had made quite considerable progress and the potentialities of the track circuit had been fairly realized. It may occur to Americans to ask why it was that progress in England was so slow and this is a question which cannot be answered by a single reason since a combination of circumstances was the cause. In the first place the older type of English signal officer was extraordinarily conservative regarding signaling practice of other countries as he had that peculiar type of contempt which generally comes from want of knowledge. Anyone who, like the writer, listened for instance to the objections brought forward by some of these men to controlled manual block, will know to what absurd lengths they could go in resisting improvements in working. Although this spirit, which has markedly diminished during the last 15 years, must have accounted to some extent for the slow development of the track circuit in England, there were yet some reasons of a more sensible kind which must be borne in mind. The English light weight four-wheeled freight car without air brakes was and still is a bother to the track circuit engineer because of the difficulty of getting a satisfactorily low shunt under all circumstances. Then again the Mansell disc wheel made it necessary to resort to bonding between the tire and the hub before a vehicle would shunt the track circuit at all and this was an expense to which the companies were loath to go, especially if they had or contemplated very few track circuits, though the use of even one circuit really necessitated the whole of these wheels being so treated. There was no great demand for automatic signaling, as the manual system was giving good results and was also cheap at that time,