While such are the expedients adopted to insure safety, others equally ingenious are adopted to insure speed. In the case of express and mail trains, the frequent stopping of the engines to take in a fresh supply of water occasions a considerable loss of time on a long journey, each stoppage for this purpose occupying from ten to fifteen minutes. To avoid such stoppages larger tenders have been provided, capable of carrying as much as 2000 gallons of water each. But as a considerable time is occupied in filling these, a plan has been contrived by Mr. Ramsbottom, the locomotive engineer of the London and Northwestern Railway, by which the engines are made to _feed themselves_ while running at full speed! The plan is as follows: An open trough, about 440 feet long, is laid longitudinally between the rails. Into this trough, which is filled with water, a dip-pipe, or scoop attached to the bottom of the tender of the running train, is lowered, and, at a speed of 50 miles an hour, as much as 1070 gallons of water are scooped up in the course of a few minutes. The first of such troughs was laid down between Chester and Holyhead, to enable the Express Mail to run the distance of 84-3/4 miles in two hours and five minutes without stopping; and similar troughs have since been laid down at Bushey, near London; at Castlethorpe, near Wolverton; and at Parkside, near Liverpool. At these four troughs about 130,000 gallons of water are scooped up daily. * * * * * Wherever railways have been made, new towns have sprung up, and old towns and cities been quickened into new life. When the first English lines were projected, great were the prophecies of disaster to the inhabitants of the districts through which they were proposed to be forced. Such fears have long since been dispelled in this country. The same prejudices existed in France. When the railway from Paris to Marseilles was projected to pass through Lyons, a local prophet predicted that if the line were made the city would be ruined--"_Ville traversée, ville perdue_;" while a local priest denounced the locomotive and the electric telegraph as heralding the reign of Antichrist. But such nonsense is no longer uttered. Now it is the city without the railway that is regarded as the "city lost;" for it is in a measure shut out from the rest of the world, and left outside the pale of civilization. Perhaps the most striking of all the illustrations that could be offered of the extent to which railways facilitate the locomotion, the industry, and the subsistence of the population of large towns and cities, is afforded by the working of the railway system in connection with the capital of Great Britain.