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Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
I shall refer later to the effect on railway legislation of the power and
influence to which the waterways had attained. The consideration for
the moment is that, even allowing for a certain number of minor or
of purely speculative canals which were admittedly failures, the
waterway interests, consolidating their forces, were able, by virtue of
their position at the time in question, to organise a powerful and
widespread opposition to a rival form of transport then still in its
infancy, though obviously capable of eventually becoming a
formidable competitor.

The canal interests also made every effort to work up an opposition

on the part of representatives of the landed interests, who, however,
developed such strong hostility of their own towards the iron road
that the arguments of the canal proprietors were hardly needed to
arouse them to violent antagonism to the scheme. Popular
prejudices, too, were well exploited, and the most direful predictions
were indulged in as to what would result from the running of
locomotives, so that, for a time, the promoters even abandoned the
idea of using locomotives at all.

The combined canal and land interests scored the first victory on the
Liverpool and Manchester Bill, which was thrown out in 1825; but it
was reintroduced and passed in 1826, the opposition of the
Bridgewater trustees having, in the meantime, been overcome by a
judicious presentation to them of a thousand shares in the railway.

The promoters thus established the new principle of direct

competition between railways and waterways; but otherwise the
Liverpool and Manchester differed from the Stockton and Darlington,
at the outset, and as a line of railway, only in the fact that the
former was to be provided throughout with malleable iron rails,
whereas the latter had two-thirds malleable iron and one-third cast
iron. On the one line as on the other, the use of locomotives had not
been decided upon from the start; and, unless the Liverpool and
Manchester had not only adopted locomotives but, as was, of
course, the case, improved on those of the Stockton and Darlington,
it would have shown little real advance in actual railway operation.

The motive power to be used on the Liverpool and Manchester

remained uncertain when George Stephenson and his "navvies" were
attacking the engineering proposition of Chat Moss. It was still
uncertain in October, 1828—or two years after the passing of the Act
—when three of the directors went to Killingworth colliery, to see the
early locomotive which Stephenson had made there, and to
Darlington to see the locomotives then operating on the Stockton
and Darlington line. They decided that "horses were out of the
question"; but even then the point remained doubtful whether the
Liverpool and Manchester should be provided with locomotives or
have stationary engines at intervals of a mile or two along the line to
draw the trains from station to station by means of ropes. How the
directors sought to solve the problem by offering a premium of £500
for a locomotive which would fulfil certain conditions; how George
Stephenson won the prize with his "Rocket"; and how the "Rocket,"
with a gross load of seventeen tons, attained a speed of twenty-nine
miles an hour, with an average of fourteen—whereas counsel for the
promoters had only promised a speed of six or seven miles an hour
—are facts known to all the world.

If the Stockton and Darlington Railway had had the honour of

introducing the locomotive, it was the Rainhill trials, organised by
the Liverpool and Manchester Company, which gave the world its
first idea of the great possibilities to which alike the locomotive and
the railway might attain. In this respect the Liverpool and
Manchester line carried railway development far beyond the point
already attained by the Stockton and Darlington, although no
fundamentally new principle in railway working was set up. The
Liverpool and Manchester line did, however, establish a new
departure in proclaiming direct rivalry with the then powerful canal
interests, and the warfare thus entered on, and persevered in until
the railway system had gained the ascendancy, was to affect the
whole further history of railway expansion and control.
 CHAPTER XX

RAILWAY EXPANSION

The monopolist tendencies of the waterway interests, the magnitude

of the profits secured, and the resort by traders to the building of
railways as an alternative thereto and as a means of meeting the
transport requirements of expanding industries, were factors in the
development of the railway system that operated as direct causes in
the construction of other lines besides the Liverpool and Manchester.
From these particular points of view the story of the Leicester and
Swannington Railway is of special significance.

In the closing years of the eighteenth century, when the Canal Era
was in full operation, the various new projects put forward included
one for constructing a canal, eleven miles in length, down the
Erewash valley to connect with the Trent, thus facilitating the
transport of coal and other products from Nottinghamshire and
Derbyshire to places served by that river; and another for rendering
the Soar navigable from its junction with the Trent to Leicester, this
being known as the Loughborough Navigation. These two schemes
were to form part of a network of important waterways, the Soar
Navigation joining the Leicester Navigation, and this, in turn,
communicating with the Leicestershire branch of the Grand Junction
Canal, thus eventually giving a direct route from Derbyshire,
Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire to London.

The Leicestershire coalowners regarded these proposals with great

uneasiness. They were then supplying Leicester with coal conveyed
there by waggon or packhorse from the collieries on the other side
of Charnwood Forest, and they foresaw that the proposed
navigations would give the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire
coalowners a great advantage over them in the Leicester market.
They accordingly offered a strong opposition to the schemes, and
persisted until the projectors of the Loughborough Navigation
undertook to make that Charnwood Forest Canal which, with its
edge-railway at each end (see page 220), would connect the
Leicestershire coal-fields at Coleorton and Moira with Leicester, and
so allow of the threatened competition from the north of the Trent
being duly met.

The Loughborough Navigation and its Charnwood Forest extension

were completed in 1798; but in the succeeding winter the
Charnwood Forest Canal burst its banks, and the damage done was
never repaired, the Loughborough Navigation trustees (who, though
forced to construct the canal, did not consider themselves obliged to
maintain it) finding it to their advantage, from a traffic point of view,
to enable the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire coalowners to have a
virtual monopoly on the Leicester market. It was under these
conditions that the Loughborough Navigation shares advanced, by
1824, from their original value of £142 17s. each to no less a sum
than £4700.

The local waterway interests maintained their supremacy and were,

indeed, complete masters of the situation for over thirty years; but
the days of their 200 per cent dividends were then numbered.
Influenced by what the traders of Liverpool and Manchester were
doing to fight the canal and river monopolists there, the
Leicestershire coalowners got, in 1830, an Act of Parliament
authorising them to build a railway from Swannington to Leicester.
This line would give them the facilities they wanted for their coal;
but it was to be a "public," and not merely a private, railway. By one
of the clauses of the Act it was provided that "all persons shall have
free liberty to use with horses, cattle and carriages the said railway
upon payment of tolls." These tolls were arranged alike for
passengers and for goods and minerals, and they varied according to
whether the travellers and traders provided their own conveyances
or used those of the railway company. In the former case
passengers were to pay twopence halfpenny each per mile, and in
the latter case threepence per mile, the tolls for goods and minerals
being in like proportion. In a later Act, however, passed in 1833, it
was declared that "whereas the main line hath been constructed
with a view to locomotive steam engines being used, it might be
very injurious to the said railway and inconvenient and dangerous if
horses or cattle were used," and the rights thus granted to the
public under the first Act were now withdrawn.

Opened in 1832, the Leicester and Swannington Railway restored to

the Leicestershire colliery-owners the advantage in the Leicester
market of which the canal companies had enabled their north-of-the-
Trent competitors to deprive them for so many years; and it was
now the turn of the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire coalmasters to
consider what they should do to meet the new situation which had
arisen. They first had conferences with the directors of the
Loughborough, Erewash and Leicester Navigations, and sought to
induce them to grant such reductions in tolls as would enable them
to compete with the Leicestershire coal, now that this was no longer
shut out from Leicester by the dry ditch in Charnwood Forest. But
the only concessions the canal companies would make were
regarded as wholly inadequate by the Nottinghamshire coalmasters,
who, meeting at a little inn at Eastwood, on August 16, 1832,
resolved that "there remained no other plan for their adoption" than
to lay a railway from their collieries to the town of Leicester. They
formed a Midland Counties Railway Company, obtained an Act, built
their line, and so laid the foundations of the great system now
known to us as the Midland Railway. Into that system the Leicester
and Swannington was absorbed in 1846.

The position to-day of the waterways which for thirty years

controlled more or less the transport conditions of the three counties
in question, brought great wealth to their owners, and, by their sole
regard for their own interests, forced the traders to resort to
railways, is shown by the Fourth or Final Report of the Royal
Commission on Canals and Waterways. From this one may learn that
the Loughborough and Leicester Navigations, which follow the
course of the Soar, are liable to floods and are, also, sometimes
short of water, in consequence of the want of control over the supply
of water to mills; and although, with the Grand Junction Canal, they
offer "the most direct inland water route" to London for the traffic of
Derby, Nottingham and Leicester and of the large coal districts, they
serve at present, adds the Report, but an insignificant part of the
traffic which travels by this route.
In effect, the very efforts made by the canal companies to preserve
the monopoly they had so long and so profitably enjoyed were only
a direct means of encouraging railway expansion; though few great
institutions, destined to lead to a great social and economic
revolution, have established their position in the face of more
prejudice, greater difficulties, and less sympathetic support from
"the powers that be" than was the case with the railways.

The traders of the country were naturally favourable to them, since

the need for improved means of communication, following on the
ever-expanding trade and industry of the land, was becoming almost
daily more and more acute. But the vested interests, as represented
alike by holders of canal shares, by turnpike road trustees and
investors, and by the coaching interests, were against the railways;
the Press of the country was to a great extent against them; leaders
in the literary and the social worlds either ignored or condemned
them; landowners first opposed and then blackmailed them;
Governments sought to control and to tax rather than to assist
them; and then, when the railways had proved that they were less
objectionable than prejudiced critics had assumed, and were likely
even to be a source of profitable investment, they were boomed by
speculators into a popularity that led both to successive "railway
manias" and to the whole railway system being still further burdened
with an excessive capital expenditure which has been more or less to
its prejudice ever since.

Some of the early denunciations by those who would have

considered themselves, in their day, to be leaders of public opinion,
if not of light and learning, afford interesting examples of the
hostility which railways, in common with every innovation that seeks
to alter established habits and customs, had to encounter.

In the article published in the "Quarterly Review" for March, 1825, in

which proposals for making railways general throughout the country
are condemned as "visionary schemes unworthy of notice," it is
further said in reference to the Woolwich Railway:—

"It is certainly some consolation to those who are to be whirled at

the rate of eighteen or twenty miles an hour, by means of a high
pressure engine, to be told that they are in no danger of being sea-
sick while on shore, that they are not to be scalded to death, nor
drowned by the bursting of the boiler; and that they need not fear
being shot by the scattered fragments, or dashed in pieces by the
flying off or the breaking of a wheel. But, with all these assurances
we should as soon expect the people of Woolwich to suffer
themselves to be fired off upon one of Congreve's ricochet rockets
as trust themselves to the mercy of such a machine, going at such a
rate. Their property they may, perhaps, trust; but while one of the
finest navigable rivers in the world runs parallel to the proposed
railroad, we consider the other twenty per cent which the
subscribers are to receive for the conveyance of heavy goods almost
as problematical as that to be derived from the passengers. We will
back old Father Thames against the Woolwich Railway for any sum."

In "John Bull" for November 15, 1835, railways are spoken of as

"new-fangled absurdities," and it is declared that "those people who
judge by the success of the Manchester and Liverpool Railroad, and
take it as a criterion for similar speculations, are dunces and
blockheads." In the case of that particular railway, the writer argues,
the distance was short, the passengers were numerous, the "thing"
was new and the traffic was great—above all the distance was short;
but it did not follow that railways were going to succeed elsewhere.
He continues:—

"Does anybody mean to say that decent people, passengers who

would use their own carriages, and are accustomed to their own
comforts, would consent to be hurried along through the air upon a
railroad, from which, had a lazy schoolboy left a marble, or a wicked
one a stone, they would be pitched off their perilous track, into the
valley beneath; or is it to be imagined that women, who may like the
fun of being whirled away on a party of pleasure for an hour to see
a sight, would endure the fatigue, and misery, and danger, not only
to themselves, but their children and families, of being dragged
through the air at the rate of twenty miles an hour, all their lives
being at the mercy of a tin pipe, or a copper boiler, or the accidental
dropping of a pebble on the line of way?

"We denounce the mania as destructive of the country in a thousand

particulars—the whole face of the Kingdom is to be tattooed with
these odious deformities; huge mounds are to intersect our beautiful
valleys; the noise and stench of locomotive steam-engines are to
disturb the quietude of the peasant, the farmer and the gentleman;
and the roaring of bullocks, the bleating of sheep and the grunting
of pigs to keep up one continual uproar through the night along the
lines of these most dangerous and disfiguring abominations....

"Railroads ... will in their efforts to gain ground do incalculable

mischief. If they succeed they will give an unnatural impetus to
society, destroy all the relations which exist between man and man,
overthrow all mercantile regulations, overturn the metropolitan
markets, drain the provinces of all their resources, and create, at the
peril of life, all sorts of confusion and distress. If they fail nothing will
be left but the hideous memorials of public folly."

In "Gore's Liverpool Advertiser" for December 20, 1824, mention is

made of some of the objections then being raised against railways,
these being described as "exceedingly trifling and puerile." "Elderly
gentlemen," it is said, "are of opinion that they shall not be able to
cross the rail-roads without the certainty of being run over; young
gentlemen are naturally fearful that the pleasant comforts and
conveniencies of their foxes and pheasants may not have been
sufficiently consulted. Ladies think that cows will not graze within
view of locomotive engines, and that the sudden and formidable
appearance of them may be attended with premature consequences
to bipeds as well as quadrupeds. Farmers are quite agreed that the
race of horses must at once be extinguished, and that oats and hay
will no longer be marketable produce."

Other alarmist stories were that a great and a scandalous attack was
being made on private property; that there was not a field which
would not be split up and divided; that springs would dry up,
meadows become sterile and vegetation cease; that cows would
give no milk, horses become extinct, agricultural operations be
suspended, and houses be crushed by the railway embankments;
that ruin would fall alike on landowners, farmers, market gardeners
and innkeepers; that manufacturers' stocks would be destroyed by
sparks from the locomotives; that hundreds of thousands of people,
including those who had invested in canals, would be beggared in
the interests of a few; and that (as an anti-climax to all these
predictions of national disaster) the locomotive, after all, would
never be got to work because, although its wheels might turn, it
would remain on the lines by reason of its own weight—a theory
which, long pondered over by men of science, led to early projects
of "general" railways being based on the rack-and-pinion principle of
operation, and was only abandoned when someone had the happy
idea of making experiments which proved that the surmise in
question was a complete delusion.

I reproduce these puerilities of the early part of the nineteenth

century, not simply for the entertainment of the reader, but because
it is a matter of serious consideration how far they affected the cost
of providing the country with railways. and whether, indeed, the
traders who smile at them to-day may not still be paying, in one way
or another, for the consequences they involved.
The keener the prejudice, the greater the hostility and the more
bitter the denunciations when railways were struggling into
existence, the more vigorous became the antagonism of landowners,
the higher were the prices demanded for land, the more costly, by
reason of the opposition, were the proceedings before Parliamentary
Committees, and the heavier grew that capital expenditure the
interest on which would have to be met out of such rates and
charges as the railways, when made, would impose.

To a certain extent one may sympathise with landowners who feared

that the amenities of their estates might be prejudiced by an
innovation of which so much evil was being said; but, as a rule (to
which there were some very honourable exceptions) it was found
that their scruples in regard alike to their own interests and to the
national welfare eventually resolved themselves into a question of
how much money could be got out of the companies. Thus the
extortionate prices paid for land often had no relation to the actual
value of the land itself. They were simply the highest amount the
railway company were prepared to pay the landowner for the
withdrawal of his threatened opposition. If the company resisted the
exorbitant demands made upon them, and would not give a
sufficiently high bribe, they were so strongly opposed that they
generally lost their Bill when they first applied for it to Parliament.
Thereupon they would yield, or effect a compromise on, the terms
asked for, announce that they had made amicable arrangements
with the opposition, re-introduce their Bill in the following Session,
and then succeed in getting it passed.

It might happen, even then, that the companies obtained their

powers subject only to a variety of hampering or vexatious
restrictions which the landed gentry or others were able to enforce
in order that due respect should be shown to their fears or their
prejudices. In some of the earlier railway Acts the companies were
forbidden to use any "locomotives or moveable engines" without the
written consent of the owners or occupiers of the land through
which their lines passed. One of the clauses of the Liverpool and
Manchester Act provided that "no steam engine shall be set up in
the township of Burtonwood or Winwick, and no locomotive shall be
allowed to pass along the line within those townships which shall be
considered by Thomas Lord Lilford or by the Rector of Winwick to be
a nuisance or annoyance to them from the noise or smoke thereof."
The same two individuals secured insertion of a clause in the
Warrington and Newton Railway Act to the effect that every
locomotive used within the parishes mentioned should be
"constructed on best principles for enabling it to consume its own
smoke and preventing noise in the machinery or motion thereof,"
and should use "no coal, but only coke or other such fuel" as his
lordship and the rector might approve.

The story of the London and Birmingham Railway is especially

significant of the general conditions under which the English railway
system came into being.

Industrial expansion had brought about great developments in the

Birmingham and Black Country districts, the population in
Birmingham alone having increased from about 50,000 in 1751 to
110,000 in 1830. Wide possibilities of increasing trade and
commerce were being opened up, but these were seriously
hampered by the disadvantages experienced in the matter of
transport. Small parcels of manufactured goods could be sent by
coach, and a good deal of wrought iron—in small quantities per
coach—was also distributed in the same way during the course of
the year. For bulky goods or raw materials the only means of
transport between Birmingham and London was by canal, and this
meant a three-days' journey. Over 1000 tons a week were then
going from Birmingham to London by water; but there was great
need for a means of communication at once more speedy and more
trustworthy. Goods were delayed in transit even beyond the three
days; they were rejected by the shippers because they did not arrive
in proper time; they were sometimes held up by frost on the canal
between Birmingham and London and lost their chance of getting to
the Baltic before the spring; while, alternatively, they might be
pilfered or lost on the canal journey, and so not get even as far as
London. There was often much difficulty, also, in obtaining raw
materials.

In the result manufacturers had to refuse orders because they could

not execute them in time, and the local industries were not making
anything like the advance of which, with better transport facilities,
they would have been capable. The business that Birmingham
manufacturers should have been doing with Italy, with Spain, or with
Portugal was found to be drifting more and more into the hands of
Continental competitors who had greater advantages both in
obtaining raw materials on the spot and in distributing their
manufactured goods. It was further argued that in view of the
struggle then proceeding between this country and Continental
countries for commercial supremacy, the improvement of the means
of transport, even as regarded Birmingham and London, was a
matter of national, and not simply of local, concern.

It might well be assumed that such considerations as these would

have appealed to the patriotic instincts of the English people, and
especially to those of the landed gentry. Yet the issue, in January,
1832, of the first prospectus of the London and Birmingham Railway
Company, and the introduction of their Bill in February of the same
year, led to opposition, to extortion and to actual blackmail of the
most determined and most merciless description.

The Bill passed in the Commons, but it was thrown out in the Lords.
Its rejection there was attributed to the landowners, who, it was
declared, had "tried to smother the company by the high price they
demanded for their property." The inevitable negotiations followed.
Six months after the defeat of the Bill the directors announced that
the "measures" they had taken with a view to removing "that
opposition of dissentient landowners and proprietors which was the
sole cause of their failure ... had been successful to a greater extent
than they had ventured to anticipate. The most active and
formidable had been conciliated," and the Bill would be introduced
afresh in the following Session. This was done, and the Bill became
an Act, receiving the Royal assent on May 6, 1833.

The nature of the "measures" which had succeeded in overcoming

the opposition may be judged from some facts mentioned by John
Francis, who says that land estimated in value at £250,000 cost the
company three times that amount. One landowner, in addition to
getting £3000 for a certain plot, extorted £10,000 for what he called
"consequential damages"; though, instead of injuring the remainder
of his property, the line increased its value by twenty per cent. For
land used only as agricultural holdings the company is said to have
had to pay at the rate of £350 an acre.

But this was not all. There was the opposition of towns as well as
the greed of individuals to be taken into account. According to
Robert Stephenson's original survey, the London and Birmingham
Railway was to pass through Northampton, where, also, it was
proposed to establish the company's locomotive and carriage works.
The opposition in Northampton, however, was so great that in order
to meet it the company altered their plans and arranged for the line
to pass at a distance from that town. They further undertook to start
their locomotive works at Wolverton, and thus not interfere with the
amenities of Northampton.

How much the town and trade of Northampton lost as the result of
its scruples could hardly be told; but the consequences to the
railway company of this enforced alteration of route were as serious
as any of the extortions practised by the landowners. The line had
now to pass through a tunnel at Kilsby, five miles distant from
Northampton, and a contractor undertook to cut this tunnel for
£90,000. But, while engaged on the task, he came upon a quicksand
which reduced him to despair and led to his throwing up the
contract. Robert Stephenson thereupon took the work in hand and
he had to have 1250 men, 200 horses and thirteen steam-engines at
work raising 1800 gallons of water per minute night and day for the
greater part of eight months before the difficulty was overcome. By
the time the tunnel was completed the cost of construction had risen
from the original estimate of £90,000 to over £300,000, this
enormous expenditure having been incurred, not because it was
necessary for the line, as first designed, but to meet the opposition
and spare the feelings of the then short-sighted dwellers in the town
of Northampton.

The London and Birmingham Railway, with its terminus at Euston,

was eventually opened for traffic throughout in September, 1838. It
was, of course, one of the lines subsequently amalgamated to form
the London and North-Western Railway.

The first Bill of the Great Western Railway, applied for in 1834, was
strenuously opposed and defeated. The second Bill, brought forward
in the following session, was less strenuously opposed, and was duly
passed. In the interval the opposition of the dissentient landowners
had been "conciliated"; and, commenting thereon (in 1851), John
Francis says:—

"The mode by which the opposition of landholders was met bears

the same sad character as with other railways. Every passenger who
goes by the Great Western pays an additional fare to meet the
interest on this most unjust charge; and every shareholder in this, as
in other lines, receives a less dividend than he is entitled to from the
same cause. Nor does the blame rest with the conductors of the
railway. They were the agents of the shareholders and were bound
to forward their interests. The principle of the case to them was
nothing. They were bound to get the Act at the cheapest possible
rate, and if the law gave their rich opponents the power of
practically stopping the progress of the line, and those opponents
chose to avail themselves of the law, the shame rests with the
proprietor of the soil, and not with the promoter of the railway.
Fancy prices were given for fancy prospects, in proportion to the
power of the landowner. Noblemen were persuaded to allow their
castles to be desecrated for a consideration. There can be no doubt
—it was, indeed, all but demonstrated—that offers were made to
and accepted by influential parties to withdraw their opposition to a
Bill which they had declared would ruin them, while the smaller and
more numerous complainants were paid such prices as should
actually buy off a series of long and tedious litigants."

The promoters of that most unfortunate of lines, the Eastern

Counties—predecessor of the Great Eastern Railway of to-day—
found themselves faced with serious opposition in the Lords after
they had got their Bill through the Commons; "but," says the first
report, "the directors, by meeting the parties with the same
promptness and in the same fair spirit which had carried them
successfully through their previous negotiations, effected amicable
arrangements with them," and the company was incorporated in
1836. The negotiations must, however, have been carried through
with greater promptness than discretion, for, to save the fate of their
Bill, the directors undertook to pay one influential landowner
£120,000 for some purely agricultural land which was said to be
then worth not more than £5000. After they had secured their Bill
they made persistent attempts to get out of paying the £120,000;
and, altogether, they so shocked John Herapath that in successive
monthly issues of his "Railway Magazine" all references to the
Eastern Counties Railway Company were encircled by a black border.

In another instance a company proposed to meet the opposition of

certain landowners by carrying the line through a tunnel, which
would enable them to avoid the property in question. The tunnel
would have cost £50,000, and the landowners said, "Give us the
price of that tunnel and we will withdraw our opposition." The
company offered £30,000, and the landowners agreed to be
"conciliated" on this basis. They still came off better than the
objector who began by demanding £8000 and finally accepted £80.
John Francis, too, relates the following story: "The estate of a
nobleman was near a proposed line. He was proud of his park and
great was his resentment. In vain was it proved that the new road
would not come within six miles of his house, that the highway lay
between, that a tunnel would hide the inelegance. He resisted all
overture on the plea of his feelings, until £30,000 was offered. The
route was, however, afterwards changed. A new line was marked out
which would not even approach his domain; and, enraged at the
prospect of losing the £30,000, he resisted it as strenuously as the
other."

There were some honourable exceptions to the general tendency to

extort as much as possible from the railway companies. Among
these may be mentioned the voluntary return by the Duke of
Bedford of a sum of £150,000 paid to him as compensation, his
Grace explaining that the railway had benefitted instead of injuring
his property; and by Lord Taunton of £15,000 out of £35,000
because his property had not suffered so much as had been
anticipated. Exceptions such as these do not, however, alter the fact
that, as stated by Francis in 1851, the London and Birmingham
Company had had to pay for land and compensation an average of
£6300 per mile, the Great Western £6696, the London and South
Western £4000 and the Brighton Company £8000 per mile.

One argument, at least, which can be advanced in favour of State

railways—as applying, however, to a country beginning the creation
of a railway system, or building new railways, rather than to one
taking over an existing system—is that extortions in respect to land
could not be practised on the State in the same way as they have
been practised on English railway companies left by their
Government to make the best terms they could with those who were
in a position to drive the hardest of bargains with them. In Prussia,
for example, the securing of land for any new lines wanted for the
State railway system is a comparatively simple matter. If the
landowner and the responsible officials cannot agree to terms, the
matter is referred to arbitration, though with every probability that
the landowner will get no more than a fair sum, and will not be able
to extort fancy figures under the head of consequential damages or
as the "price" of his withdrawing any opposition he might otherwise
offer.

Apart from other considerations, and taking only the one item of
land, the State lines of Continental countries may well have cost less
to construct than the English lines, while both in the United States
and in Canada the pioneer railway companies had great stretches of
land given to them, by State or Federal Government, not alone for
their lines, but as a further means of assisting them financially.

When one finds how the cost of creating the railway system in our
own country was swollen, under the conditions here stated, to far
greater proportions than should have been the case, and when one
remembers that the excessive capital expenditure involved in
meeting extortionate demands had either to remain unremunerative
or be made good out of the payments of travellers and traders, it is
evident that comparisons between English and foreign railway rates
and fares may be carried to unreasonable lengths if they ignore
conditions of origin by which the operation of the lines concerned
must necessarily have been more or less influenced. Francis himself
says on this point, while confessing that "every line in England has
cost more than it ought":—

"The reader may learn to moderate his intense indignation when,

anathematising railways, he remembers with what unjust demands
and impure claims they had to deal, and with what sad and selfish
treatment it was their lot to meet. They owe nothing to the country;
they owe nothing to the aristocracy. They were wronged by the
former; they were contumaciously treated by the latter."

Another factor, apart from cost of land, in swelling the construction

capital of British railways to abnormal proportions has been the cost
of Parliamentary proceedings; and here, again, State railways have
had the advantage. In Prussia the obtaining of sanction for the
building of an additional line by the State railways administration is
little more than a matter of official routine; whereas in England the
expenses incurred by railway companies in obtaining their Acts have
often amounted to a prodigious sum—to be added, of course, to the
capital outlay which the users of the railway will be expected to
recoup, or, at least, to pay interest on.

An especially striking example was that of the Blackwall Railway,

now leased to the Great Eastern Railway Company. The cost of
obtaining the Act for this line, which is only five miles and a quarter
in length, worked out at no less a sum than £14,414 per mile, the
total cost being thus £75,673. The amounts paid by certain other
companies in securing their Parliamentary powers are given as
follows by G. R. Porter in his "Progress of the Nation" (1846):—

Birmingham and Gloucester £22,618

Bristol and Gloucester £25,589
Bristol and Exeter £18,592
Eastern Counties £39,171
Great Western £89,197
Great North of England £20,526
Grand Junction £22,757
Glasgow, Paisley and Greenock £23,481
London and Birmingham £72,868
London and South Western £41,467
Manchester and Leeds £49,166
Midland Counties £28,776
 North Midland £41,349
Northern and Eastern £74,166
Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne and Manchester £31,473
South-Eastern £82,292

In some cases, Porter explains, the sums here given contain the
expenses of surveying and other disbursements which necessarily
precede the obtaining of an Act of incorporation. On the other hand,
they include only the costs defrayed by the proprietors of the
railway, and not the expenses incurred by parties opposing the Bills.
Nor do they include the expenses incurred in connection either with
rival schemes or with schemes that failed altogether; though, in
these instances, of course, there would be no chance of recouping
the outlay out of rates and fares. No fewer than five different
companies, for instance, sought for powers to construct a line from
London to Brighton, and the amounts they expended are given by
John Francis as follows:—

Rennie's line £72,000

Stephenson's £53,750
Cundy's £16,500
Gibb's £26,325
South-Eastern £25,000
————
Total £193,575

Another company, the name of which is not given by Francis, had so

vigorous a fight that they spent nearly £500,000 before they got
their Act; but still worse than this was the fate of the Stone and
Rugby Railway, whose promoters spent £146,000 on attempts made
in two successive sessions to get an Act (the Committee on the first
Bill sitting on 66 days) and then failed. In another instance the
promoters expended £100,000 with a like result.
After the early companies had got their Acts and obtained their land
they still, as railway pioneers, had to bear the expense of some very
costly experiments, of which railways constructed at a later date had
the advantage. The idea that the locomotive would be able to haul
trains only on the level involved much unnecessary expenditure on
engineering works, while the battle of the gauges led to a prodigious
waste of money alike in Parliamentary proceedings and in the
provision of lines, embankments, cuttings, bridges and viaducts
adapted to a broad gauge eventually abandoned in favour of the
narrower gauges now in general use.

The facts here mentioned will have given the reader some idea of
the conditions under which the railways so greatly needed in the
interests of our national industries were handicapped from the very
outset by an unduly heavy expenditure; but there were still other
influences and considerations which materially affected the general
position, more especially as regards questions and consequences of
State policy towards the railway system in general.
 CHAPTER XXI

RAILWAYS AND THE STATE

From the earliest moment of there being any prospect of railways,

operated by locomotives in place of animal power, coming into
general use, the attitude of the State towards their promoters was
one less of sympathy than of distrust; and this distrust was directly
due to the experience the country had already had of the waterway
interests, whose merciless exactions and huge dividends had led to
the fear that if the railway companies, in turn, were to get a
monopoly of the transport facilities of the country, they might follow
in the footsteps of the inland navigation companies unless they were
restrained either by law or by the enforcement of the principle of
competition.

Public sentiment, which Parliament is assumed to represent, and of

which our legislation is supposed to be the outcome, was divided
between, on the one hand, the landed gentry, the canal proprietors
(each alike hostile to the railways until they found they had more to
hope for from exploiting them), and the inevitable opponents of
innovations of any kind; and, on the other hand, the traders, by
whom the railways were being cordially welcomed, not only because
of the greater and better transport facilities they offered, but also
because they presented an alternative to the canals, the earlier
enthusiasm for which had been greatly moderated by the prospect
of an improved means of transport.

Without adopting wholeheartedly the views of either of these two

opposing parties, Parliament regarded the position with much
concern lest there might be a renewal, in another form, of what we
have seen to be the grasping tendencies of monopolistic canal
companies; and the distrust inspired, under these particular
circumstances, and from the very outset, towards railway companies
which were preparing to create a revolution in the transport
conditions of the country—a revolution the State was not itself
disposed to effect or to finance—was powerfully to influence much
of the subsequent railway legislation, if, indeed, it has even to-day
entirely disappeared.

At first it was assumed that competition in rail transport would be

assured, and the dangers in question proportionately reduced, by
different carriers using their own locomotives, coaches and carriages
on the railway lines, which alone, it was thought, would be owned
by the railway companies constructing them. In some of the earlier
railway Acts there was even a provision that the railway companies
could lease their tolls, as turnpike trustees were doing. But the
apparent safeguard in the form of competition between rival carriers
disappeared when it was found (1) that, although a railway company
was required to allow a trader's own horse or locomotive to use the
line, it was under no obligation to afford him access to stations and
watering-places, or to provide him with any other facilities, however
indispensable these might be to the carrier's business; (2) that the
tolls charged by the railway companies were heavier than the
carriers could afford to pay; (3) that the entire operation of a line of
railway worked by locomotives must necessarily be under the control
of the owning and responsible company; and (4) that railway
companies would have to become carriers of goods as well as
owners of rails.

A Parliamentary Committee which sat in 1840, and of which Sir

Robert Peel was a member, had reported in the strongest terms that
the form of competition originally designed was both impracticable
and undesirable, and that monopoly upon the same line, at all
events as regarded passengers, must be looked upon as inevitable.
"Your Committee," said the report, "deems it indispensable both for
the safety and convenience of the public, that as far as locomotive
powers are concerned, the rivalry of competing parties on the same
line should be prohibited"; though, as some check to the consequent
monopoly of the railway companies, they suggested that the Board
of Trade should act as a supervising authority, with power to hear
complaints, consider bye-laws, etc.

A witness for the Grand Junction Railway Company, who gave

evidence before this Committee, said that any person might run his
own engine on the Grand Junction, and in one instance this was
done by a trader who had a locomotive on the company's line for
drawing his own coal; but the witness apprehended the greatest
possible inconvenience from any general resort to such powers. On
the Liverpool and Manchester, also, anyone might run his own
engines on the line; but, the witness added, "no one does."

The Royal Commission of 1865 summed up the position thus:—"No

sooner were railways worked on a large scale with locomotive power
than it was found impracticable for the general public to use the line
with carriages and engines, and railway companies were compelled
to embark in the business of common carriers on their own line, and
conduct the whole operations."

When, in these circumstances, it was made certain that any idea of

competition between carriers using a railway company's lines in the
same manner as an ordinary highway would have to be abandoned,
it became the established policy of the State to promote competition
between the railway companies themselves by encouraging the
construction of competitive lines or otherwise, thus still protecting,
as was thought, the interests of railway users, and checking any
monopolistic tendencies on the part of the railway companies. The
futility, however, of seeking to compel railway companies to compete
with one another had already been pointed out by Mr James
Morrison, whose speech on the subject in the House of Commons on
May 17, 1836, confirms, also, the theory I have suggested as to the
attitude adopted towards the railway companies being traceable to
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