Railway mania

“ Spite of this impoverishment of the ordinary shareholder, this railway system has evidently paid too much profit in the past for efficiency; the rolling stock is old and ageing—much of it is by modern standards abominable—the trains are infrequent, and the shunting operations at local stations, with insufficient sidings and insufficient staffs, produce a chronic dislocation and unpunctuality in the traffic that is exaggerated by the defects of direction evident even in the very time-tables. The trains are not well planned, the connections with branch lines are often extremely ill managed. ”

“ On the contrary, disregard of it is chronic and contagious, and constitutes one of the leading characteristics of our railway system. In spite of law and justice our railway practice is a tissue of unfair discrimination, denying the small man equal opportunity with the rich and influential, and breaking the connection between merit and success.
The railways unjustly favor persons, places, and commodities, and they do it constantly, systematically, habitually. ”

“ At other [Pg 136] times a man in semi-uniform, with a cap bearing a small metal locomotive as a badge of office, will fall upon you for the same purpose, and then depart. At wayside stations you will see him leaning from the door of a first-class compartment, smoking a cigar or cigarette, and preparing to resume his footboard tricks when the train is again under way. But though the descent is as unexpected as the same performances in American trains, yet there is an entire absence of that aggressive, domineering attitude which in some of the United States railway officials is so offensive. ”

“ Add to this situation that this public, having largely invested their fortunes in these very transporting lines, are dependent for its incomes from their prosperity. Does not the great ramification strike us as one rather too enormous for any single recipe to meet, or to be guided by any one infallible and inexorable rule of constant and rigid procedure?
There is not a single criticism of railway management or outbreak of popular anti-railway feeling which has not its own perfectly well-known periodicity. As a rule, they lapse with time and disappear without exposition. ”

“ The sunshine beating through the glass roof, the heat of travel, the dust of the station, the moving carriages with their various colours, the shouts of railway officials, the recurring panics of fussy passengers, begin to affect the nerves. Conversation becomes broken, porters are beset on every side with questions they cannot answer, rushes are made on any empty carriages within reach, a child is knocked down and cries. ”

“ The moral of this composition is, that thoughtless people grumble more than is fair about railroad management in the United States. When we consider that every day and night of the year full fourteen thousand railway-trains of various kinds, freighted with life and armed with death, go thundering over the land, the marvel is, NOT that they kill three hundred human beings in a twelvemonth, but that they do not kill three hundred times three hundred! ”

“ Unfortunately, it is not only the frequent stops that have made railway travelling almost ideally uncomfortable. The Government seems also to have hired a staff of workers to impregnate the seats of the carriages with dust and to scatter all the dust that can be spared in these exiguous days on the floors. They have also a gang of old and wheezy gentlemen who travel up and down the line all day shutting the windows. ”

“ Now I had said all that I had to say to Lord Hendley on a public railway platform, and I felt that if the train didn't move off soon I should end by saying something fatuous. Was there ever anything more trying than seeing people off or being seen off one's self at a railway-station? I don't know which is the lesser evil. You've already said all you've got to say long before you get there, but, still, you've got to make idiotic remarks to fill up the time, knowing that at any moment you may be cut short in the middle of a sentence by the train moving off. ”

“ If the public only knew the anxiety and care with which its interests are looked after both by night and by day by our excellent passenger and goods-managers they would perhaps present each of these gentlemen with a testimonial piece of plate, and would for evermore lay aside that wicked and ungrateful idea that railway companies are ‘fair game,’ to be plundered by every one who receives, or fancies he has received, the slightest possible amount of damage to limb or property. Railway companies are not perfect any more than other companies. ”

“ Is every drunken vagabond who lies down in the track,—every deaf old man who chooses the railway for his walk,—every fidgetty traveller who steps out while the train is in motion, in the face of extra-large print, on the station walls, which forbids him to do so,—to be regarded as the victims of the railway proprietors? ”

“ Possibly to the rail way-haters the advent of the trolley has come both as a revelation and an extinguisher! At any rate it has brought them the cheap transportation for which they worried, without the expense of building their own railway coaches, and so a revelation in solving their difficulties with unexpected rapidity. But has it also silenced them? They can not demand that Government seize the railways without seizing the tramways. ”

“ A society has been formed, I see, to agitate against this overcrowding; but it seems to me it will only waste its pains. Let it agitate for an underground railway, by all means; and if, as I gather, the underground railway scheme is obstructed by self-seeking vested interests, let it do its best to break down the obstruction. Until some altogether new means of transport are provided, the attempt to restrict the number of passengers which a car or trolley may carry is, I think, anti-social, and must prove futile. The force of public convenience would break the red-tape barrier like a cobweb. ”

“ They have come hurrying after each other so fast that men going a journey wear sober faces, and enter a railway carriage with an ugly presentiment of its being a probable tomb, and are haunted with dread visions of a fast train dashing up behind, or a slow one right in the path in front, and cannot settle to their newspapers and slumbers as usual. What a pity it is bridges are not built higher, and people cannot travel outside trains as they do on coaches ”

“ We may pity the unfortunate blunderers, just as we may pity a drunkard or a thief, but their usefulness to us should be over. They may start in again, but it must be on some other road. Our duty to the public and to our stockholders demands that the safety of a train should be sacred. One of the most absurd conclusions is to measure the punishment by the amount of damage, according to how straight the track happened to be, according to how hard they happened to hit. Some railroad sins can be forgiven, but drunkenness, chronic or periodic ”

“ I have come to the conclusion that the railway train exercises a sinister influence upon the human race. Persons who are tolerable—or even welcome—in ordinary daily life, become peculiarly obnoxious so soon as they enter the compartment of a train. No fairy prince ever stepped into a railway train—assuming he favoured that means of locomotion—without being transformed straightway into a Beast, and even Beauty herself could not be distinguished from her disagreeable sisters—in a train. ”

“ The impression which prevailed in the rural districts was, that fox-covers and game-preserves would be seriously prejudiced by the formation of railroads; that agricultural communications would be destroyed, land thrown out of cultivation, landowners and farmers reduced to beggary, the poor-rates increased through the number of persons thrown out of employment by the railways,—and all this in order that Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham shopkeepers and manufacturers might establish a monstrous monopoly in railway traffic. ”

“ Which of these benefits does the railway bring to the peasant? It increases the temptations; it destroys the woods; it draws away labourers; it raises the price of grain....
The real people, that is to say those who themselves work and live productively—nine-tenths of the whole nation—without whom no progress is conceivable, are always hostile to the railway. ”

“ But (and can you wonder at it?) they rarely chose to accept, having naturally the bitterest prejudices against the railways and everything that belonged to them; and many men wasted their energies and expended their savings in a fruitless endeavour to compete with steam, when they could have transferred their allegiance from the road to the rail with honour and profit to themselves and no less to their employers. John Peers, a well-known coachman, and driver of the London and Southampton “Telegraph,” was reduced by the coming of the railway to driving an omnibus. ”

“ For never before in our splendid profession of railroading has there been greater need for the wisdom of old age, the enthusiasm of youth, and the balanced execution of middle life. We, the railways, we the most scattered and, ergo, the most exposed of property rights, are the first of the outposts to receive and to repel the assaults of anarchy and its smaller sister, socialism. Subtle, sinister, and specious is the reasoning which supports the claims of those who single out the arteries of inland commerce as a thing apart, as something immune to the irresistible laws of cause and effect. ”

“ Next day men talked, newspaper in hand, at the breakfast-table, in the early trains, omnibuses, and tramcars, of the singular railway outrage. It was clear its purpose was not robbery. What, then, did it mean? Some—probably most—declared it was very plain what it meant; while others,—the few,—after much argument, confessed themselves quite mystified.
The police, too, were not idle. They made inquiries and took notes here and there. They discovered that the five o'clock train made but two pauses on its journey to London—at Croydon and at Clapham Junction. ”

“ It must be for the public to determine whether, for the sake of a small saving in their fares, which after all are moderate as compared with other travelling charges, they desire not only to forego the accommodation and convenience to which they have lately become accustomed, but to arrest the development of the railway system to its utmost extent, and with its development its profits. ”

“ Of course, so long as railways are worked by men, they will be liable to the imperfections belonging to all things human. Though their machinery may be perfect, and their organization as complete as skill and forethought can make it, workmen will at times be forgetful and listless, and a moment's carelessness may lead to the most disastrous results. Yet, taking all circumstances into account, the wonder is that traveling by railway at high speeds should have been rendered comparatively so safe. ”

“ Also, he gets the idea that a through train in this country is so called because it invariably runs through the train ahead of it; and that when a man in Connecticut is expecting a friend on the fast express from Boston, and wants something to remember him by, he goes down to the station at train time with a bucket. Under the headlining system of the English newspapers the derailment of a work-train in Arizona, wherein several Mexican tracklayers get mussed up, becomes Another Frightful American Railway Disaster! ”

“ In this way, not only does the individual unit count, but the individual unit in railway operation may be the Atlas upon whose shoulders the railway world does, in a sense, rest. A blunder in an ordinary factory or workshop may involve no more than the spoiling of a machine or the waste of so much material. A blunder on the railway may involve a terrible loss of human life. ”

“ To my mind, however, nothing but hard necessity could compel people to live under such conditions as those to which the inhabitants of the houses exposed to the nuisance of the Elevated Railway must submit. It is not alone that they are under incessant inspection of the passengers if they keep blinds and windows up or open, but that the noise and whirl must be distracting. A train passes every minute, I was told, during the hours of business. ”

“ These tracks and grade crossings, from which so few parts of the city are free, are a serious evil and danger, and the annoyance is increased by the multiplicity of street railway’s, and by the swiftly running cable-cars, which are a constant source of alarm to the timid. The railways present a difficult problem. The town covers such a vast area (always extending in a ratio that cannot be calculated) that to place all the passenger stations outside would be a great inconvenience, to unite the lines in a single station probably impracticable. ”

“ The introduction of railways has proved one of the great enemies of caste. Men of different rank who formerly would not have rubbed elbows under any considerations sit side by side in the railway cars--and they prefer to do it rather than travel a week by bullock-cart to reach a place which is but a few hours by train. ”

“ To say that they are very far from perfect is nothing; it is only to say that they are worked by human agency. Their worst enemies will scarcely deny that they are at least alive; so long as there is life there may be growth, and we may hope to see them outgrow the faults of their youth. The charge made against State railway systems is that they are incapable of vigorous life. ”