To bring fifty-four almost entirely competitive railways into four almost non-competitive ones and insure a governmental control of rates and other charges sufficient to bring the constituent roads a rate of return equal to that which they were receiving in 1913—here in brief is the chief purpose of the extremely lengthy Railways Act, supplanting all transport legislation that had gone before. It is the most drastic business move that England has accomplished in many and many a day. Upon it are pinned the hopes of a thinking people. And because, following in the steps of the long-established regional systems of France it has become a high hope for our extremely muddled rail transport situation in the United States, it is well worth at least a little detailed study.
The south coast of England runs at a distance from London of from sixty miles upward, as it extends both east and west of Brighton, the nearest point to that great city. Three separate systems connect it with London: to the extreme east the affiliated Southern and Chatham railways, made familiar to thousands of Americans who have used them as an essential link between Victoria Station and the beginning of the Channel crossing at Dover; the London, Brighton, and South Coast; and the London and Southwestern, this last line reaching as far west as Plymouth, down in Cornwall. In a sense it may be said that these three railways are regional railways within a region. Each has fairly definite and non-competitive territory. Each serves its own principality, and serves it admirably. To make a region out of these three railways is no problem at all. It is solved, almost before it is begun.
Nor is the east coast of England to the north of London and right up to and beyond the old Scottish border difficult to bring into a single region. Three more or less parallel railways—the Great Central, the Great Northern, and the Great Eastern—occupy the eastern counties all the way up to York, 188 miles north of London, where the Northeastern has its real beginning and occupies the extreme northeastern corner of England as an absolute monopoly. This last line reaches within fifty-eight miles of Edinburgh. As a matter of operating convenience, however, its locomotives run all the way through to that ancient Scottish capital, traversing the final fifty-eight miles upon the rails of the North British company. Perhaps no better instance may be shown of the absurdly small typical English railway of to-day than to realize that within the 392 miles that lie between London and Edinburgh—no distance at all upon our American railroad map—the through fast expresses run upon three separate railways. The only condition we have that parallels and exceeds this is the operation of the Baltimore and Ohio’s through trains from New York to Philadelphia, which traverse the rails of three roads—the Pennsylvania, the Lehigh Valley, and the Philadelphia and Reading—in the short ninety miles that intervene between Manhattan Island and the entrance to the B. & O.’s own rails.
The British railroaders have long recognized the absurdity of the railway that is too short just as they are able to point the finger of fine scorn at our many railroads that are entirely too long. More than a decade ago these four roads of the eastern counties of England sought to anticipate the present grouping principle of the Railways Act by an amalgamation of their properties into a single, succinct regional railway property. The proposal was bitterly fought in Parliament and then defeated. Great Britain had not then become convinced of the extravagance of the competition principle in transportation. It was necessary to have a war to teach her that important economic lesson.
Almost as the northeastern corner of England is the undisputed principality of a single system so does a single railway, the Great Western, stretch alone directly west from London and almost completely dominates its territory. To bring it into regional grouping with any of the other important British railway systems has been well-nigh impossible. After a number of futile attempts the professional and amateur railroaders who have been attempting the solution of the regional plan for Great Britain have given up the idea. They have found that they could only combine the Great Western with the Cambrian and some other less important Welsh roads, and now they have let it go at that—a single well-developed region of some 3650 miles, well contained and, with the exception of a single long arm thrust up into Liverpool, fairly compact.
In the center of England rested the difficult part of the entire problem of working out a rational and economic regional plan. In the succeeding and final chapters of this book I shall show how in the two inner industrial centers of America, the one just east and the other just west of the Mississippi River, we shall come to two territories where the working out of a pure regional plan is virtually impossible. So it is in central England. Two great railways, possibly the two greatest in all Britain, the London and Northwestern and the Midland—occupy that industrial area with a perfect interlacing of lines, and at every corner of it fight energetically for its traffic. Other railways enter slightly upon it; as we have just seen, the Great Western with its line through Birmingham up to Liverpool, the Great Central and, in its northerly reaches, the cross-country Lancashire and Yorkshire. This last line has however recently been absorbed by the London and Northwestern. It too anticipated the decisions of the Railways Act and comes into any grouping the largest single system in Great Britain, with considerably more than four thousand miles of line, a system roughly comparable in size and volume of traffic with our own Baltimore and Ohio, although in its history, as well as in the traditions of its personnel, more closely analogous to the Pennsylvania railroad.
To have attempted to separate the important London and Northwestern and Midland systems would have been to break down completely the whole spirit and plan of the British regional system. Therefore they have been brought into a single grouping, and with them the Lancashire and Yorkshire of course, the North Staffordshire, the Furness, the Caledonian, the Glasgow and Southwestern, and the Highland companies—the last of these, as their names indicate, Scottish lines.
Here then are four railways created out of fifty-four—some 24,500 miles of line as compared with the 27,000 miles of French railway. The groupings have followed the lines that I have just shown and take the names of the Southern; the Northeastern, the Eastern, and the East Scottish; the Western; and the Northwestern, Midland, and West Scottish groups respectively. The smaller and comparatively unimportant lines of the United Kingdom fall easily into some one of these four great regions. For a time Scotland itself represented a rather perplexing problem. The energetic young British minister of transport, Sir Eric Geddes, stood stoutly for the retention of all the Scottish railways in a separate, distinct, and strongly unified group. In this he was opposed. The old-time competitive idea that there should be at least two separate and rival routes from London up into Scotland—the one on the east coast and the other on the west coast of Britain—would not down. Geddes gave up. Then for a time he proposed a generous compromise in the form of two separate Scotch groups, one upon each side of the island and connecting with the Eastern (English) and the Northwestern and Midland groups at York and Carlisle respectively. But even in this he was beaten. Scotland lost her railway autonomy. Her lines will be merged and as entities forever lost in the sweep of the two larger groups of the entire kingdom.