That the conveniences of travel and the advantages to traders have been greatly enhanced by the substitution of these few great companies for a large number of small ones is beyond question, and actual experience has shown that the fears of grave evils resulting from prospective abuses of the railway "monopoly" brought about by amalgamations such as these have been mainly imaginary, notwithstanding the fact that they have formed the basis of so much of the policy of the State in its dealings with the railways.
There are still various small and even diminutive companies which have escaped the fate of being swallowed up by their big neighbours. One of the smallest engaged in a general traffic—as distinct from dock or mineral lines—is the Easingwold railway, Yorkshire, which connects with the North-Eastern at Alne, but still maintains an independent existence. According to the Board of Trade Returns for 1910 the Easingwold Railway consists of two miles of line, or three miles if we include sidings, and it owns one locomotive, two carriages for the conveyance of passengers and one goods waggon. It carried in 1910 a total of 33,888 passengers, 5547 tons of minerals and 11,214 tons of general merchandise. Its total gross receipts from all sources of traffic for the year amounted to £2358, and the net receipts, after allowing for working expenses, were £936. The authorised capital of the company is £18,000, of which £16,000 has been paid up.
Small as this line is, it serves a useful purpose; but the policy of amalgamation, followed up by leading companies with such pertinacity, and in spite of so much distrust and opposition, has, happily, saved the railway system of the country from remaining split up among an endless number of companies of the Easingwold type—even though they might have had more than three miles of railway and a single locomotive each.
Other developments of State policy towards the railways have applied to ensuring both perfection of construction and safety in operation.
In the former respect the English lines have been built with a solidity and a completeness not to be surpassed by the railways of any other country in the world. Even in sparsely populated districts where, under similar circumstances, the American or the Prussian railway engineer would lay down only such a line as would be adequate to the actual or prospective traffic, would give the passengers no platform, would provide little more than a shed for a railway station, and would expect the public to be content with a level crossing and look out for the trains, a British railway company is obliged to respect State requirements by laying down a line equal to the traffic of a busy urban centre, give the passengers such platforms as will enable them to enter or leave the trains without the slightest inconvenience, erect well-built and more or less commodious station buildings, and, it may be, arrange for bridges, viaducts or underground passages such as in other countries would be found only in centres having a substantial amount of traffic.
Apart, in fact, from any question as to expenditure on Parliamentary proceedings and on the acquiring of land, the cost simply of building the railway itself has, generally speaking, been far greater in this country than, under corresponding geographical and traffic conditions, has been the case elsewhere. Judging from the example of the Prussian State Railway administration it is extremely doubtful if, had the British railway system been constructed, owned and operated by the State, instead of being left to private enterprise, any responsible Chancellor of the Exchequer would have authorised so great a degree of expenditure, in the interests of an absolute perfection of construction under all possible conditions, as that which has been forced upon commercial companies dependent for their capital on the money they could raise from investors.
Less scope for criticism is offered by the provision of the most complete of safety appliances in regard to signalling and other phases of railway operation. The desirability of reducing the risk of railway accidents to an absolute minimum is beyond the range of all possible dispute. Yet, as a matter of detail, the substantial cost of ensuring this all-important element of safety, no less than the exceptionally heavy outlay on the lines themselves, has helped still further to increase that capital expenditure a return on which is only to be secured by the investors from the revenue the companies can get from the railway users.
When we look for the ultimate and combined results of the various conditions touched upon in this and the preceding chapter—excessive cost of land, abnormal expenditure on Parliamentary proceedings and various aspects of State policy and control—we find them in the fact that, whether or not the British railways are really the best in the world, they have certainly been the most costly.
Comparisons with other countries may be misleading unless we remember that published statistics as to the cost of construction of the world's railways apply to route mileage—or, otherwise, "length of line"—and that the English lines have a large proportion of double, treble and other multiple track, while in more sparsely populated countries the railways, except in and around the large towns, consist to a far larger extent of single track. The actual position is not, therefore, quite so bad as the comparative figures appear to show. But, even allowing for these considerations, the following table—which I compile from data published in the "Bulletin of the International Railway Congress Association" for February, 1911—may be regarded as conveying the moral of the story I have here been seeking to tell:—
| CONSTRUCTION COST OF THE RAILWAYS OF DIFFERENT COUNTRIES. | |||||
| COUNTRY. | SYSTEM. | YEAR. | MILES. | CONSTRUCTION TOTAL. | CAPITAL PER MILE. |
| Great Britain and Ireland | Entire | 1905 | 22,843 | £ 1,272,600,000 | £00 55,712 |
| Germany | " | 1908 | 35,639 | 813,300,000 | 22,821 |
| France | Main lines | 1906 | 24,701 | 706,700,000 | 28,611 |
| Belgium | State lines | 1907 | 2,523 | 93,600,000 | 37,088 |
| Netherlands | Entire | 1897 | 1,653 | 28,700,000 | 17,350 |
| Denmark | State | 1909 | 1,218 | 13,250,000 | 10,884 |
| United States of America | — | 1908 | 233,632 | 3,521,200,000 | 15,071 |
| Canada | — | 1907 | 22,447 | 269,850,000 | 12,022 |