Even when the traders own extensive mills or factories they often find it convenient to allow the railway company to warehouse most of their raw material for them, sending on supplies to them as needed, a saving thus being effected in respect alike to capital outlay on land and buildings for store rooms and to rates and taxes thereon. In other instances goods are sent, as ready, to the railway warehouses at the port to await shipment, the manufacturers once more saving in not having to provide extra accommodation on their own premises for the storing of goods until a large order has been completed or until a vessel is due to leave.
The extent of this railway warehouse accommodation will be better understood if I mention that two sets of premises which constitute the Broad Street goods depôt of the London and North-Western Railway Company, in the heart of the City of London, have a total floor space of 29,500 square yards; that the same company have at Liverpool a series of warehouses with a total of about 30,500 square yards of floor space; that the Great Northern Railway Company have at Bradford one wool-warehouse which can accommodate from 50,000 to 60,000 bales, and another that has a storage capacity of 150,000 bales; and that an exceptionally large goods depôt and warehouse in Manchester, with floor space equal to one and a quarter acres, cost the Great Northern Railway Company no less a sum than £1,000,000.
To illustrate the nature of the accommodation offered by, and the work carried on, in these great goods stations and warehouses, I offer a few details respecting the Bishopsgate Goods Station of the Great Eastern Railway Company.
Situate in the midst of one of the busiest of London's commercial centres and in the immediate proximity of docks, wharves, markets and warehouses carrying on, in the aggregate, an enormous business, the Bishopsgate Goods Station is a hive of activity of so extensive and varied a type that the working bees employed form a staff of no fewer than 2000 persons.
The premises, which have nine exits and entrances, are divided into three levels, known as the basement level, the rail level and the warehouse level. The total area covered by the goods station, including railway lines, yard and buildings, is twenty-one acres.
The basement level consists of a series of arches on which the lines leading into the goods station have been built. Originally the arches were designed by the railway company to serve the purposes of a general fruit, vegetable and fish market, and this market was opened in 1882; but the lessee of the Spitalfields market claimed certain monopoly rights under an ancient charter, and the Bishopsgate market had to be closed; though the railway company continued to carry on a market they had previously opened at Stratford, E., subject to the payment of certain tolls to the aforesaid lessee in respect to his rights. The Stratford market, located immediately alongside lines of railway bringing produce from the most important agricultural districts of the Eastern Counties, has conferred great advantages alike on traders and on residents in the East of London. The basement arches at Bishopsgate are to-day let mainly to potato salesmen and others, who find them of the greatest convenience because loaded trucks arriving on the rail level can be lowered into the basement, there to be moved by hydraulic power to the particular arch for which the consignment is destined.
The rail level is the goods station proper. It has eleven sets of rails and five loading or unloading platforms, or "banks," while two shunting engines are constantly employed in taking loaded or empty trucks in or out. In 1910 the business done gave a daily average of 725 trucks inwards traffic, and 632 outwards traffic, a total daily average of 1,357 trucks. About eighty goods trains leave or arrive at the station during the twenty-four hours. These include two which are fitted with the vacuum brake, and give the traders and inhabitants of Lincoln and towns beyond all the advantages of an express goods service at ordinary rates—a service, that is, equivalent to what, in Germany, traders would have to pay double or treble their own ordinary rates for if they wished to ensure a corresponding speed.
Of potatoes from the fenland districts of the Eastern Counties the total quantity received at Bishopsgate during 1910 was 100,000 tons. Of green peas from Essex as many as 1000 tons have been received in a single day. Fish from Lowestoft and Yarmouth runs into an annual total of many thousands of tons.
Passengers' luggage in advance is also dealt with at Bishopsgate. This system, saving the traveller much trouble, and greatly facilitating the working of passenger traffic at the stations, is evidently advancing in favour, the packages handled at Bishopsgate having increased from 18,617 in 1900 to 87,129 in 1910.
In the matter of general merchandise, the experiences of the other railway depôts already mentioned are confirmed by those at Bishopsgate, the taking there of the number and weight of all consignments of merchandise forwarded on a particular day having shown the following results:—