To accomplish these runs the weight of trains was cut down, and the times of stoppages reduced or abolished altogether. But the expense was too great. It did not really “pay” in convenience or in money, and to these judgments companies must bow. But considering that the Great Northern reaches Grantham, 105¼ miles, in 115 minutes as a daily occurrence, an approximate running of near a mile a minute, and that the North-Western can run at an average of fifty-five miles an hour, the locomotive has amply justified George Stephenson’s prophecy when he made “Blucher,” that there was no limit to the speed of the locomotive, provided the work could be made to stand.
Mr. C. R. Deacon also prophesied a few years since in an American magazine that a hundred miles an hour would be the express speed of the future, provided that passengers would give up luxurious cars and dining and sleeping carriages. At present it seems questionable if they will do so.
THE “FLYING DUTCHMAN.”
But speed is by no means the monopoly of the North. Other companies beside the owners of the East and West Coast routes to Scotland can run expresses equally or almost as fast. There is the “Flying Dutchman,” for instance, of the Great Western. It daily covers the 77¼ miles from London to Swindon in 87 minutes. And the tale is told by Mr. W. M. Acworth, on the authority of an inspector who was in charge of the train, that a famous Great Western engine, the “Lord of the Isles,” which was in the Exhibition of 1851, actually whirled a train from Swindon to London, 77¼ miles in 72 minutes.
Some of those older engines could run bravely. Mr. Acworth reports that “a Bristol and Exeter tank-engine with 9 feet driving wheels, a long extinct species,” pelted down a steep incline at the speed of 80 miles an hour, many years since, and it has never been surpassed. The fastest speed during the Race to Edinburgh days seems to have been 76 miles, but perhaps the weight of the trains may have accounted for this. Mr. Acworth himself is believed to have accomplished the fastest bit of advertised journeying in the world. He went down on the “Dutchman,” and leaving Paddington at 11.46, he caught the return train at Swindon and was back at 2.45, having covered 154½ miles, with five minutes for refreshments, in 177 minutes. The line is easier on the up journey to London, and mile after mile sped by at a rate of over 60 miles an hour. From 56½ to 58 seconds was the chronograph’s record again and again, while on the down journey to Swindon he records a burst of 34½ miles in 34 minutes.
The gradients of the railway form of course a most important factor in the question of speed. The Midland has one of the hardest roads in England for steep slopes, yet its magnificent engines bring its heavy trains from Leicester, 99¾ miles in 122 minutes. Considering the high levels the locomotives have to climb, only to sink again to low flats, as about the Ouse at Bedford, this performance is really as fine as some of the superb running of the Great Northern.
The Southern lines out of London have no long distances to cover as the Northern, unless it may be the South-Western to Plymouth. The South-Western to Bournemouth and Exeter, and the mail trains on the South-Eastern, Chatham and Dover, and the Brighton trains can also show some excellent work as regards speed.
The government of a large railway now has grown to something like the rule of a small state. Sir George Findlay, the general manager of the North-Western Company, in his evidence before the Labour Commission in 1892, deposed that the capital raised for British railways amounted to the vast sum of 897 millions of pounds; that the receipts were 80 millions yearly, that much more than half of this immense amount, namely 43 millions, yearly was paid in wages, and that half-a-million of men directly or indirectly were given employment.