| Birmingham and Gloucester | £22,618 |
| Bristol and Gloucester | 25,589 |
| Bristol and Exeter | 18,592 |
| Eastern Counties | 39,171 |
| Great Western | 89,197 |
| Great North of England | 20,526 |
| Grand Junction | 22,757 |
| Glasgow, Paisley, and Greenock | 23,481 |
| London and Birmingham | 72,868 |
| London and South-Western | 41,467 |
| Manchester and Leeds | 49,166 |
| Midland Counties | 28,776 |
| North Midland | 41,349 |
| Northern and Eastern | 74,166 |
| Sheffield, Ashton, and Manchester | 31,473 |
| South-Eastern | 82,292 |
It must be borne in mind that these large sums were all for parliamentary expenses alone, and were merely the disbursements of the railway proprietors, whose applications to Parliament were successful. Probably as large an amount was expended in opposition to the several bills, and in the fruitless advocacy of rival companies. Thus above a million and a-quarter of pounds sterling was spent as a preliminary outlay.
Of the railway lines, the construction of the Great Western, 117½ miles in length, was the most costly, entailing an expenditure of nearly eight millions; the London and Birmingham, 112½ miles, cost 6,073,114l.; the South-Eastern, 66 miles, 4,306,478l.; the Manchester and Leeds, 53 miles, 3,372,240l.; the Eastern Counties, 51 miles, 2,821,790l.; the Glasgow, Paisley, Kilmarnock, and Ayr, 57½ miles, 1,071,263l.; an amount which was exceeded by the outlay on only the 3½ miles of the London and Blackwall, first opened, which cost 1,078,851l. I ought to mention, that the lengths in miles are those of the portions first opened to the public in the respective lines, and first authorised by parliamentary enactments. “Junctions,” “continuations,” and the blending of companies, have been subsequent measures, entailing, of course, proportionate outlay. The length of line of the Great Western, for instance, with its immediate branches, opened on the 30th of June, 1849, was 225 miles; that of the South-Eastern, 144 miles; and that of the Eastern Counties, 309 miles. It is stated in Mr. Knight’s “British Almanac” for the current year, that the “London and North-Western is almost the only company which has maintained in 1849 the same dividend even as in the preceding year, viz. seven per cent. The Great Western, the Midland, the Lancashire and Yorkshire, the York and Newcastle, the York and North Midland, the Eastern Counties, the South-Eastern, the South-Western, Brighton, the Manchester and Lincolnshire, all have suffered a decided diminution of dividend. These ten great companies, whose works up to the present time have cost over one hundred millions sterling, have on an average declared for the half year ending in the summer of 1849, a dividend on the regular non-guaranteed shares of between three and four per cent per annum. The remaining companies, about sixty in number, can hardly have reached an average of two per cent per annum in the same half year.”
The following Table gives the latest returns of railway traffic from 1845. Previous to that date no such returns were published in parliamentary papers:—
COMPARATIVE STATEMENT OF THE TRAFFIC ON ALL THE RAILWAYS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM FOR THE FIVE YEARS ENDING JUNE 30, 1845, 1846, 1847, 1848, 1849, TOGETHER WITH THE LENGTH OF RAILWAY OPEN ON DECEMBER 31 AND JUNE 30 IN EACH YEAR.
| Length open on June 30 in each year. | Total Number of Passengers. | Total Receipts from Passengers. | Receipts from Goods, Cattle, Parcels, Mails, &c. | Total Receipts. | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year ending | Miles. | £ | s. | d. | £ | s. | d. | £ | s. | d. | |
| June 30, 1845 | 2343 | 33,791,253 | 3,976,341 | 0 | 0 | 2,233,373 | 0 | 0 | 6,209,714 | 0 | 0 |
| „ 1846 | 2765 | 43,790,983 | 4,725,215 | 11 | 8½ | 2,840,353 | 16 | 6¼ | 7,565,569 | 8 | 2¾ |
| „ 1847 | 3603 | 51,352,163 | 5,148,002 | 5 | 0½ | 3,362,883 | 19 | 6¾ | 1,510,886 | 4 | 7¼ |
| „ 1848 | 4478 | 57,965,070 | 5,720,382 | 9 | 1¾ | 4,213,169 | 14 | 5½ | 9,933,552 | 3 | 7¼ |
| „ 1849 | 5447 | 60,398,159 | 6,105,975 | 7 | 7¾ | 5,094,025 | 18 | 11 | 11,200,901 | 6 | 6¾ |
This official table shows a conveyance for the year ending June, 1849, of 60,398,159 passengers. It may be as well to mention that every distinct trip is reckoned. Thus a gentleman travelling from and returning to Greenwich daily, figures in the return as 730 passengers. Of the number of individuals who travel in the United Kingdom I have no information. Thousands of the labouring classes travel very rarely, perhaps not more than once on some holiday trip in the course of a twelvemonth. But assuming every one to travel, and the population to be thirty millions, then we have two railway trips made by every man, woman, and child in the kingdom every year.
There are no data from which to deduce a precisely accurate calculation of the number of miles travelled by the 60,398,159 passengers who availed themselves of railway facilities in the year cited. Official lists show that seventy-eight railways comprise the extent of mileage given, but these railways vary in extent. The shortest of them open for the conveyance of passengers is the Belfast and County Down, which is only 4 miles 35 chains in length, and the number of passengers travelling on it 81,441. The Midland and the London and North-Western, on the other hand, are respectively 465 and 477 miles in length, and their complement of passengers is respectively 2,252,984 and 2,750,541½. The average length of the 78 railways is 70 miles, but as the stream of travel flows more from intermediate station to station along the course of the line, than from one extremity to the other, it may be reasonable to compute that each individual passenger has travelled one-fourth of the entire distance, or 17½ miles—a calculation confirmed by the amount paid by each individual, which is something short of 2s., or rather more than 1¼d. per mile.
Thus we may conclude that each passenger has journeyed 17½ miles, and that the grand aggregate of travel by all the railway passengers of the kingdom will be 1,052,327,632½ miles, or nearly eleven times the distance between the earth and the sun every year.
The Government returns present some curious results. The passengers by the second-class carriages have been more numerous every year than those by any other class, and for the year last returned were more than three times the number of those who indulged in the comforts of first-class vehicles. Notwithstanding nearly 1000 new miles of railway were opened for the public transit and traffic between June 1848-9, still the number of first-class passengers decreased no fewer than 112,000 and odd, while those who resorted to the humbler accommodation of the second class increased upwards of 170,000. The numerical majority of the second-class passengers over the first was:—