Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland

by Joseph Tatlow

The form of half-yearly accounts prescribed by the Regulation of Railways Act, 1868, admirable as they were, in course of time were found to be insufficient and unsatisfactory. They failed to secure, in practice, such uniformity as was necessary to enable comparisons to be made between the various companies, and in 1903 a Committee of Railway Accountants was appointed by the Railway Companies’ Association to study the subject, with the view of securing uniformity of practice amongst British railways in preparing and publishing their accounts. This Committee, after an

expenditure of much time and trouble, prepared a revised form, but the companies failed to agree to their general adoption, and without legislation, compulsion could not of course be applied. This led to the Board of Trade, who were keen on uniformity, appointing, in 1906, a Departmental Committee on the subject. On this Committee sat my friend Walter Bailey. The Committee heard much evidence, considered the subject very thoroughly, and recommended new forms of Accounts and Statistical Returns, which were (practically as drawn up) embodied in the Act of 1911, and are now the law of the land. From the shareholders’ point of view the most important changes are the substitution of annual accounts for half-yearly ones, and the adoption of a uniform date for the close of the financial year. In addition to the many improvements in the direction of clearness and simplicity which the new form of accounts effected, the following two important changes were made:—

(1) All information relating to the subsidiary enterprises of a company to be shown separately to that relating to the railway itself

(2) A strict separation to be made of the financial statements from those which were of a purely statistical character

The first of these alterations had become desirable from the fact that practically all the larger railway companies had, in the course of years, added to their railway business proper such outside enterprises as steamships, docks, wharves, harbours, hotels, etc.

One bright morning, in the autumn of 1911, I was summoned to the telephone by my friend the Right Honorable Laurence A. Waldron, then a Director of the Dublin and Kingstown Railway, and now its Chairman. He said there was a vacancy on the Kingstown Board; and, supposing the seat was offered to me, would I be free to accept it? As everybody knows, it is not usual for a railway manager, so long as he remains a manager, to be a director of his own or of any other company; so, “I must consult my Chairman,” said I. The Dublin and Kingstown being a worked, not a working line, the duties of its directors, though important are not onerous, and my Chairman and Board readily accorded their consent. Such was my first happy start as a railway director.

The Dublin and Kingstown has the distinction of being the first railway to be constructed in Ireland. Indeed, for five years it was the only railway in that country. Opened as far back as 1834, it was amongst the earliest of the railway lines of the whole United Kingdom. The Stockton and Darlington (1825), the Manchester and Liverpool (1830), and the Dundee and Newtyle (1831), were its only predecessors. Soon after its construction it was extended from Kingstown to Dalkey, a distance of 1¾ miles. This extension was constructed and worked on the atmospheric system, a method of working railways which failed to fulfil expectations, with the result that the Dalkey branch was, in 1856, changed to an ordinary locomotive line.

The atmospheric system of working railways found favour for a time, and was tried on the West London Railway, on the South Devon system, and in other parts of Great Britain, also in France, but nowhere was it permanently successful. The reason of the failure of the system on the Dalkey extension, Mr. Waldron tells me (and he knows all about his railway, as a Chairman should) was due to the impossibility of keeping the metal disc airtight. The disc, shaped like a griddle, was edged with leather which had to be heavily greased to enable it to be drawn through the pipe from which the air was pumped out, in order to create a vacuum, and the rats, like nature, abhorring a vacuum, gnawed the greasy leather, letting in the air, and bringing the train to a standstill!

The Kingstown Railway was also interesting in another respect, as illustrating the opposition which confronted railways in those early days. There was a Mr. Thomas Michael Gresham, who was the owner of the well-known Gresham Hotel in Dublin, and largely interested in house property in Kingstown—Gresham Terrace there is called after him. He organised a successful opposition to the Dublin and Kingstown Railway being allowed—though authorised by Parliament—to go into Kingstown, and its terminus was for some years Salthill Station (Monkstown) a mile away. Mr. Gresham’s action was so highly appreciated—incredible as it now appears—that he was presented with a testimonial and a piece of plate for his “spirited and patriotic action.” I have adorned this book with a photograph of the salver which, with the inscription it bears, will I think, in these days, be not uninteresting.