One of the largest English railway systems is that of the London & Northwestern. The territory covered by this railway extends from London in the south to Carlisle in the north, and from Cambridge in the east to Holyhead in the west—an area of three hundred miles in breadth. The main office of the government is in London, but the capital, so to speak, is Crewe, a town of thirty-five thousand inhabitants consisting entirely of the employees of the railway and their families. The total number in the railway’s service does not fall far short of sixty thousand. The annual budget amounts to ten million pounds, while the funded debt has reached a total of one hundred million pounds sterling.
The London and Northwestern shops at Crewe have to keep in repair a stock of engines that is worth five million pounds sterling, and while they do not indeed put a girdle round the earth every forty minutes, they do literally every four hours, and in doing so the engines consume a million tons of coal per annum. On an average, it is reckoned that every five days an old engine is withdrawn and replaced by a new one.
Of late years the company has been experimenting on an extensive scale with a system of metallic permanent way. Steel “keys” fasten the rails into steel “chairs,” which in their turn are riveted down to steel sleepers. About thirty miles of line has been laid on this system, with about sixty thousand sleepers. So far the results are understood to be satisfactory. The question involved in the conflict between steel and wooden sleepers is gigantic. A rough calculation shows that to replace the wooden sleepers on existing lines in Great Britain only would require about four million tons of steel, without reckoning the weight of the chairs and keys. And great Britain has only one-fifteenth of the railway mileage of the world.
In some ways the goods traffic arrangements of the road at Liverpool are even more remarkable than those in London. At Liverpool the Northwestern has six goods stations, two of them reached by tunnels each a mile and a quarter in length, constructed for their use alone. One of these stations, Edgehill, is called a goods “yard,” but this yard contains fifty-seven and a half miles of land, covers two hundred acres of ground, and has cost about two million pounds sterling—nearly ten millions of dollars.
The conductors on the New York street cars, like the New York policemen, are sullen and sour; they seem ill-tempered, if not ill-natured. You seldom or never see a smile on their lips, and as for giving utterance to the common and easy phrase, “thank you,” when they receive a fare, they wouldn’t be guilty of such a piece of politeness; not they.
It is different in England, on the Continent, everywhere in Europe. Whether on a steam road, a steamboat, a tram or an omnibus, no officer nor conductor would think of receiving a fare without thanking a passenger audibly, and even when an officer opens the door or looks into the window of a carriage for the purpose of examining tickets, you will not hear the short, sharp, curt demand, “tickets,” as in the States, but “all tickets, please,” in a pleasant and agreeable tone.
