And now see the enormous magnitude to which railway passenger-traffic has grown. In the year 1873, 401,465,086 passengers were carried by day tickets in Great Britain alone. But this was not all. For in that year 257,470 periodical tickets were issued by the different railways; and assuming half of them to be annual, one-fourth half-yearly, and the remainder quarterly tickets, and that their holders made only five journeys each way weekly, this would give an additional number of 47,024,000 journeys, or a total of 448,489,086 passengers carried in Great Britain in one year.
It is difficult to grasp the idea of the enormous number of persons represented by these figures. The mind is
merely bewildered by them, and can form no adequate notion of their magnitude. To reckon them singly would occupy twenty-five years, counting at the rate of one a second for twelve hours every day. Or take another illustration. Supposing every man, woman, and child in Great Britain to make ten journeys by rail yearly, the number would greatly fall short of the passengers carried in 1873.
Mr. Porter, in his ‘Progress of the Nation,’ estimated that thirty millions of passengers, or about eighty-two thousand a day, travelled by coaches in Great Britain in 1834, an average distance of twelve miles each, at an average cost of 5s. a passenger, or at the rate of 5d. a mile; whereas above 448 millions are now carried by railway an average distance of 8½ miles each, at an average cost of 1s. 1½d. per passenger, or about three halfpence per mile, in considerably less than one-fourth of the time.
But besides the above number of passengers, over one hundred and sixty-two million tons of minerals and merchandise were carried by railway in the United Kingdom in 1873, besides mails, cattle, parcels, and other traffic. The distance run by passenger and goods trains in the year was 162,561,304 miles; to accomplish which it is estimated that four miles of railway must have been covered by running trains during every second all the year round.
To perform this service, there were, in 1873, 11,255 locomotives at work in the United Kingdom, consuming about four million tons of coal and coke, and flashing into the air every minute some forty tons of water in the form of steam in a high state of elasticity. There were also
24,644 passenger-carriages, 9128 vans and breaks attached to passenger-trains, and 329,163 trucks, waggons, and other vehicles appropriated to merchandise. Buckled together, buffer to buffer, the locomotives and tenders would extend from London to Peterborough; while the carrying vehicles, joined together, would form two trains occupying a double line of railway extending from London to beyond Inverness.
A notable feature in the growth of railway traffic of late years has been the increase in the number of third-class passengers, compared with first and second class. Sixteen years since, the third-class passengers constituted only about one-third; ten years later, they were about one-half; whereas now they form more than three-fourths of the whole number carried. In 1873, there were about 23 million first-class passengers, 62 million second-class, and not less than 306 million third-class. Thus George Stephenson’s prediction, “that the time would come when it would be cheaper for a working man to make a journey by railway than to walk on foot,” is already verified.
The degree of safety with which this great traffic has been conducted is not the least remarkable of its features. Of course, so long as railways are worked by men they will be liable to the imperfections belonging to all things human. Though their machinery may be perfect and their organisation as complete as skill and forethought can make it, workmen will at times be forgetful and listless; and a moment’s carelessness may lead to the most disastrous results. Yet, taking all circumstances into account, the wonder is, that travelling by
railway at high speed should have been rendered comparatively so safe.