The traffic receipts of the Orleans Company, for 1866, were £4,401,894; average weekly receipts, £94,267; per mile per annum, £2,189, or £496 per mile per week below the receipts per mile per week of the total French railway system. London and North-Western, £6,312,056; average weekly receipts, £120,400; per mile per annum, £4,782.
Owing to the war in Italy in 1866, the tables connected with the passenger traffic of the Alta Italia are defective, but of the 7,858,893 passengers carried on the South Austrian in 1866, 1 per cent. only were first class, but they yielded 5 per cent. of the passenger receipts; 12 per cent. in number were of the second class, they yielded 19 per cent. of the receipts; the third class were 87 per cent. in number and 76 per cent. in receipts.
The number of passengers carried on the Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean was 18,443,597, of which about 6 per cent. in number were first class, 13½ second, and 80½ third.
This total number represents between a fourth and a fifth of the gross number carried in France during 1866—about eighty-four millions—and is in no way in accordance with its proportion, either as regards its gross receipts or its gross mileage, the former being, as just stated, more than a third, and the latter one-fourth of the total railway receipts and mileage of the empire; thus showing that the principal traffic of the Paris, Lyons and Mediterranean Company is long traffic; in this respect very strikingly resembling the traffic of the London and North-Western Railway Company. According to the testimony of M. Charles La Vollée, furnished in his very interesting work, “Les Chemins de Fer en France,” Paris, 1866, the average distance travelled by each passenger on French railways in 1865, was 40 kilometres (25 miles); average distance of a ton of merchandise, 140 kilometres (87½ miles); but as the average price of passenger travelling of all classes in France is only 5½ centimes per kilometre, equal to 9½ centimes per mile: of goods per ton, 6½ centimes per kilometre, equal to 10½ centimes per mile, it follows that each passenger and each ton of goods travels on the Paris, Lyons and Mediterranean Railway nearly double the average distance on all French railways. According to the investigations of M. La Vollée, the average cost of all three classes of passengers in England is 14½ centimes, or 1⅜d. per mile; goods precisely the same per ton. This gentleman makes the following calculation with regard to the saving effected in consequence of the substitution of railways for diligences in travelling. The latter, he says, sped their way at the rate of 6¼ miles an hour. Railways go at the rate of 25. For each of the 80,000,000 who were carried on French railways in 1865, there is a saving of 10 sous an hour, equal to 112,500,000 francs, or £4,500,000, and upon the transport of goods there would he a saving of ten millions sterling, supposing that all goods now carried by railway were to be carried by road.
The construction of railways cheaply in France is now occupying attention. A railway on this system was opened on the 25th of August last—the line from Fougères to Vitré, on the Chemin de Fer de l’Ouest. Its length is 23 miles, and it has been constructed for £100,000, or at the rate of £4,348 a mile, notwithstanding the fact that it is carried through a difficult country, necessitating numerous heavy works, the greatest of which is a viaduct constructed of granite 120 yards long, and 22 yards high. The rails are Vignoles pattern, 60 lbs. to the yard. The above price includes rolling stock, shops, and their equipment, &c. But everybody received “argent sonnant” as the works progressed, and the line was not opened until everything had been settled up and paid for. This is one of the secrets appertaining to the economic construction of railways.
On the Orleans Railway, 9,630,460 passengers were conveyed in 1866: of which 7½ per cent. in number were first class, 14½ per cent. second, and 78 third.
Before quitting the subject of French traffic receipts, a word must be said about a little railway which appertains to the most stately city in France—Lyons—until a few years ago, when Marseilles superseded it,[6] the second in commercial importance, the second also, not long back, in revolutionary susceptibility, yielding only in this respect to the once great head quarters of rebellion, barricades, and insurrection, Paris. As it is some years since our last visit to Lyons, an accident alone put us upon the track of this railway. We looked for some account of it in that great compendium of hotel-keepers’ advertisements, Bradshaw’s Continental Guide, (lucus, &c.), but, of course, not a word is said about it, and we are bound to record the same omission in the (with this exception) admirable “Indicateur des Chemins de Fer, et de la Navigation”, published weekly by Messrs. Chaix & Co., of Paris. Thanks, however, to “my Murray,” we discover the “Lyons-Croix Rousse” runs from the heart of the city to the Croix Rousse, the former hotbed of insurrection, and “inhabited principally by silk-weavers who live in densely crowded narrow streets, where twelve to twenty families are piled, one above the other, in the lofty houses.” But these revolutionary silk-weavers must be a grand moving population, for although the line is stated in the Moniteur des Interets Materiels, a weekly journal which treats, according to the words of its title, upon “tout ce qui a rapport au bien-être general, hormis la politique,” to be only 587 yards long, it had a daily traffic in 1866 of 666 francs, equal to 243,093 francs, or £9,723 per annum! The company has paid off all its debenture debt, and its modest share capital receives the benefit of all profits. What they are, however, is a mystery, for the directors have, in their wisdom and discretion, never thought fit to publish them.
Our Gallic neighbours lodge their Sovereign, his Empress, and his suite, in palaces replete with magnificence and luxury, and when he travels, they are equally mindful of his dignity and of his comfort. Witness the following description of the imperial train in which the Emperor and the Empress went from Paris to Salzburg to visit the Emperor and Empress of Austria, in August last. It may well he said that it exceeds in comfort and elegance any previous equipment of a similar nature. It consists of nine carriages, communicating with each other by tastefully decorated bridges. In the middle is a handsome sitting-room, furnished with chairs, ottomans, pictures, clocks, and chandeliers. On one side of this room is the dining-room, and on the other the Emperor’s study. In the middle of the dining-room there is a table capable of being extended or contracted at pleasure, with easy chairs placed parallel to the sides of the carriage. The Emperor’s study contains an elegant writing-table, a clock in the style of the renaissance, a thermometer, a barometer, and a telegraphic apparatus, by means of which telegraphic communication is established with the several apartments of the various court officials travelling with His Majesty. Next to the study is the bed-room of the Emperor and Empress, with two beds placed transversely against the sides of the carriage. Two dressing-rooms are attached to the bed-room. The remaining carriages consist of a kitchen, wine cellar, and the apartments of the imperial suite. There is also a conservatory for the choicest flowers.
Our own gracious Sovereign travels in her journeys to and from Scotland with great comfort, but without the extent of magnificence above depicted.
Proportioned to the passenger traffic of other English railways, the London and North-Western Company is deficient as regards numbers, for although it has on its system Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, and almost all the leading manufacturing bee-hives in the north of England, it is the sole railway having its terminus in London, that does not encourage short local and Sunday traffic. Nevertheless the number of passengers carried on the London and North-Western in 1866 was 20,811,173, which however is less than a tenth (excluding the holders of 97,147 periodical tickets) of the total number (251,862,715) conveyed on all the railways of the United Kingdom in 1865. The returns before us do not enable us to state the relative proportions of classes of passengers carried by the London and North-Western, but, at all events, we know that they exceed two-thirds of the population of Great Britain and Ireland, which, according to the estimate of the Registrar-General, published a few days ago, was 30,157,239 in June, 1867. The estimated population of London and of its suburbs, comprised within a circle of twelve miles from the General Post Office, St. Martin’s-le-Grand, is, at present, 3,521,267, which is more than the population of half-a-dozen German Principalities;[7] more than half that of Ireland,[8] and equal to that of all Scotland. Those desirous of knowing the component parts of the metropolitan population, and how it is distributed over its area of 687 square miles, are referred to the recently published vigorous and able statistical vindication of the City of London,[9] by its distinguished and learned Chamberlain, Mr. Benjamin Scott.