Rambles on Railways

by Sir Cusack P. Roney

“Third. The right of the Post Office to require for a mail guard or other Post Office servant, a monthly, quarterly, or annual or other periodical ticket, at the same charge as is made to the public for the same distance and for the same period, should be made clear.

“Fourth. The mode of calculating the rate of travelling of a mail train, making allowance for the difference between the stops of the company’s fastest train, and those of the mail train required by the Post Office, should be clearly defined.

“Fifth. The right of the Post Office to insist upon the erection and use of the mail-bag exchanging apparatus at the cost of the department, should be made clear.

“In another portion of his evidence, Mr. Edward J. Page dwells on the practicability and importance of establishing a small parcel post at an uniform rate of charge: pointing out, at the same time, the peculiar facilities and advantages for this purpose, which are afforded by the organisation and machinery of the Post Office; so superior in their operation and extent to any possessed by railway companies.

“It appears highly desirable that, as fast as railways become national property, provision should be made in the leases for giving effect to these views; and in the meantime, fully believing that the plan would prove beneficial to railway interests as well as to the public, it is hoped that arrangements for the purpose may be made (as suggested by Mr. Edward Page), for attaining the same end, with the concurrence of existing companies.”

The recommendations of Sir Rowland Hill, as regards the Post Office and the railways, although drawn up with such elaborate and dogmatic precision, have not the slightest chance of ever being adopted; but as it is so unceasingly asserted and repeated, on Post Office authority, that railways are more costly to the department than the old road conveyances, and that it is a great hardship on the Post Office that it cannot get mails conveyed by ordinary trains, except at unreasonable rates, it is desirable to make an addition to what has been said in previous pages, on both these questions.

We must ask permission to go as far back as the year 1838. In that year, as we learn by a return laid before the Committee of the House of Commons which sat on Postal Reform, and which was presided over by the late Mr. Robert Wallis, M.P. for Glasgow, that the daily mileage of mail coaches in 1838 was 24,613, and the payments for this mileage were £84,103, being an average of 2¼d. per single mile. And we learn also, by an article that appeared in Fraser’s Magazine of September, 1862, written, as we understand, by Mr. M. D. Hill, Recorder of Birmingham, from information evidently supplied from official sources, that the weight of the letters carried throughout the kingdom in 1838, was 750 tons. We find likewise, by returns furnished to Mr. Wallis’s Committee, that letters formed 7 per cent. of the total weight of mails, consequently the weight of mails for the whole year 1838, was 10,500 tons. The latest dated Postmaster-General’s Report, which contains details of postal mileage is that of the 30th of April, 1863. It specifies that the mails travelled daily 49,782 miles by railway in 1862, at an average charge for the whole kingdom of 6¾d. per mile. In the same year “mails were conveyed by mail coaches, omnibuses, mail carts, &c., exclusive of conveyance of mail bags from one part of a town to another,” 33,371 miles each day, at an average cost of 2½d. a mile.

In 1866, the railway postal mileage, according to the evidence and statements furnished to the Royal Commissioners on Railways, was 60,000 miles a day, or, with deductions for greatly diminished mileage on Sundays, Good Friday, and Christmas Day, about 18,780,000 miles per annum. The total amounts paid to railway companies by the Post Office was £570,502, or about 7½d. per single mile. The total weight of mails carried by railways is certainly not less than 110,000 tons, so that, whilst the payments to railway companies in 1866 were about seven times as much as they were to mail coaches in 1838, the weight of mails carried is nearly ten and a-half times as great. But the rate of speed has been quadrupled in the course of a few years. In the olden time, increase of speed of even half a mile an hour, always added considerably to mileage cost, but by railways, the old ten miles an hour are converted into forty, with much diminished cost,—weight for weight carried.