Again, it was soon found that our merchants and manufacturers as justly insisted rather than requested that their goods and merchandise should go “through” to their destinations without being subjected to the delay and serious injury which were unavoidable in repeatedly unpacking and repacking them into fresh waggons. Lastly, it was found that, for cattle and horses, changes of carriages were equally objectionable. The will of the people becoming, therefore, in these instances, the law of the rails, passengers, parcels, goods, horses, and cattle, were, generally speaking, carried “through” without change of carriage.
But though the traveller, the receiver of the parcel, of the package, of the horse, dog, bullock, sheep, or pig, after paying for the fare, of course cared not the hundred-thousandth part of a farthing what was done with the money, yet it will be self-evident that he left behind him sources of endless vexation and almost unpreventible disputes; for not only was the paltry fare he had paid for his own conveyance, or that which he might have paid for the conveyance of a lean pig, to be divided among the proprietors of two, three, four, five, six, or seven different companies, but of these companies all excepting one would have not only to remunerate by a mileage allowance the company in whose carriage or waggon, for the benefit of all parties, the traveller, or his parcel, or his goods, or his cow, calf, horse, dog, sheep, or sow, had been carried “through,” but an extra charge for demurrage was evidently due to the said company for every day that its carriage or waggon had been detained by the companies to whom it did not belong. The railway companies between London and York first saw the absolute necessity of their endeavouring by some arrangement to settle accounts of this description, which daily and hourly were growing up between them; but inasmuch as each company, from feelings of jealous independence, kept their books in a different form, dissensions arose, angry correspondence followed, until the settlement of their joint accounts was impeded by the most vexatious delays. The virulence of the disorder, however, was the means of its cure. Mr. Morison, the present very able manager and sole organiser of the new system, conceived the formation of a central office, and the idea was no sooner suggested to Mr. Glyn, the chairman of the London and North-Western Railway, than, seeing at a glance its practical bearing, he gave it the whole weight of his well-earned influence, and was mainly instrumental in the establishment of the astonishing system of minute detail which we will now endeavour very briefly to describe.
The Railway Clearing-House, which adjoins the right-hand side of the entrance-gate from Seymour Street to the Euston Station, is under the control of a committee composed of the chairmen of all the railway companies who are parties to the clearing arrangements; the expense of maintaining the establishment being divided rateably among the companies in proportion to the extent of business transacted by it for each.
On opening a street door, which a brass plate beamingly announces to be that of the “Railway Clearing-House,” the stranger sees before him a long passage, on both sides of which are hanging, as if for sale, a variety of very decent-looking hats, cloaks, and coats, which he has no sooner passed than he finds himself in a spacious hall or office 78 feet long, 20 wide, and 26 feet high, in which, at one glance, he sees seated or standing before him, at 13 parallel desks, upwards of a hundred well-dressed clerks, each silently occupied either in writing or in apparently carefully investigating that which others have written. The stillness of the scene, to which the public have no admittance, is very remarkable; and before we enter on the subject of the avocation of those before us, we cannot help observing that, to any one who has lately had an opportunity of seeing the number of half-starved men in Paris who, with interminable mustachios and noble bushy beards, are, with depressed heads, intently engaged in a variety of occupations, down to that of—say—painting a tiny brooch to ornament the bosom of a lady’s gown—it is amusing to contrast a body of such fierce-looking warriors “à demi-solde” with the plain, clean, close-shorn men of business, who throughout the United Kingdom are, week after week, month after month, and year after year, unassumingly labouring in behalf of that which republicans only talk of instead of attain—a commonwealth.
The business of the Railway Clearing-House is transacted by one manager and 110 clerks. The system comprehends 47 railway companies: in short, it extends to all railways north of the Thames—from Bristol, London, and Harwich, to Aberdeen; and it contains no less than 648 clearing-house stations, by the correspondence of which with the London clearing-office the accounts of the “through” traffic of all the companies is adjudged and settled.
The aforesaid business is divided into four departments:—
First, and most important, the goods and live-stock traffic.
Second, the coaching traffic.
Third, the mileage of carriages and waggons, as also the mileage of tarpaulins for covering waggons.
Fourth, lost luggage.