Page:Fred Arthur McKenzie - British Railways and the War (1917).djvu/11

 the central military organisation. The very railway cars were built to a size that could be employed for transporting the maximum number of men. Goods trucks were planned so as to be suitable when the moment came for the carriage of guns and war material.

The British railways were privately owned, and were built solely for commercial purposes. The control of the principal lines was divided between forty companies. These maintained only a minimum of co-operation among themselves, and wherever they ran through the same territory there was keen rivalry. British lines were laid, the size of railway carriages and goods trucks decided, and the staffs selected solely for the ordinary work of peace time. It was the business of the railways to provide for the needs of the communities they served and to obtain a fair return for their shareholders, and nothing else. They were peace lines laid down not where strategy dictated, but where business was likely to be best.

One thing, however, had been done, a thing that was to prove of vital importance when war broke out. In 1871, following the Franco-Prussian conflict, the British Government took power by Act of Parliament to acquire by Royal Proclamation any or all of the railways of the United Kingdom in time of war. A committee of railway managers was already in existence to deal with such a situation. This body, known first as the War Railway Council and afterwards as the