Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/405

3, 1863.] companies treat smoking as an offence to be dealt with more or less severely and arbitrarily. The whole of this sort of guerilla warfare between guards and passengers might be superseded at once if each train had a smoking-carriage attached to it. Supposing this were done, I would have no mercy on persons who smoked in prohibited places. Till it be done, passengers will break the law, guards will be bribed to wink at an infraction of their duty, and non-smoking wayfarers will be subjected to the annoyance of travelling in carriages redolent of stale tobacco. We always boast of being the freest country in the world, but there is no country except England where the public would submit to such an interference with their tastes and habits as is daily practised upon our great smoking community in its journeyings by rail. I shall never forget the glow of satisfaction I experienced when I first saw written on a compartment in a German train, “Hier darf nicht geraucht werden.” Here at last smoking was the rule, and abstention from tobacco was regarded as an eccentricity. A negro who came into a country where a white skin was considered a sign of inferiority could hardly entertain a more vivid sense of pride than I did at that moment.

I also want to know the reason why our trains are notorious for their want of punctuality. Time is of more value in Great Britain than it was ever known to be in any portion of the globe, or at any period of the world’s history. Punctuality is claimed, with some reason, to be an emphatically British virtue. And certainly, as far as your social position goes, you had better break all the ten commandments than fail to keep an appointment. French, or German, or Italian travellers can better afford to be an hour behind time than we can five minutes. Yet there is no reliance to be placed on an ordinary British train performing its journey in the time stipulated. You would suppose, beforehand, that the time required to perform a known distance at a given speed might be calculated with absolute accuracy. Such, however, is not the case in practice. I have travelled across France, from Marseilles to Calais, a distance of some eight hundred miles, without ever being more than a minute behind or before our time at any station. If any English traveller can say the same about a journey from London to Aberdeen, he has been much more fortunate in his experiences than it has fallen to my lot to be. On many, if not all, of the French lines there is a system in vogue which very nearly ensures punctuality. Whenever a train is exact to its time between station and station, the drivers receive an additional gratuity of a centime for every kilometre run over. To the companies the extra cost is unimportant compared with the saving gained in many respects by the additional regularity thus acquired. If any body examines the statistics of railway accidents, he will find that in nine cases out of ten the catastrophe has occurred owing to some uncertainty about the time when a train would arrive. On one of our London lines, by which of late I have been in the habit of travelling almost daily, the trains are always from five to fifteen minutes behind their time. In consequence, the railway officials must have grown to regard this delay as a normal circumstance; and, some day or other, the reliance on these minutes of grace will lead to an accident. As far as I can learn, a traveller has no redress for lost time. The delay of a quarter of an hour may often be a matter of incalculable importance; yet the railroads cannot be called upon to give compensation for the losses accruing from their own unpunctuality. In the days when railways were novelties in Italy, a train stopping at a station on the Modena line, delayed there, from some cause or other, for upwards of an hour. The passengers could put up with the despotism of Francis V., of evil memory, but they could not stand the tyranny of a railway official. So they sallied en masse from the train, and smashed the windows of the station-master’s house, a proceeding which, though illogical, produced the desired effect, and caused the train to be sent on at once. I have no wish to see English passengers take the law into their own hands, but I do think the government might protect us. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is said to be at his wit’s end to devise new taxes. Why are not our railway companies obliged to pay a fine to the Treasury every time one of their trains is late? If such a tax were productive, nobody would complain; if it were unproductive, the public would be the gainer. Let it be understood that I have no desire to compel our railways to travel faster; on the contrary, I think that already they travel too fast for their own pockets, if not for the safety of their passengers. All I want is that they should allow time enough to be able to perform their contracts. If I know beforehand at what time a train will arrive, I can make my arrangements accordingly. But I have a cause of complaint when I take my ticket on the understanding that I am to be delivered at a given spot at a certain time, and the contract is not fulfilled.

Then I also want to know, why I am starved upon my journeys whenever I travel in England? I always get hungry in travelling: and even if I am not hungry, eating promotes sleep, and I fancy a desire to sleep as much as possible while travelling by rail, is one very generally entertained by passengers. But yet how am I or my fellow passengers to gratify this natural and innocent taste? It seems to me, that within my memory, railway refreshments have fallen off. I can recall the fact, that when, as a child, I used to be taken along the London and Birmingham line, the Wolverton buffet appeared to me to afford a repast worthy of the Arabian Nights. The ghost of many an Olla Podrida of buns and coffee, and sandwiches, and pork-pies, and lemonade, rises before my memory as I write these lines. Everything, as I remember it, was excellent. It is, of course, possible that my youthful appetite was somewhat indiscriminating. I confess that the poky little room at Wolverton lives in my recollection as a vast and spacious saloon; that the greasy, oilcloth-coloured counter, appears to me in other days to have been surmounted with slabs of dazzling white marble, and that the rather dowdy damsels who now administer at the station to the wants of the hungry public, have succeeded to the place of enchanting Hebes—