Page:The Canal System of England.djvu/83

 remove as much as possible of slow traffic from our Railways to enable them more easily to meet the growing and more remunerative passenger and fast traffic.

There are other features besides the capital accounts in which the economy of transport by canal differs from that by railway, and perhaps the most evident is the comparative expense of maintenance. As soon as anything like an adequate amount of traffic is brought on to a line, the cost of maintenance of a railway is remarkably steady, rising and falling with the increase or diminution in the volume of the traffic. On canals, on the other hand, the fixed expenses demand in any case a certain cost, but this cost is very little increased by a large increase of traffic. The annual cost of maintenance of the Suez Canal was actually less from 1876 to 1881 than it had been from 1871 to 1876, although the traffic had considerably more than doubled, and thus the cost of maintenance per ton per mile fell from 0·35d. to 0·134d. Again, the half-yearly report of the Manchester Ship Canal, up to December, 1903, shews that the weight of toll paying merchandise which passed over the waterway was nearly 200,000 tons in excess of that of the corresponding period of 1901 when the tonnage was 1,391,149. This has been accomplished with an increased expenditure of only £1,658, while the increase in the receipts amounted to £20,095.

Not only does an increase of traffic diminish the proportionate cost of maintenance, but the cost of haulage