Page:The Working and Management of an English Railway.djvu/254

 a court of law, upon simple proof that the committee have declared the amount to be payable.

In earlier days, the operations of the Clearing-house were limited to dealing with passenger and parcel traffic, and the mileage and demurrage charges for the use or detention of carriages, waggons and sheets, when travelling upon railways other than those belonging to the owners of the stock; but since the year 1847 the system has been extended to merchandise and live stock traffic, including a considerable proportion of the through coal traffic. The general principle upon which the receipts arising from through traffic are apportioned between railway companies has already been described, but two or more companies frequently enter into agreements for special modes of division of certain traffic, and the Clearing-house gives effect to these on receiving "joint instructions," mutually agreed between the companies concerned, the system being sufficiently elastic to meet every kind of agreement that can be devised for the apportionment of traffic receipts. In any case in which one company claims a larger share of the receipts from a particular traffic than its partners are prepared to concede, the Clearing-house reserves, in making the apportionment, a sufficient amount to meet the claim, until the difficulty can be adjusted by agreement, arbitration or otherwise, and amounts thus reserved are said to be "in suspense."

Having described the results achieved by this admirable, organisation, it may be worth while to glance briefly at the machinery by which those results are attained.

In the first place, all through tickets are forwarded to the Clearing-house; for instance, if a passenger books