Page:The Working and Management of an English Railway.djvu/328

290 APPENDIX. A writer in the Edinburgh Review, of July, 1889, commenting on Mr. Acworth's recently published work on "The Railways of England," is apparently much impressed with the difficulties which must arise, and the loss of profit which must ensue, from the fact of traffic of various descriptions, and travelling at different rates of speed, having to be accommodated on the same railway, and he puts forward the theory, that in cases where a railway is doubled, that is, where there are two up and two down main lines, if one of each were appropriated to the express passenger trains, running at forty-five to sixty miles an hour, and the others devoted to such selected merchandise traffic as would pay for a speed of about thirty miles an hour, and to passenger trains calling at every station, leaving the heavy mineral and low-priced goods traffic to be accommodated by the canals, the railways would thus be utilised in the most remunerative manner, and there would be a lucrative future in store for the railway shareholder.

This proposition is one based upon fallacies which are sufficiently apparent to any one practically conversant with the working of railways. The reviewer, in short, advises the railway companies to increase their revenue by cutting off one of the most important branches of their business—and that not the least lucrative—on the assumption that the others would in the end grow to such an extent as to absorb the whole of the accommodation provided; but it is very doubtful whether there are sufficient grounds for this initial assumption, since in a country of small extent, like Great Britain, there must be limits to the possibilities of expansion of any class of traffic. In the second place, he is apparently not aware that the policy of appropriating one track to the express passenger trains, and the other to the goods and slow passenger trains, is one already adopted on sections where there are four