ENGLAND'S RAILWAY ARMY.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume IV, Issue 1081, 23 October 1883, Page 4

ENGLAND'S RAILWAY ARMY.

The Builder publishes some interesting statistics; of the English railways : “Tberease,two armies in England (says Sir E,-Sullivan) a military army and an industrial army. We may put. each roughly ■ at' 100,000 men. But if the writer’ had consulted so popular a work as l.Onr Railways,’ by Joseph Parsloe, he would; have,.found that according to the retnrns of the Board of Trade, dated February 5, 1875, there were at that time 274,535 persons employed on the railways of England,-Stmtfohd,' and Ireland.” It is one of .the great defecfcs in our railway ratnmsthatno annual account is rendcred of .the* number of railway servants ; a line or two added to the Board of Trade returns J would afford a valuable set of statistical-facts on this head. The nearest approach that we can make, in the absence of-tatdr -returns than-that in question, is to tcalculate how many men were employed; pert mile in 1874, and to apply the sameproportion to the increased length of .railways;.now open. On the 16,447 miles o£;railvay open at the end of 1874, the number above cited allows 16'7 persons per mile. -At that rate the number employed, in round figures, on our actual 18,000 miles, of railway, will be 300,000 men. The gross working expenditure on the railways of the United Kingdom for 1874. tfopuptcd ; to 1,36,612,-712. • If we roughly * divide - this as half j paid for materials, and half for labor, it gives an average of very nearly L6O per head for all the railway servants in that year. The ,y^r,-1878; is’ the last for which the analytic returns of the “Index to our 'Railway System have been published! < The length of the line then open was 17,p33 miles, which, at 16 7 souls per miICJ gives men. . The total working expenditure for the United Kingdom for the same year was L 33,189,368, the half of which, taken as before, comes to L 57 per man per year. This gives a reduction in the rate of pay of about 6 per|kont. ftfid in point of fact the working . in 1878 to 63 J&t'cdnf jso that, as a rough check, the. payments arq' riot very disproportioiiafff to the estimate of the number of men.”