WORLD'S RECORD IN RAILWAY TRANSPORT
London's colony of "hustlers," otherwise known as the American Luncheon Olub. received at'.- one of their recent weekly meetings in the Savoy what the/would call "a severe jolt" (says the "Daily Mail").' ■ Their guests of honour were the memhers of the Railway Executive Commit-' tee of Great Britain, and from its chair-, man, Mr. H.. A. Walker, general manager of the London and South-Western Railway, the club heard a story of British "hustle" which fairly made them gasp. It ■ was a 1 matter-of-fact statement, now made public for. the first "time, of .the: amazing speed and accuracy with which British railways handled military traffic at the outbreak of the war. ,Mr. Walker said: —• "The Government gave the railways a time-limit of 60 hour's to make ready for dispatch to Southampton, the port of departure for the Expeditionary Force, 350 trains of, roundly, thirty vehicles each. We 'delivered the goods,' as you Americans would say, in forty-eight hours. At Southampton, for practicallj every day of the first three weeks of the war, we handled during a period of fourteen hours no fewer than seventy-three of these trains, including the running of them to the boat side and the unloading of the full equipment of guris, ammunition, and horses. "The trains arrived at intervals averaging twelve minutes. It was a. matter of special pride to all the railwaymen concerned —and we general managers'give credit for the feat to the efficiency of our disciplined staffs—that practically every train without exception came in on scheduled time. Some of them came from remote parts of the Kingdom—Wales and the North of Scotland.''' Mr. H. W. Thornton, general manager of the Great Eastern Railway, formerly general superintendent of a railway in the United States, rising to acknowledge a tribute which the previous speaker had paid to his zeal during mobilisation, said that so far as his knowledge of great transportation achievements went, there was no event iii railway history to compare with what British lines had accomplished in August, 1914. Certainly in America, the land of "big stunts," there had never beeii anything like it,
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Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2352, 7 January 1915, Page 9
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354WORLD'S RECORD IN RAILWAY TRANSPORT Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2352, 7 January 1915, Page 9
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