CHANGED THE EARTH

Evening Star, Issue 22459, 2 October 1936, Page 14

CHANGED THE EARTH

EFFECT OF RAILWAY LINES EARLY DIFFICULTIES IN BRITAIN Railways created the empires and powers we know to-day (writes C. A. Lyon in the ‘ Melbourne Argus ’). The German Empire, created after the Eranco-Prussian War of 1870, was a railway power. Until 1870 Britain had almost a monopoly of carrying goods from North Europe to South. After that much of it went overland through Germany. Before the railways Russia was a sprawling mass of incoherent pieces, with independent principalities on the borders. Railways gave her a nervous system and made her a European menace. As for America, she simply grew up along her railway lines. The railways changed the face of the earth, opening up the interiors which had been out of man’s reach since the beginning of time. They gave us continents instead of coasts. INACCESSIBILITY. Before the railways came some of the world’s richest hinterlands were inaccessible and worthless except on the seaboard. For instance, there was a violent controversy in England in 1763 after the Seven Years’ War about whether we should retain the great unmapped plains of Canada or the two tiny West Indian islands of Martinique and Gautleloupe. Until railways came there could bo no development of Africa. Man alone was the beast of burden, and a slow-moving one, for the horse was killed by the tsetse fly. And history records that the very Union of South Africa was the outcome of a railway conference. Railways not only changed the life of empires—they revolutionised the lives of people. It is not for nothing that the English Prayer Book has no fewer than five •separate prayers dealing with food shortages. In the days when the Prayer Book was written the danger of death by famine in some cut-off countryside was real. It was not until 1850 that wheat was ever taken from one European country to another except in time of dearth. The railways delivered us from hunger. In 1801, before the railways, a fifth of the people of England lived in towns of more than 10,000 population. In 1891 three-fifths did. The world-chang-ing strips of metal were laid first in Britain because everyone was dissatisfied with the existing methods of transport. The canals, which were then the great goods traffic arteries of the country, were behaving in a very arbitrary fashion. In 1824 2,000 ft out of 5,000 ft of timber needed by a Manchester firm remained undelivered for five months. It was quicker for Liverpool to send cotton to New York than to Manchester. The first real railway was the Liverpool and Manchester railway', opened by George Stephenson, with his £SOO prize locomotive Rocket, • in 1830, but it had many curious predecessors. Wooden rails were laid down from collieries to rivers in the seventeenth century. A railway consisting of iron rails worked by horses which anyone might use for his own vehicles was opened between Croydon and Wandsworth in 1801. The Stockton and Darlington railway was opened in 1825. 'Goods were drawn by locomotive, but horses hauled the passengers. By 1838 there were 490 miles of railways in Great Britain, but long before that the stage coaches had seen the red light. They began a speeding-up campaign—with such disastrous results that in February, 1835, alone nine coaches overturned. These _ early railway days were divided into three phases: a period of blind hatred, when everyone’s hand was against them; a period of mulcting, when landlords found that the railways had money and stung them in the most outrageous way; and a period of railway mania, with hardly a parallel in world history, when everyone believed railways were a cure for everything and .the vehicles,of the New Jerusalem. PERSECUTION. In the persecution period such remarks as this were made: “Was the House (of Commons) aware of the smoke and the noise, the hiss and the whirl which locomotive engines, passing at the rate of 10 or 12 miles an hour, would occasion? Neither the cattle ploughing in the fields nor grazing in the meadows could behold, them without dismay. Agriculturists, graziers, and dairymen would be up in arms. Iron would be raised in price 100 per cent, and more, and would probably be exhausted altogether. It would be the greatest nuisance, the most complete disurbance of quiet and comfort in all parts of the kingdom that the ingenuity of man could invent.” Country gentlemen were told that the smoke would kill birds as they flew over the locomotives. The public was told that engines would not move for their own weight; the manufacturer was told that the sparks would burn his goods. Farmers were told that cows which ate grass near railway lines would stop giving milk, and vegetation generally would cease to grow. It was a matter for jubilation when a town could prevent a railway line entry. Northampton, for instance, rejoiced that the hated steel lines passed it a full five miles off. Then people found that the railways had money to burn in way-leaves and compensation. All and sundry wont fortune hunting. As one author writes: “A reverend gentleman complained that his privacy had been ruined; that his daughter’s bedroom windows were exposed to the unhallowed gaze of the men working on the railway; that lie must remove his family to a .watering place, to do

which ho must engage a curate. All this was considered in the compensation demanded and paid; yet no curate was engaged, no lodgings at a watering place taken. “ The unhappy family still dwelt in its desecrated abode and bore with Christian-like resignation all the miseries heaped upon it, and we have no doubt that if his daughter’s bedroom had a back window as well as a front one, ho would be exceedingly glad if a railroad was carried across that at the same price.” It is because of cases like this that British railways are the most heavily capitalised in the world to-day. Every mile of them cost £54,000. The Prussian railways cost £21,000 —the American £13,000. Then, in 1845, people perceived that railways were the transport of the future, and mad speculation began. The low bank rate, 2J- per cent., encouraged investors. The orgy of share-pushing surpassed anything since the South Sea Bubble. The whole income of the country at that time was £200,000,000 a year, and yet in the two years, 1845-46, £182,000,000 was put into railways. Twenty railway journals were printed. The railway advertisements with which the newspapers were stuffed brought in from £12,000 to £14,000 a week revenue. The price of iron nearly doubled, engineers made fortunes. Every mile of railway built benefited surveyors and lawyers by £4,000, For months it was said that no London tradesman was found at his counter, nor merchant in his office; they had all gone off to the city to speculate. DEPOSITORS’ RIOTS. Sunday, November 30, 1845, was fixed as the last date by which the railway plans, the concrete objects of these mad speculations, must be deposited at the Board of Trade in Whitehall. It was a never-to-be-forgotten day. Riots of depositors took place in Preston and Mansfield. The main roads to London were blocked with coaches and the main lines with special expresses. By_ 1846 there were 200,000 navvies working on the new railways. Parliament found that they received no compensation _ for injury, and the regulations instituted were the first instance ever known of workmen’s compensation.