RAILWAY TRAVELLING 70 YEARS AGO.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 387, 10 March 1908, Page 4

RAILWAY TRAVELLING 70 YEARS AGO.

TyONDON, January 24

Railway travelling is now accompanied by so many luxuries unknown to the undreamt of by our grandfathers, that it is scarcely possible for the present generation to appreciate adequately the circumstances in which journeys by rail were made fifty or sixty years ago, when the railway system of which we are so justly proud was yet in its infancy. We who nowadays enjoy the advantages of through trains, non-stop runs, dining and sleeping saloons, electric lighting, lavatory compartments, provided with hot and cold water, and all the other comforts which our leading railway companies have placed at the disposal of the travelling public find it extremely difficult to carry our minds back to a time when travellers in certain instances rode in open coaches that were little better than trucks, when the guards were ensconced on outside box seats, like the ’bus driver of to-day, and when signalmen had not yet attained to the snug shelter of a cabin, but were doomed to stand by the track and signal their trains by hand lamps. These were the days when, on certain lines, at all events, smoking was disallowed in stations, as well as in railway carriages, when “ tips ” to railway servants were against the regulations, when dogs were not permitted to accompany their masters, when a railway journey was an enterprise not be lightly undertaken. They were the days also when railways had to encounter a vast deal of public prejudice, when all sorts of dangers to man and beast were supposed to lie in the wake of a long railway journey, when railways were regarded in certain quarters as little better than unnatural and uncanny devices on the part of the Kvil One.

A profoundly interesting light is shed on the early days of railway travel in this country by the collection of mementoes and relics which are gradually being amassed by the various departments of the London and North-Western Railway, for ultimate exhibition in a museum, which, it is hoped, may one day be established at the company’s headquarters at Huston. Even now there is ample material to stock a fairly large museum, and every day the catalogue of curiosities, as so many of them really are, is being extended. The progress of locomotive building will be illustrated by a finely executed series of engine models. Here we shall see the early type of skeleton looking engine of 1830, with its tall and slender smokestack, contrasted with the giants of more modern days, such as the famous “ Charles Dickens ” of 1838, which in the course of its career, ran million miles between London and Manchester. The advance of permanent-way construction will be shown by numerous actual specimens, and perhaps relics of noteworthy accidents may even find a place in this particular section. The gradual perfection of signalling apparatus from its crude and elementary beginnings, will, no doubt, constitute a department by itself. Another interesting section will depict the gradual development of the railway carriage. Portraits of celebrated pioneers intimately associated with the growth,of the London and North Western system will naturally form part of the general collection. But, interesting as these different groups of exhibits will prove, on the mechanical side particularly, they are probably eclipsed in interest by the large collection of mementoes which has been got together to illustrate the gradual development of railway travelling on its administrative, and, shall we add, its literary side, as represented by maps, guide-books, timetables, and the like. Here, for instance, is the original manuscript copy of the first time-table of the London and Birmingham Railway, which, with the Grand Junction Railway and the Manchester and Birmingham, really formed the nucleus of the London and North - Western system. The relic is dated May 7th, 1838. Accompanying it are the instructions, also in manuscript, of the then general manager, warning all whom the time-table concerns to see that its details are carried out. More interesting still, from the point of view of the railway traveller is an original copy of the first number of Bradshaw, dated “ xoth Mo. 25th, 1839”—otherwise October 25th, 1839. It was published at a shilling, and so fare has it become that a copy as before now been known to sell for £25. It is a tiny thing of thirty or forty pages, very much like a calender or pocket-book which a man might very conveniently put in a vest pocket. Let anyone compare this bijou publication with the present Bradshaw of 1,200 pages. A peep into the pages of this unpretentious ancestor of the portly Bradshaw as we know it shows us many things. In those days there were evidently more classes of trains than there were, separate vehicles on any one of them—“mixed, calling at first-class stations,” “ first-class, calling at mail stations,” and the like. There are in the tiny volume wellexecuted maps of London, Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham, and tables of “ Hackney coach and cab fares ” from each ; and extracts from the company’s bye-laws, which make rather strange reading to-day. One of the most remarkable features of the literature ot railway travel in the “thirties” and “ forties ” is the lavishness, and,

in many cases, the artistic skill, with which it is illustrated by means of steel engravings and maps. There is in this collection a series of large maps, beautifully executed, covering England and Wales in sections, and revealing to the modern eye the poverty of the land in the matter of railway communication sixty years ago. Some of the guide books contain illustrations showing the kind of train that took the metals in those far-off-days—the guards on their box seats, the baggage on the top of the vehicles, and the nobility and gentry occasionally riding in their own carriages, set on trucks, so that they might be able to travel by road conveniently after their railway journey had come to an end. A broad-sheet recording a “dreadful accident,” by which three men lost their lives by a fall of earth in a railway cutting near Coventry, on December 22, 1835, and a specimen of the truncheon with which a platform official was armed in the early days, when he had to act as porter, ticketcollector, inspector, and policeman, all rolled into one, are numbered among the other curiosities of this remarkable collection.