Railway Adventures and Anecdotes Part 7

Rev. F. S. Williams in an article upon "Railway Revolutions,"

remarks:-"When railways were first established it was never imagined that they would be so far degraded as to carry coals; but George Stephenson and others soon saw how great a service railways might render in developing and distributing the mineral wealth of the country. Prejudice had, however, to be timidly and vigorously overcome. When it was mentioned to a certain eminent railway authority that George Stephenson had spoken of sending coals by railway: 'Coals!' he exclaimed, 'they will want us to carry dung next.' The remark was reported to 'Old George,'

who was not behind his critic in the energy of his expression. 'You tell B-,' he said, 'that when he travels by railway, they carry dung now!'

The strength of the feeling against the traffic is sufficiently ill.u.s.trated by the fact that, when the London and Birmingham Railway began to carry coal, the wagons that contained it were sheeted over that their contents might not be seen; and when a coal wharf was first made at Crick station, a screen was built to hide the work from the observation of pa.s.sengers on the line. Even the possibility of carrying coal at a remunerative price was denied. 'I am very sorry,' said Lord Eldon, referring to this subject, 'to find the intelligent people of the north country gone mad on the subject of railways;' and another eminent authority declared: 'It is all very well to spend money; it will do some good; but I will eat all the coals your railway will carry.'

"George Stephenson, however, and other friends of coal, held on their way; and he declared that the time would come when London would be supplied with coal by railway. 'The strength of Britain,' he said, 'is in her coal beds; and the locomotive is destined, above all other agencies, to bring it forth. The Lord Chancellor now sits upon a bag of wool; but wool has long ceased to be emblematical of the staple commodity of England. He ought rather to sit upon a bag of coals, though it might not prove quite so comfortable a seat. Then think of the Lord Chancellor being addressed as the n.o.ble and learned lord on the coal-sack? I'm afraid it wouldn't answer, after all.'"

AN EPITAPH ON THE VICTIM OF A RAILWAY ACCIDENT.

A correspondent writes to the _Pall Mall Gazette_:-"Our poetic literature, so rich in other respects, is entirely wanting in epitaphs on the victims of railway accidents. A specimen of what may be turned in this line is to be seen on a tombstone in the picturesque churchyard of Harrow-on-the-Hill. It was, I observe, written as long ago as 1838, so that it can be reproduced without much danger of hurting the feelings of those who may have known and loved the subject of this touching elegy.

The name of the victim was Port, and the circ.u.mstances of his death are thus set forth:-

Bright was the morn, and happy rose poor Port; Gay on the train he used his wonted sport.

Ere noon arrived his mangled form they bore With pain distorted and overwhelmed with gore.

When evening came and closed the fatal day, A mutilated corpse the sufferer lay."

AN ENGINE-DRIVER'S EPITAPH.

In the cemetery at Alton, Illinois, there is a tombstone bearing the following inscription:-

"My engine is now cold and still.

No water does my boiler fill.

My c.o.ke affords its flame no more, My days of usefulness are o'er; My wheels deny their noted speed, No more my guiding hand they heed; My whistle-it has lost its tone, Its shrill and thrilling sound is gone; My valves are now thrown open wide, My f.l.a.n.g.es all refuse to glide; My clacks-alas! though once so strong, Refuse their aid in the busy throng; No more I feel each urging breath, My steam is now condensed in death; Life's railway o'er, each station past, In death I'm stopped, and rest at last."

This epitaph was written by an engineer on the old Chicago and Mississippi Railroad, who was fatally injured by an accident on the road; and while he lay awaiting the death which he knew to be inevitable, he wrote the lines which are engraved upon his tombstone.

TRAFFIC-TAKING.

Between the years 1836 and 1839, when there were many railway acts applied for, traffic-taking became a lucrative calling. It was necessary that some approximate estimate should be made as to the income which the lines might be expected to yield. Arithmeticians, who calculated traffic receipts, were to be found to prove what promoters of railways required to satisfy shareholders and Parliamentary Committees. The Eastern Counties Railway was estimated to pay a dividend of 23 per cent.; the London and Cambridge, 14 per cent.; the Sheffield and Manchester, 18 per cent. One shareholder of this company was so sanguine as to the success of the line that in a letter to the _Railway Magazine_ he calculated on a dividend of 80 per cent. Bitter indeed must have been the disappointment of those railway shareholders who pinned their faith to the estimates of traffic-takers, when instead of receiving large dividends, little was received, and in some instances the lines paid no dividend at all.

MONEY LOST AND FOUND.

On Friday night, a servant of the Birmingham Railway Company found in one of the first-cla.s.s carriages, after the pa.s.sengers had left, a pocket book containing a check on a London Bank for 2,000 and 2,500 in bank notes. He delivered the book and its contents to the princ.i.p.al officer, and it was forwarded to the gentleman to whom it belonged, his address being discovered from some letters in the pocket book. He had gone to bed, and risen and dressed himself next morning without discovering his loss, which was only made known by the restoration of the property. He immediately tendered 20 to the party who had found his money, but this being contrary to the regulations of the directors, the party, though a poor man, could not receive the reward. As the temptation, however, was so great to apply the money to his own use, the matter is to be brought before a meeting of the directors.

-_Aris's Gazette_, 1839.

ORIGIN OF COOK'S RAILWAY EXCURSIONS.

Mr. Thomas Cook, the celebrated excursionist, in an article in the _Leisure Hour_ remarks:-"As a pioneer in a wide field of thought and action, my course can never be repeated. It has been mine to battle against inaugural difficulties, and to place the system on a basis of consolidated strength. It was mine to lay the foundations of a system on which others, both individuals and companies, have builded, and there is not a phase of the tourist plans of Europe and America that was not embodied in my plans or foreshadowed in my ideas. The whole thing seemed to come to me as by intuition, and my spirit recoiled at the idea of imitation.

"The beginning was very small, and was on this wise. I believe that the Midland Railway from Derby to Rugby _via_ Leicester was opened in 1840.

At that time I knew but little of railways, having only travelled over the Leicester and Swannington line from Leicester to Long Lane, a terminus near to the Leicestershire collieries. The reports in the papers of the opening of the new line created astonishment in Leicestershire, and I had read of an interchange of visits between the Leicester and Nottingham Mechanics' Inst.i.tutes. I was an enthusiastic temperance man, and the secretary of a district a.s.sociation, which embraced parts of the two counties of Leicester and Northampton. A great meeting was to be held at Leicester, over which Lawrence Heyworth, Esq., of Liverpool-a great railway as well as temperance man-was advertised to preside. From my residence at Market Harborough I walked to Leicester (fifteen miles) to attend that meeting. About midway between Harborough and Leicester-my mind's eye has often reverted to the spot-a thought flashed through my brain, what a glorious thing it would be if the newly-developed powers of railways and locomotion could be made subservient to the promotion of temperance. That thought grew upon me as I travelled over the last six or eight miles. I carried it up to the platform, and, strong in the confidence of the sympathy of the chairman, I broached the idea of engaging a special train to carry the friends of temperance from Leicester to Loughborough and back to attend a quarterly delegate meeting appointed to be held there in two or three weeks following. The chairman approved, the meeting roared with excitement, and early next day I proposed my grand scheme to John Fox Bell, the resident secretary of the Midland Counties Railway Company. Mr. Paget, of Loughborough, opened his park for a gala, and on the day appointed about five hundred pa.s.sengers filled some twenty or twenty-five open carriages-they were called 'tubs' in those days-and the party rode the enormous distance of eleven miles and back for a shilling, children half-price. We carried music with us, and music met us at the Loughborough station. The people crowded the streets, filled windows, covered the house-tops, and cheered us all along the line, with the heartiest welcome. All went off in the best style and in perfect safety we returned to Leicester; and thus was struck the keynote of my excursions, and the social idea grew upon me."

THE DEODAND.

It was a principle of English common law derived from the feudal period, that anything through the instrumentality of which death occurred was forfeited to the crown as a deodand; accordingly down to the year 1840 and even later, we find, in all cases where persons were killed, records of deodands levied by the coroners' juries upon locomotives. These appear to have been arbitrarily imposed and graduated in amount accordingly as circ.u.mstances seemed to excite in greater or less degree the sympathies or the indignation of the jury. In November, 1838, for instance, a locomotive exploded upon the Liverpool and Manchester line, killing its engineer and fireman; and for this escapade a deodand of twenty pounds was a.s.sessed upon it by the coroner's jury; while upon another occasion, in 1839, when the locomotive struck and killed a man and horse at a street crossing, the deodand was fixed at no less a sum than fourteen hundred pounds, the full value of the engine. Yet in this last case there did not appear to be any circ.u.mstances rendering the company liable in civil damages. The deodand seems to have been looked upon as a species of rude penalty imposed on the use of dangerous appliances, a sharp reminder to the companies to look sharply after their locomotives and employes. Thus upon the 24th of December, 1841, on the Great Western Railway, a train, while moving through a thick fog at a high rate of speed, came suddenly in contact with a ma.s.s of earth which had slid from the embankment at the side on to the track. Instantly the whole rear of the train was piled up on the top of the first carriage, which happened to be crowded with pa.s.sengers, eight of whom were killed on the spot, while seventeen others were more or less injured. The coroner's jury returned a verdict of accidental death, and at the same time, as if to give the company a forcible hint to look closer to the condition of its embankment, a deodand of one hundred pounds was levied on the locomotive and tender.

AN UNFORTUNATE DISCUSSION.

Two gentlemen sitting opposite each other in a railway carriage got into a political argument; one was elderly and a staunch Conservative, the other was young and an ultra-Radical. It may be readily conceived that, as the argument went on, the abuse became fast and furious; all sorts of unpleasant phrases and epithets were bandied about, personalities were freely indulged in, and the other pa.s.sengers were absolutely compelled to interfere to prevent a _fracas_. At the end of the journey the disputants parted in mutual disgust, and looking unutterable things. It so happened that the young man had a letter of introduction to an influential person in the neighbourhood respecting a legal appointment which was then vacant, which the young man desired to obtain, and which the elderly gentleman had the power to secure. The young pet.i.tioner, first going to his hotel and making himself presentable, sallied forth on his errand. He reached the n.o.ble mansion of the person to whom his letter of introduction was addressed, was ushered into an ante-room, and there awaited, with mingled hope and fear, the all-important interview.

After a few minutes the door opened and, horrible to relate! he who entered was the young man's travelling opponent, and thus the opponents of an hour since stood face to face. The confusion and humiliation on the one side, and the hauteur and coldness on the other, may be readily imagined. Sir Edward C-, however-for such he was-although he instantly recognized his recent antagonist, was too well-bred to make any allusion to the transaction. He took the letter of introduction in silence, read it, folded it up, and returned it to the presenter with a bitter smile and the following speech: "Sir, I am infinitely obliged to my friend, Mr.

-, for recommending to my notice a gentleman whom he conceives to be so well fitted for the vacant post as yourself; but permit me to say that, inasmuch as the office you are desirous to fill exists upon a purely Conservative tenure, and can only be appropriately administered by a person of Conservative tendency, I could not think of doing such violence to your well-known political principles as to recommend you for the post in question." With these words and another smile more grim than before, Sir Edward C- bowed the chapfallen pet.i.tioner out, and he quickly took his way to the railway station, secretly vowing never again to enter into political argument with an unknown railway traveller.

-_The Railway Traveller's Handy Book_.

DOG TICKET.

Shortly after telegraphs were laid alongside of railways, a princ.i.p.al officer of a railway company got into a compartment of a stopping train at an intermediate station. The train had hardly left, when an elderly gentleman, in terms of endearment, invited what turned out to be a little Skye terrier to come out of its concealment under the seat. The dog came out, jumped up, and appeared to enjoy his journey until the speed of the train slackened previous to stopping at a station, the dog then instinctively retreated to its hiding place, and came out again in due course after the train had started. The officer of the company left the train at a station or two afterwards. On its arrival at the London ticket platform the gentleman delivered up the tickets for his party.

"Dog ticket, sir, please." "Dog ticket, what dog ticket?" "Ticket, sir, for Skye terrier, black and tan, with his ears nearly over his eyes; travelling, for comfort's sake, under the seat opposite to you, sir, in a large carpet bag, red ground with yellow cross-bars." The gentleman found resistance useless; he paid the fare demanded, when the ticket-collector-who throughout the scene had never changed a muscle-handed him a ticket that he had prepared beforehand. "Dog ticket, sir; gentlemen not allowed to travel with a dog without a dog ticket; you will have to give it up in London." "Yes, but how did you know I had a dog? That's what puzzles me!" "Ah, sir," said the ticket-collector, relaxing a little, but with an air of satisfaction, "the telegraph is laid on our railway. Them's the wires you see on the outside; we find them very useful in our business, etc. Thank you, sir, good morning."

It is needless to tell what part the princ.i.p.al officer played in this little drama. On arrival in London the dog ticket was duly claimed, a little word to that effect having been sent up by a previous train to be sure to have it demanded, although, as a usual practice, dog tickets are collected at the same time as those of pa.s.sengers.

-_Roney's Rambles on Railways_.

THE ELECTRIC CONSTABLE.