The Sun.
London, England, 1865-11-23 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TIDIES.--Much as we have gained by the substi-
tution of railway travelling for more primitive
modes of locomotion, there is much also that we

have sacrificed. We have lost, for example, all the
genial and humorous traditions of the road. A

coach, even when reduced to the utmost regularity,
had something of human nature about it. The
coachman, and even the guard, like all the other
classes of old English society, had special humours
and sociable touches of nature which made them kin

with all their passengers. There was a rough and
natural homeliness about them which made them
human beings as well as coachmen. . There was a
predominance, too, of natural life about the coach

-which sustained and, perhaps, created this feeling.
The actual machine, the wood and iron, was the
smallest part of the whole. Even the horses were

a much more prominent object than the body of
the coach, and at every 10 or 12 miles they were
surrounded by a suite of attendants, while the coach
itself was almost deprived of its inanimate appear-
ance by the swarm of human life which covered it

inside and out. The travellers in their long
cold journeys felt the influence of so much na-

ture and life about them, and grew cheery and
friendly with each other. All these pleasant
features are now completely gone. A railway
offers a scene which is the opposite of this
rough and genial humanity in every par-
ticular. Human beings and natural life are the
least part of it. Iron and wood are now every-
thing. What are all the passengers and the officials
to that vast mass of hard and lifeless material which
rushes with the irresistible force of an unconscious
mechanisni over the rigid line carved out for it ?
The driver sitting on the engine boasts of the pace
he goes, but he is little more than the fly in the
fable who sat on the axletree of the chariot wheel
and said, " What a dust do I raise !" The officials
show the influence of association, and merge their
humanity in the overpowering uniformity of the
great machine. There are no human angles about
railways or the people connected with them ; a
moderate curve is the utmost variation they attain.
The travellers have little more relation to each other
than to the seats they sit upon or to the partitions
at their sides ; while to the officials they are of no
more interest than the oil which is applied to the
wheels. They keep the machine going, and that it
should be kept going is the only object to be at-
tained. All this is a real loss, but it is one of the
inevitable penalties we pay for our progress. Civi-
lisation consists, to a large extent, in the substi-
tution of mechanism for human energies and hearts
and hands. But there is one advantage which, at
all events, we might expect to gain from this
mechanical tyranny. A machine is, at all events,
regular. What it does, it does systematically and
punctually. Like a watch, it will work round to
exactly the same place at the end of the same inter-
val. In the same way, whatever disadvantages rail-
ways may have, we might have been expected to
congratulate ourselves that they must at least be
punctual. With an iron road, and iron wheels ex-
actly fitted to it and iron mechanism in every, part,
and the number of trains and their order under the
absolute control of the directors, one would think
that the machine would perform its work in exactly
the time allotted to it, that the trains would pulsate
through the stations with the regularity of the tide,
and annoy us only by punishing the unpunctuality
of human nature. Strange to say, this is the very
point in which railways are most defective. The
other day a correspondent called attention to the
invariable unpunctuality of the Brighton Railway,
and his complaint was supported by a multitude of
fellow-sufferers. It is no matter whether the dis-
tance travelled be long or short. Trains into Lon-
don from Croydon or Richmond or Sydenbam are
often just as much behind their time as from Bir-
mingham or York. Indeed, the trains from short
distances are even more unpunctual in proportion
than those from long ones. One of the most signal
illustrations of the extent of the evil may be con-
stantly witnessed in the suburban traffic at Clapham
Junction. Of the innumerable trains which succeed
each other at that heart of so many railway arteries,
not one, probably, is ever punctual, and the conse-
quence is that the officials on the platform are con-
stantly ignorant what train it is which is approach-
ing at a given moment. A main-line train, for all
they know, may have come up to the last Junction
before the branch train which should have preceded
it, and the whole series of trains may be irremediably
confused. In fact, the hour at which the trains
start on their journeys is now the only time which
is ever observed. Once dismissed from the terminus,
they feel their way along as the signalmen from
station to station will let them, and get to their
journey's end, not when they ought, but when they
can. In short, from all parts of the country, and
from all classes of society, we receive loud and
incessant complaints of the inveterate violation of
this primary duty of railway companies. The in-
conveniences which the railway companies inflict
upon men of business must be beyond calculation.
The great majority of them are those to whom it is
of the utmost importance to be in the City or at
their offices by a certain time. They have taken
advantage of the facilities held out by the railways
to remove their families from town, presuming that
the machine-like regularity of the railway will enable
them to be as sure of being at their business at the
proper hour as if they lived in town and walked to
their offices. They find themselves entirely deluded.
To be ten or twenty minutes or half-an-hour late is
a contingency they must any day be prepared for.
Such a state of things is far more than a fanciful
annoyance. To these men time is money, and they
are thus compelled to acquiesce in a waste which
they would never endure if they were their own
masters. Business in London is notoriously and
scrupulously punctual, and it is disgraceful that the
only clement of unpunctuality should be contributed
by the very machinery which ought most easily to
avoid it. It should be remembered, moreover, that
this side of the matter presents what is far from
being the most serious view of the evil. It is un-

questionably to unpunctuality that the greater part
of the risks of railway travelling are to be ascribed ;
and it is not only, therefore, the time, the money,
and the convenience, but the lives of the public
which the directors thus sacrifice to a gratuitous
carelessness. From all these points of view
the evil has now reached such a pitch that
it behoves every one, for his own sake and
for the sake of the public in general, to protest by
every possible means against a constantly in-
creasing abuse. A remonstrance which reached us
in the summer referred the evil chiefly to a foolish
economy of the directors in their staff and mate-
rials ; and there can be no doubt that a portion of
the evil is to be attributed to this case. But the
remonstrants made another suggestion, which
appears to us to point to a still more common mis-
take, and to one which might be at once remedied.
They observe that the public would. very much
rather the directors engaged to convey them more
slowly than that they should hold out to them their
present promises and uniformly fail to fulfil them.
No doubt of it; and the greater part of the evil
would be remedied if the directors would act upon
this , plain dictate of common sense. They must
know perfectly well that the engagements they
issue in their monthly time-tables are more than
they can perform, and they have no right to delude
the public into taking season-tickets by holding out
expectations which they have neither the power nor
the intention to satisfy. No doubt the times which
they fix for the trains might be easily kept if each
train had the line all to itself and was subject to
no interruptions. But they must now be thoroughly
aware, in the present condition of the traffic on
the main and suburban lines, that every train
is, in point of fact, more or less delayed by the
crush of traffic on the line, and that in calculat-
ing its time it is necessary to take this delay
into account. The case is now precisely the same
with a railway as with a street in London. A Han-
som cab might, if the road were clear, get from
Charing-cross to the Bank in ten minutes ; but in
practice the road is never clear, and few cabmen
would engage to do the distance in less than half-
an-hour. A railway into London is now compara-
tively as crowded as the Strand, and a preciselysimi-
lar allowance should be made for the time required
to traverse it. Take another instance. A gentle-
man observes from the time-books that by a certain
train he can get down to Portsmouth in good time
to catch the last boat to the Isle of Wight. The
train, however, is 20 minutes or half-an-hair behind
time, and he misses the steamer. He remonstrates,
and learns that the case is always the same. The
train is never in time. In short, the directors, with
the best intentions we dare say, have promised more
than they can perform. They must know this quite
as well as the officials at Portsmouth, and they have
no right, for the sake of saving their credit in print,
to put the public to all the inconvenience and ex
pense which such an incident as this may involve
It would probably make little cr no difference to
most passengers to start half an hour earlier, whereas
it may be a most serious matter to them to be thus
disappointed. This is a point of management which
can be at once amended, and if the directors do not
adopt a course so plainly incumbent on them it will
amount to a wilful and permanent breach of faith.
Either they must add largely to their staff, and
greatly increase the efficiency of their material, or
they must be content to be more modest in their
promises.
POST.—The Court of Queen's Bench was engaged
during the greater part of Tuesday in hearing a
demurrer argued in which the point substantially at
issue was one of vast public importance. The argu-
ments will be resumed to-day, but as it is not im-
probable that the court will reserve its judgment,
and as it would be mere affectation to suggest that
the decision would in any way be affected by any