The Dorset County Express and Agricultural Gazette. — 1858-04-06 (Dorchester, Dorset, England)

RAILWAY COMPETITION.—The London and NorthWestern Railway runs from London, says the Times, to Manchester; the Great Northern Railway, in connexion with a line between Mumhester and Lincoln, does the same. The distance between the capital of England and the capital of Lancashire is some 200 miles, and very naturally might the public be gratified at being carried for a couple of guineas, and in five hours and a half, over a journey which in the old times of patting would have cost two days and £2O. It happens, however, that these two railway companies have now quarrelled. They have deliberately set to work, each in its own sphere, to destroy their own resources, cut away their own profits, and consume their own funds. Each, in order to destroy the other, makes the most desperate and incessant attempts at suicide. The immensity of the interests at stake may be inferred from the fact that the last published reports set the receipts of one single week at £95,419 for the London and North-Western, £21,906 for the Great Northern, and £9,142 for the Manchester, Sheffield, and Lincoln. The remunerative fare required from a passenger between London and Manchester was 425. where the speed was express; it dropped to 355. and 258. for the Ist and 2nd classes respectively in ordinary trains, but the work could not be done for less than 15s. Bd. even at the lowest rates prescribed by Parliament for the benefit of the million. In other words, £1 lie. 4d. represented the very smallest sum for which, except under the indulgent conditions of return tickets or excursion trains, the humblest class of passengers could be conveyed from London to Manchester and back again. Now, however, the companies have respectively announced their readiness to carry people over this very ground for the sum of se. —that is to say, for a sixth part of the lowest proper charge, so that they deprive themselves by their own acts and deeds, as far as this great branch of the traffic is concerned, of at least five-sixths of the receipts which they are fairly earning. The 'trunk, is to see which can bold out longest against ruin on the shortest possible road to that end; and the prospect, if the thing could ever cocas to an end, is that one company will lose its all and the other be left only one degree better off. Two great trading companies, representing capital to the amount of millions upon millions, are engaged in the work of destroying their own property, and have pitted themselves against each other in the job. Bo vast a capital is now embarked in railways that its management is an affair of national interest. The amount of money invested in railways is equal to a third of the whole national debt. A difference of 1 per oent, in the returns of this capital is equal to a difference of £3,000,000 a year. The complaint of everybody is that railway property is unjustly depreciated; and hereafter these rivals will recruit their finances by increase of fares, by reduction of accommodation, by retrenchment in the general expenditure upon the line, and by all those expedients which curtail the money's worth of their customers, while the exhaustion of their resources will be appealed to as precluding the adoption of any improvement.