Statistical Observations on the Railway System (1862)

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

The English railways are a generation old, 30 years. Except for the national debt, no other branch of the national wealth has developed so rapidly to such an enormous size. According to a recently published Blue Book, the capital invested in the railways until 1860 came to £348,130,127, of which £190,791,067 were raised by common stock, £67,873,840 by preferred stock, £7,576,878 by bonds, and £81,888,546 by current loans. The total capital amounts to about half the national debt and is five times the yearly revenue from all the real estate in Great Britain. This parvenu form of wealth, the most colossal offspring of modern industry, a remarkable economic hybrid whose feet are rooted in the earth and whose head lives on the Stock Exchange, has given aristocratic landowning a powerful rival, and the middle class an army of new auxiliary troops.

In 1860, the steel rails stretched for 22,000 English miles, counting double-track and branch lines. On average, therefore, 733 miles of track have been laid every year over the last 30 years. This sort of average figure, however, is even more deceptive in this branch of industry than in any other, as regards expressing the actual living process. Some years of the railway mania, such as 1844 and 1845, conquered the bulk of the territory at the double. The other years fill things out gradually, connect the major lines, branch out, expand relatively slowly. During these years the production of railways falls below the average level. An enormous amount of work precedes the laying of the rails. According to the data provided by Robert Stephenson as early as 1854 some 70 miles of railway tunnels had been driven through, there were 25,000 railway bridges and numerous viaducts, one of which, near London, was more than 11 miles long. The earthworks, 70,000 cubic yards per mile, would fill an area of 550 million cubic yards. Piled up in the form of a pyramid, the diameter would be half an (English) mile and the height a mile and a half, a mountain of earth beside which St. Paul’s Cathedral would shrink to Lilliputian size. But since the time of Robert Stephenson’s estimate the length of railways has increased by a third.

The “eternal way”, as the English have baptised the railway, is not immortal by any means. It is subject to constant metabolism. The iron, which is continually being lost by wear, oxidation, and new manufacture, has constantly to be replaced. It has been calculated that a locomotive wears off 2.2 pounds in a run of 60 miles, every empty car 472 ounces, every ton of freight an ounce and a half, and that the railways like the London-North Western Line will last about 20 years. The yearly total of iron worn off is estimated at half a pound per yard; 24,000 tons of iron are required for replacements over the whole system in its present extent every year and 240,000 tons for the annual installation. But the rails form the bones and need to be replaced much more slowly than the wooden supports of the rails. The wood part of the apparatus of the network requires an annual input of 300,000 trees, which need an area of 6,000 acres to grow in.

When the railway is completed, it needs locomotives, coal, water, railway cars, and finally working personnel to operate it. The number of locomotives was 5,801 in 1860, or more than one locomotive for every two miles. Like most machines in their infancy, locomotives were at first clumsy-looking, awkward in motion, still bound up to a certain extent in reminiscences of the old-fashioned instrument they replaced, and relatively cheap. The first English locomotive, four-wheeled, weighing barely 6 tons and priced at £550, has gradually been replaced by steam engines priced at £3,000, which pull 30 passenger cars, each weighing 572 tons, at 30 miles an hour, or 500 tons of goods at 20 miles per hour. Like their predecessors, the horses, individual locomotives have their own names and have attained varying degrees of fame for their names.

The Liverpool, belonging to the North Western Line, pours out 1,140 horsepower at full load. A monster like this consumes a ton of coal and 1,000 to 1,500 gallons of water daily. The organism of these iron horses is extremely delicate. It has no less than 5,416 parts, which are assembled as carefully as the parts of a watch. A railway train going 50 (English) miles per hour has a sixth of the velocity of a cannon ball. Reckoning the average cost of a locomotive at £2,200, the outlay on 5,801 locomotives comes to over £12,700,000. Every minute of the year 4 to 5 tons of coal turn 20 to 25 tons of water into steam. Stephenson remarks that the water thus converted into steam would be an adequate daily water supply for the entire population of Liverpool. The quantity of fuel consumed is almost as much as Britain’s total coal exports four years ago, more than half the entire consumption of London.

The 5,801 locomotives are followed, as baggage, by 15,076 passenger cars and 180,574 goods wagons, which represent a total capital of £20 million. A train made up of all the locomotives and cars would take the entire line from Brighton to Aberdeen, over 600 miles.

More than 7,000 trains run every day, over seven trains every minute throughout the twenty-four hours. Last year passengers and goods travelled over 100 million miles, more than four thousand times the circumference of the earth. Every second of the year over 3 miles of railway are covered by trains. Twelve millions cattle, sheep, and pigs made railway journeys; 90 million tons of goods and minerals were transported. The minerals came to twice the quantity of all the other goods.

The gross revenue totalled £28 million. The production costs, apart from the wear of the railway itself, came to 41 per cent of the revenue for the Midland Company, 42 per cent for the Yorkshire and Lancashire railway line, 46 per cent for the West Midland Line and 55 to 56 per cent for the Great Northern Line; the average outlay for all the lines came to £13,187,368, or 47 per cent of revenue.

The London and North Western Line ranks first in size. Originally limited to the London and Birmingham Line, the Grand Junction, the Manchester and Liverpool Line, it now extends with its branch lines from London to Carlisle and from Peterborough to Leeds in the east and to Holyhead in the west. Its management controls over a thousand miles of railways and is at the head of an industrial army of about 20,000 men. Construction of the railway line costs over £36 million. Every hour of the day and night its gross revenue is £500; its weekly law costs are £1,000. The net yield of this railway, as of most of the others, fell relatively as their extent increased to cover less populous and less industrial districts. Their shares, issued at £100, gradually sank from £240 to £92-93, and dividends from 10 per cent to 3 3/4 per cent. As the scale of operations grew enormously, for this as well as other railways, control by the shareholders decreased, the management gained greater power and mismanagement ensued.