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 4'/; 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 5'/s 
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, 

Statistical Observations on the Railway System 15] 

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 ae per 

12* 

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. 

First. published in Die Presse, No. 22, i 
January 23, 1862 Published in English for the first 
time