The Great Eastern page 2

As it was mentioned in the Act, which was obtained in 1836, he had to adopt a gauge of 5 ft. 0½ in., another of Rennie's trivial variations, and the line was so short that he thought it would not pay to use locomotives. It measured 3| miles, and was worked by two endless ropes, one for the up line, one for the down, some fourteen miles of rope in all. The working was on the slip principle, the two front coaches going through, the third slipping off at Poplar as did one for every station, the last being for Shad well, the first station of the seven on the road. On the up journey the coaches were each pinned on at the same time, so that they came into Fenchurch Street separately with the same intervals between them as there were between the stations, all but the Blackwall pair which arrived together. Really an ingenious and remarkable railway, the only one on which the train started from every station at the same time; and on it was used Cooke & Wheatstone's new galvanic telegraph. Needless to say the ropes wore out and were abandoned for locomotives; the stationary engines were removed to the City Flour Mills near Blackfriars Bridge; and the line - opened in 1840 - which soon became the dirtiest in the south of England, ended its separate existence in 1865 when The Great Eastern took it over, and thus obtained a second London terminus, the right to run into St. Pancras making a third.

Slipping the end carriage or carriages, not, however, in Blackwall style, is still practised, though not to the same extent as formerly; and The Great Eastern has more slips than any other line except the Great Western, which has more than double as many. In the old separate brake days there was no trouble about this slipping, but when the continuous brakes came in there were difficulties concerning the brake-hose, which put it out of fashion until the needful invention got a chance.

The slipping apparatus consists of a hinged hook which opens by the withdrawal of a pin or some other obvious device. Before it is put into action, the valve in the air-pipe is turned off by the guard in the carriage that is to be detached, either by pulling a cord or by reaching his arm out of the window, the uncoupling of the carriage and the shutting of the valve being sometimes worked pneumatically. The communication being cut off, the slip-carriage becomes a self-contained unit with a small supply of brake-power of its own in addition to that afforded by the hand brake.

When the carriage is to be slipped the train is checked in speed slightly, so as to relieve the couplings a little, and on the communication being severed the train increases in speed so as to get out of the way as soon as possible. The distance from the station at which the carriage is set free depends upon the speed, the gradient, and the slipperiness of the rail, which is dependent on the weather. One frosty day, for instance, when snow lay deep on the ground, the writer was in a slip for Luton which travelled through that station half the way to Leagrave, and had to be pushed back ingloriously by hand.

It is as well to be cautious in getting into last carriages, lest they should be slips. At St. Pancras on a Nottingham race-day, when the same slip was full, a corpulent racing-man, notwithstanding protest, forced his way in at the last moment, and stood making remarks intended to be irritating until the carriage stopped at Luton and the other passengers left him alone. "All change here!" said the guard; and when the bookmaker stepped out on to the platform and found the carriage alone in its glory, and the train disappearing in the distance, his look of surprise and disgust - and his language - amply repaid us for our unpleasant journey. Nowadays any number of trailers up to eight are slipped, so that there are not only slip carriages but slip trains, and slips are fitted with pneumatic horns as if they were motor-cars, the horns being worked by the feet; and there are head-lights and tail-lights for safety purposes, just as for an ordinary train.

Some sixty years ago the old Blackwall and the Eastern Counties joined together in forming the London, Tilbury, & Southend, which was opened in 1854, and after being run by the contractors for twenty-one years, mustered up courage enough in 1875 to undertake its own working. Since then have come Tilbury Docks and other developments, and a promising future.

Londonwards, the Tilbury's own line ends at Gas Factory junction, continued jointly with the Metropolitan District to Whitechapel. By running powers it reaches Fenchurch Street, and, by a branch from Barking, it has its own metals to Woodgrange Park or thereabouts, whence by Forest Gate it runs into Liverpool Street, and, by the Tottenham & Forest Gate, St. Pancras. From Barking its main line goes straight to Shoeburyness through South-end, giving off a branch to Romford at Upminster, whence another goes south to join the old line that, through Rainham and Purfleet, reaches Tilbury, and so continues to Pitsea on the main line, throwing off a branch half-way at Stanford-le-Hope to Thames Haven, which is nothing like so important a place as at one time it promised to be.

This company has 79 miles of track, on which in a year it carries 300,000 first-class passengers, and nearly 29 millions of third-class, besides dealing with, say, a million tons of minerals and merchandise. Its carriages are of varnished teak, and its engines were green or black until it recently ventured on a new departure by painting its new ones a neat, light grey that is at any rate smart and distinctive while it is fresh, and is quakerish enough to have been appropriate on the Stockton & Darlington.

It is the smallest of the railways using three London terminal stations, but it is not the shortest railway by any means. There are many much less in length, the shortest in the kingdom being the Deptford that belongs to the London Corporation, and measures 484 yards, the gross revenue of which is £10 per annum.

It is by running powers on the London, Tilbury, & Southend that The Great Eastern gets from Forest Gate to Barking. By the same means on the Midland it runs from Highgate Road into St. Pancras; and on the Midland & Great Northern Joint - one of the lines on which the engines are painted yellow - it works in the north-east corner of Norfolk to Sheringham. Croydon it reaches by way of the East London and Brighton. By its joint line with the Great Northern from March it goes south to Ramsey and Huntingdon, and north through Spalding. Sleaford, Lincoln, and Gainsborough, then, by a short stretch of the Great Northern, on to the joint again to Doncaster, and thence by running powers over the Great Northern and North Eastern its trains reach York. You will find its through carriages at Rugby, Coventry, Birmingham, Wakefield, Sheffield, Manchester, Warrington, and Liverpool, putting these towns in communication with Parkeston - whence the boats ply to the Hook of Holland, Antwerp, Hamburg, and Ezbjerg - or with Norwich, Yarmouth, and Lowestoft.

In addition to the Yarmouth trade, and its docks at Lowestoft and quays at the mouth of the Orwell, it has extensive accommodation in the Thames district. At Canning Town on Bow Creek it has a big lighterage business, at Poplar there is the Blackwall Pepper Warehouse, dealing mainly with grain and farming sundries, just as Devonshire Street concerns itself with hay and straw and coals. Bishopsgate has five acres of warehouse floor space, and Goodman's Yard almost as many; and then there is Spitalfields, devoting itself largely to eggs and flour. At Stratford the company has a little Covent Garden, and at Tufnell Park a sort of minor Deptford for the Islington cattle market close by. At Whitechapel it has its coal headquarters, whence it sends the coal trains, as well as the eight trains per day of vegetables and other commodities, by a 40-ton truck hoist taking two trucks at a time, through the Thames Tunnel on East London metals to New Cross for distribution in the south. For quick collection, rapid despatch, and early delivery it ranks with the best. Once, for example, it brought up during the night 950 tons of green peas in 300 trucks, and delivered them throughout London before nine o'clock next morning. This sort of thing is not so easy on The Great Eastern as other lines, for ever since the 21st of June 1897 it has been running passenger trains in and out of Liverpool Street all through the night, its booking offices never closing; and in the early morning it has to deal with the workmen's rush to town in the overcrowded carriages we hear of. This overcrowding, however, is not so much due to the lack of facilities provided by the company as to the desire of passengers to travel by particular trains and in particular carriages - the first they reach or those that pull up nearest the exits - and, so far as the last trains are concerned, to the crowd who are not workmen but take advantage of coming cheaply to business though they may have to wait about the City until their office opens.

The profitable working of trains is not so simple as it may seem. Any person can run a train from one place to another when the road is clear, but the difficulty is to get it back again fairly well filled. There is nothing more wasteful than an empty train or a train kept idle for hours, with so many carriages, and the engine, as it were in quarantine.

The ideal manager is he who can keep his rolling stock on the move earning money all day long. So many coaches he has to deal with, and none of these must he hang up doing nothing if he can help it. Further, he must fill every seat if he can, but have no passengers standing. On an electric line it really does not matter to him whether the coaches be overcrowded or not, for the power with which he hauls them comes from the central station, and it makes no difference if the load be in one train or half a dozen; but on a line worked by steam it is to his interest to prevent overcrowding, as it increases the weight of the train and throws more work on to the engine than he has provided for, while the other trains that run light require a less powerful engine. The carrying capacity of trains is limited by the length of the platforms and the length c ' the sidings, just as the length of the wheel-base of the coaches is regulated by the length of the locking-bar; and if more than one train is necessary to carry the passengers it is ridiculous to blame the company because the passengers insist on going by the last.

No account of The Great Eastern, however brief, would be complete without some reference to the twopenny fare question. By their Act of 1864, authorising the extension of their metropolitan lines, they are compelled to carry workmen at twopence for the return journey from Edmonton and Walthamstow. Now Edmonton is 8¾ miles from Liverpool Street and Walthamstow is 7, and the obligation means a journey of 17½ miles or 14 miles respectively for the couple of pence. The railway journey costing so little, there is nothing to wonder at in the acres of small dwellings that have overspread those once quiet rural retreats.

There was a time when these twopenny trains paid their expenses without adequate return on the capital spent on the lines over which they run. Then by the increase of the traffic and the consequent increase in the capital, due to the enlargements needed for the safe working of the greater number of trains, the return on the capital became less; and then the rise in working expenses wiped this out altogether, so that in 1899 the receipts equalled the working expenses and left nothing over. Soon the working began to cost more than the receipts, and as that cost of working has increased the loss has become so great as to more than counterbalance the profit made on the ordinary traffic.

The cost of working a railway is not the same all over the system. In the neighbourhood of large towns it is always greater than in the country districts, and in the suburbs of London it is much greater than elsewhere, owing to the short sections, the shorter hours of labour, the higher rates of pay, the heavy train loads and frequent stoppages, the short mileage worked by enginemen, the greater cost of coal in London, the heavier rating, and the larger number of stations on the line.

The exact proportion of the additional cost thus incurred was very carefully investigated by The Great Eastern Company in 1903, and these investigations proved that the cost of working in their London district was at least 21'12 per cent, higher than the average of the whole line; in addition to which there are other factors impossible to estimate, which bring the actual cost of working still higher. This figure was submitted in evidence to the Royal Commission on London Traffic and to the Select Committee on Workmen's Trains, and its accuracy has not been questioned. In the Board of Trade report on London Traffic for 1907 the actual cost for working is put as at least 3s. 10'2d. per train mile, and if we set against it the 2s. 10'6d. per train mile, which is what the receipts amount to, we can quite understand why The Great Eastern wants no more twopenny workmen's fares, which some people are so anxious to burden them with. The policy that forces a company to carry passengers at an unprofitable fare, and then raises the rates and otherwise adds to the expenses to increase the loss, must inevitably end in trouble, not only to the company but to the community, which gains nothing by the company's ruin.

In regard to the London dock and riverside traffic, it has been said that The Great Eastern has a monopoly, a description which the company does not accept. It urges that as the North London has lines into Millwall and East and West India Docks, with running powers to other companies, and the Great Northern, London & North Western, and Midland have running powers over The Great Eastern, their lines in this district constitute not a monopoly but a public highway.

At one time, prior to the advent of the Midland and Great Northern Joint lines into Norfolk, and the severe competition which has recently arisen in the London and suburban districts from electric trams and motor omnibuses, The Great Eastern system as a whole might have merited the title of a monopoly; although, serving as it does such a considerable extent of coast, it always has sea competition to meet. Still, it was formerly somewhat similarly situated to the North Eastern, which frankly accepts the description; and just as The Great Eastern has the Tilbury line in its south-eastern corner, so had the North Eastern the Hull & Barnsley until the recent agreement; and the North Eastern has the Lancashire & Yorkshire in its southwestern corner, answering in a similar way to the North London.