The Blue Book tells us that goods train-miles travelled are 161,684,000.

161,684,000 40,307 trains 4,011 = 4,011 miles

per annum.

miles train per per annum 311 working days 13 miles per train per day.

train per

=

As the individual wagons cannot travel farther than the trains of which they are composed, the wagons cannot go more than thirteen miles a day, and some go much less. Therefore the average work of a wagon, at the outside, is to carry seventeen hundredweight a distance of thirteen miles in twenty-four hours.

17 cwt. × 13 miles = about 11 ton-miles per day.1

It must not, however, be supposed that seventeen hundredweight is the average weight carried by a goods wagon. Sir George Paish tells us that this average weight is 34 tons. We have already shown that ton-mileage is arrived at by multiplying the load carried by the distance travelled. We know the tonmileage is eleven ton-miles. We have 3'4 tons as the load; we therefore divide the eleven ton-miles by the load and we have:

II ton-miles

2

We know now that the wagon travels laden 3:53 miles in twenty-four hours, which at twenty miles an hour average speed will occupy ten and a half minutes. Thus it is obvious that a wagon is worked ten and a half minutes out of the twenty-four hours, or less than per cent. of its time. It will be remembered that these are outside figures and that only 311 days are allowed for. We have, therefore, fifty

1 The "ton-miles" are arrived at by multiplying the load conveyed by the distance travelled. Wherever the word "ton-mile " is used this is what is meant.

2 See Companies' working time-tables.

four days' margin, on which considerable work is done, although not full work. It will readily be admitted, therefore, that the figure is more probably per cent. than per cent. This calculation, which has been made before, and was put before railway managers so long ago as 1910, has aroused considerable umbrage in railway circles, but no figures have been put forward in attempted amendment.

It has been necessary to work this matter out in detail and thereby forestall captious and disingenuous fault-finding.

If the

the figures are incorrect, let them be

corrected.

Many have tried. Whole firms, amazed by such a conclusion, have gone into the matter with great care, only to arrive at the same result.

To continue: these 1,410,746 wagons, doing no useful work for over 99 per cent. of their time, idly encumber at least £300,000,000 worth of land. The value of these wagons-of which it is proposed to show that 80 per cent. could be dispensed with— estimated at £90 apiece, gives the gigantic total of £126,000,000 of money, requiring renewal every twenty years, and yearly incurring a heavy cost of repair. Mr. Currington, formerly Controller of Rolling Stock on the Great Central Railway, gives the life of a goods wagon at twenty-five years. Sir Guildford Molesworth puts it at sixteen years.

If any business man who used a hundred carts employed a system which permitted of their use for one week only in the course of a year, he would hardly be considered sane, and would not be tolerated by his shareholders, if he had any.

The railways are practising such a system, and they practise it entrenched behind the protecting walls of the Board of Trade. It is palpably monstrous that this department, supposed to supervise railways, should tolerate such a scandal.

The effective laden mobility of a goods wagon is per cent. of its existence !

If there were no remedy at hand for this it would still be a bounden duty to continue hammering the fact into the minds of the public until a remedy was discovered. To say that, in this mechanical age, no remedy can be found, is an insult to average common sense. It is certain that there is a remedy.

Another great source of loss is the waste of locomotive energy.

Here we have another startling diagram (Fig. 5), illustrating time occupied in unnecessary and mischievous work-mischievous because, putting aside the shunting-yard human casualties and damage to freight, which are very serious matters, there is the damage done to rolling-stock, which may not find its full expression till some time after, and then in a terrible disaster.

It is quite possible to eliminate shunting and marshalling, and with it would go the unnecessary wagons, the unnecessary shunting-locomotives, the unnecessary goods yards, and all that is involved in these three things.

The locomotive would then most certainly be free to fulfil its proper function of haulage for which it was designed. Its output of useful labour would be then 300 per cent. more than it actually now is.

The locomotive was never intended to be used as a sorting machine.

That shunting and marshalling must be eliminated, unless railways are to be run at a loss, can be proved by the following facts:

First, it should be clearly grasped that the cost of drawing trains from station to station, including the upkeep of permanent way, signalling, etc., is a very small item indeed of railway expenditure. Let it be put in this way. Suppose that the reader desires to send a ton of woollen goods from London to Leeds.