important to remember that these houses are rarely visited by a wheeled vehicle.

The traffic with wheeled vehicles is therefore almost entirely confined to the remaining 10 per cent.

It is precisely to areas like the City of London, in which practically every house is a business establishment, that the new system will bring the greatest relief.

There is not the least necessity for the streets of the City of London to be congested with traffic. This is a wide claim, but it will be shown to be justified.

The chapter on Cartage will fully demonstrate this. A suitable building for the work proposed has now been described, and a building which will accommodate any estimated increase of traffic for another hundred years.

The cartage of these goods in the London area has been provided for at a fraction of the present cost, with the additional advantage of relieving the streets of London of 80 per cent. of its trade vehicles.

The arrangements for discharging all goods arriving by road or rail into the Clearing House have been clearly set forth.

The main point of the proposed system, however, has yet to be put before the reader. The problem to be solved is how to sort goods at the highest possible speed, together with the co-ordinately rapid unloading and reloading of road and rail vehicles.

It has been estimated that it would be necessary to make arrangements for dealing with 80,000 tons of goods per day. This is an outside figure, but the capacity of the proposed Clearing House can be increased indefinitely.

It will be necessary to show in some detail that the proposed Clearing House will possess machinery

1 Edgar Harper's Report. See Appendix.

H

capable of meeting this requirement of sorting, unloading, and reloading 80,000 tons of goods in the twenty-four hours.

This machinery must be capable of dealing with 3,000,000 packages of all shapes and sizes in the course of the twenty-four hours, at such an immense economic advantage over the old system that the urgent necessity for its immediate adoption is placed beyond question. Unless it fulfils these conditions the new remedy is no remedy at all.

One word more before proceeding to explain the machinery. The Clearing House differs from all existing goods stations in this important particular. With every enlargement of the goods station there is a drop in efficiency, but the larger the Clearing House the more efficient it becomes. That is to say, in the goods yards system expenditure rapidly outstrips receipts, and must do so; in the Clearing House receipts soon outdistance expenditure.

Once again let it be said: the present railway system does not admit of economic expansion.

This is the central economic point involved. The larger the Clearing House the higher its efficiency.

The reader should now imagine himself to be standing on one of the bales-sorting floors of the Clearing House.

It will be remembered that two of the four sorting floors are for bales, and that two of the four sorting floors are for parcels.

It must be borne in mind that the Clearing House does not propose to sort trucks.

The sorting of trucks is the radical evil of the present system, and it will disappear with the advent of the Clearing House.

The Clearing House will sort packages, however large, however small.

For this purpose all individual packages must be loaded into containers.

Containers of the type here shown can and do travel by road vehicles, rail vehicles, barges, or on the decks or in the holds of ships.

They are weatherproof, they can be made with ventilators, they can be made with out ventilators, they can be equipped with or connected with refrigerating devices. They may be fitted with weatherproof doors in the sides, the ends, or in the roofs.

A Container may be loaded and unloaded in the same way that any other vehicle is loaded and unloaded.

It has been urged that the adoption of the container system would involve the scrapping of an enormous amount of rolling-stock. This would emphatically not be the case. In the first place only a fraction of the present number of wagons would be required, and were there not, as is the case, more than sufficient flat wagons already in existence for the purpose of the Clearing House, the conversion of the present type of wagon would be a simple matter.

The adoption to a certain extent of the container

system, and its admitted success, has put this part of the reform beyond argument.

It will be seen that the adoption of the container system will be a matter of the greatest convenience to the trader. It will solve many of his troubles as to space inside his premises and in the railway van. Messrs. Lyons, Fry, and Messrs. Curtis, the carriers, have already become alive to its many advantages.

A container is that which contains or holds together. There is no other definition. A container as a result of this definition may take many forms.

A match-box is a container.

The top part of a pantechnicon furniture van is a

container.

A couple of wire ropes, binding together a number of scaffold-poles, is a container.

A tubular tank carrying liquid is a container.

A steel cage carrying fish trunks is a container.
A coal-scuttle is a container.

A sanitary dust-bin is a container.

A container is always detachable from the vehicle on which it travels.

There is nothing new about a container.

In this connection an illustration of the advantage of containers will serve.

The following are the details of the nine-o'clock goods train arriving at Paddington from Bristol.

The first twelve trucks will carry fifteen cwt. of