266 History of Inland Transport 



many small, independent, and more or less competing lines, 

 and that no attempt was made to encourage the provision, 

 either by individual companies or by groups of companies, of 

 " trunk lines " of the type which Thomas Gray and others 

 had been urging on the country with so much though with 

 such futile persistence. 



The advent of the new means of transport was, in fact, 

 marked by the complete absence of any centralised effort 

 with a view to securing the network of a railway system, so 

 planned or so co-ordinated as to make the best possible 

 provision for the country as a whole, and especially for the 

 rapidly increasing necessities of trade, commerce and in- 

 dustry. The failure to act on these lines was, however, only 

 in accordance with the previous policy, or no-policy, which 

 had successively left the improvement of rivers, the making 

 of roads, the construction of canals and the provision of turn- 

 pikes either to private benevolence or to private enterprise, 

 influenced mainly by considerations of local or personal 

 interests. 



Much had certainly been done in these various directions 

 by those to whom the State had thus relegated the carrying 

 out of public works which in most other countries as regards 

 main routes, at least are regarded as a matter of national 

 obligation. But, apart from any question of providing State 

 funds, the lack even of intelligent direction and efficient 

 supervision by a central power, qualified to advise or 

 to organise private effort, had led both to a prodigious 

 waste of money and to results either unsatisfactory in them- 

 selves or in no way commensurate with the expenditure in- 

 curred. The same conditions now were to lead, in regard to 

 the railways, to a further waste of money, to disastrous 

 speculation, to infinite confusion, to the piling up of a huge 

 railway debt, and to the provision of innumerable small 

 lines which were to remain more or less independent and 

 disconnected fragments of a railway system until the more 

 enterprising companies began, on their own initiative, to 

 amalgamate them into through routes of traffic. 1 



The general position at the period here in question was 

 well stated by G. R. Porter in his " Progress of the Nation " 



1 Professor Hadley states, in " Railroad Transportation," that in 1844 

 the average length of English railroads was fifteen miles. 



