Light Railways. 
649 
way, two and a half miles long, connects the town or village of 
Wantage with its railway station. It carried last year 36,000 
passengers, and earned besides over 1,000£. from goods and 
parcels traffic — the Board of Trade returns do not give the 
tonnage. Or take another somewhat similar line, the Wisbech 
and Upwell, which runs eight miles along the road in a purely 
agricultural district. Last year it earned 1 ,500/. from parcels 
and goods, and carried over 100,000 passengers. In these 
instances, too, it will hardly be questioned that the traffic must 
have increased enormously beyond what it could have been had 
carts and omnibuses remained the only means of communication. 
If we turn from England to the Continent the evidence is 
overwhelming that the extension of cheap railway communi- 
cation into sparsely populated districts helps to promote agri- 
cultural prosperity. It was especially for the benefit of agri- 
culture that the light railway system of Belgium — the best 
organised and most successful, on the whole, in Europe — was 
undertaken, ten years back, under the direct guidance of the 
Government. Below are extracts from documents showing the 
ideas that animated the Belgian authorities. The first of them 
is from a circular letter from the National Light Railway Society, 
which is, as I have said, practically, though not nominally, a 
State organisation. It runs as follows : — 
For years past the spirit of enterprise and progress has directed itself 
almost exclusively to the extension and improvement of main lines of rail- 
way. It is true that the number of roads and canals has been increased, 
and that their construction has been improved; but there have been no 
changes, or almost none, in the manner in which traffic is conducted on 
these lines of communication. Old-fashioned wagons continue to travel on 
the high roads, and whereas the price of carriage for long distances has 
enormously decreased, it costs as much as if not more than it did half a century 
back to cart a load of wheat. 
It is the function of light railways to improve this state of things. Con- 
structed, as a general rule, on the existing roads, and in consequence more 
economically than main railway lines, operated with the utmost economy 
and by means of cheap rolling stock, they will furnish the people with the 
means of transporting their products at the lowest possible price. Bv means 
of their junctions with the main railway lines they will render access to 
them more convenient both for passengers and for goods. They will assist 
communication from village to village aud from the village to the adjacent 
station. They will call into being new industries and increase the prosperity 
of existing industries by affording them new outlets for their products. 
Finally they will enable the farmer to procure at a cheap rate the fertilisers 
necessary to enable him to face foreign competition, and by the low cost of 
carriage will open to him the markets of his own country as well as those 
abroad. For many places, deprived as it seemed for all time of railway 
communication, these light lines will furnish an opportunity unhoped for and 
possibly the last of escaping from their fatal position of isolation. 
This circular was originally sent out to the Governors of the 
