Light Railways. 
651 
ward policy in Styria is now the Austrian Minister of Commerce. 
He has recently organised in his Ministry a separate and in- 
dependent light railway department, and an important Light 
Railway Bill has been drafted for submission to the Austrian 
Parliament in the current winter session. 
Evidence of a very different kind, this time from France, 
has been collected in an admirably written work, L’Utilite des 
Chp-mins de fer d' Inter et Local , by M. Considere, an engineer oc- 
cupying in the department of Finistere (the westernmost por- 
tion of Brittany) a position apparently somewhat analogous to 
that of an English county surveyor. 1 M. Considere has ana- 
lysed in great detail the accounts of the traffic of a whole series 
of small lines. To take his first instance, this is what he found. 
From Morlaix to the coast at Roscoff, a distance of 28 kilometres 
(17 miles), a light railway was opened in 1883. Two years 
before the opening, in 1881, the traffic through the main line 
stations which then served Roscoff and its district amounted 
to 1,608,000 francs. Had the conditions remained undisturbed, 
natural growth would in four years have increased this sum to 
1.672.000 francs. In fact, in 1885, two years after the opening, 
the takings on traffic dealt with at these stations had fallen to 
1.362.000 francs. But against this loss of 310,000 francs at 
the old stations were to be set new takings of 701,000 francs on 
traffic dealt with on the new branch ; a development of traffic 
therefore in the district amounting to 391,000 francs, or an in- 
crease of about 22 per cent, within two years. But the most 
remarkable point in the statistics has yet to be told. The 
actual earnings of the branch line proper were only 77,500 francs ; 
the balance of 313,500 francs — four-fifths of the whole — was 
earned by traffic contributed to the main line, which it is evi- 
dent the main line would not have obtained had the branch not 
been opened. I must not occupy space with all the sixteen 
other separate cases fully set out by M. Considere. Here it 
must suffice to say that in every case examined it was found that 
the opening of a new line led to an important increase in the 
traffic of the district, but that the importance of the increase 
might never have been noticed by those who looked only at the 
1 M. Considered work oil the value of light railways was originally 
published in the Annales des Fonts et L'/iattssees, and subsequently issued in 
book form (Paris, Dunod, 1892). It was criticised by M. Colson, then 
professor of railway economics at the Paris Ecole des Hautes Etudes Com- 
merciales, now Directeur des Chemins-de-fer in the Ministry of Public Works 
(or, as we might say, railway secretary of the Board of Trade) in a pamphlet 
entitled La Formula d' Exploitation de M. Considere (same publisher and 
date). To this M. Considere replied in a further pamphlet (same publisher, 
1893) bearing his original title. The three works taken together are perhaps 
the most valuable contribution to the study of the question that exists. 
