Light Railways. 
6 57 
in its exuberant anxiety for the public safety, usually imposed 
so very stringent a speed limit — it is, for example, eight miles an 
hour as a maximum on the Wisbech and Upwell — that the 
carrier’s cart can beat the train in speed, though perhaps not in 
economy, and certainly not in comfort and safety. 
Another point is of the very utmost importance. The staff 
obviously cannot be specialised to the same extent as on a main 
line. The tickets will perhaps be issued by the guard and collected 
by the fireman, or it may be by a platelayer’s wife, at the road 
crossing at which the passenger alights. For, when we have light 
railways according to the Continental pattern, stations in our 
ordinary English sense, with buildings and platforms, will of 
course disappear, and station will come back to mean what it used 
to mean in England, and still does in most Continental languages 
— not a building, a gare or Bahnliof, but a mere stopping place. 
And not only must the staff turn their hands to all sorts of jobs, 
but they must be prepared to do work over very long hours. If 
the first train on the line is at six o’clock in the morning and 
the last at ten o’clock at night, it is absurd to imagine that the 
light railway earnings can possibly pay for a double staff. 
Anyone who has travelled as often as the present writer on the 
engine of an express train knows that main-line engine driving is 
extremely trying work, and that to expect a man to do such work 
for many hours on end is quite indefensible ; but to argue from 
this that a driver on a branch eight miles long ought not to be 
required to work ten or a dozen times a day over it, taking half 
an hour on each journey, with long intervals between, even 
though his first journey be made at six o’clock in the morning 
and his last at nine or ten o’clock at night, is really not reason- 
able ; and from gentlemen who maintain the contrary one has a 
right to ask whether, as a matter of fact, they have two shifts 
of housemaids in their own house, and duplicate the services of 
grooms and coachmen in their own stables. 
One point in connexion with the modes of construction and 
working cannot here be left unnoticed — the question of gauge. 
But it can only be mentioned in order to say that it is far too 
complicated and, one might say, too thorny a subject — for 
English railwaymen have always been prepared to fight their 
neighbours upon it any time this last half-century — to be handled 
here. Probably the two strongest arguments in favour of a 
narrow gauge are — the first, that Continental opinion is steadily 
becoming more and more favourable to it ; the second, that a 
break of gauge would give to all concerned notice in the most 
conspicuous possible manner that the new light lines had finally 
broken with the extravagant traditions of our English railway 
