658 
Light Railways. 
past. The strongest argument in the opposite direction is to be 
found in the fact that England is a small country, and therefore 
the new lines will all be short ; that it is a country old, settled, 
and with highly specialised industries, and that the consign- 
ments will, under these circumstances, usually be small. For it 
needs no argument to prove that, the shorter the line, the larger 
percentage the cost of transhipment will bear to the total cost 
of carrying the traffic, and the smaller and the more miscellaneous 
the consignments, the greater the cost per ton of dealing with 
them, the longer the time the operation will take, and the greater 
the risk that the goods will be damaged in transhipment. 
An excessively and inordinately high standard of construction 
and working is, however, not the only cause of the extravagant 
cost of our English railways. Everything about them has been 
done on the same lavish scale. The cost of obtaining a private 
Act of Parliament is a thing that has been grumbled at and 
acquiesced in any time these last seventy years. Evidently this is 
not the place to discuss a reform in Private Bill procedure in 
general, but a word or two in reference to light railways in 
particular will not be out of place. As far as they are concerned, 
there would seem to be two ways open for reducing the cost of 
obtaining authority to proceed. The one would be entrusting 
the whole matter to the discretion of some local body — presum- 
ably the County Council. The objections to this are sufficiently 
obvious. In the first place, most light railways would begin in 
a country district and end inside the jurisdiction of a municipal 
corporation, which, certainly if it were a county borough, and in 
all probability even if it were not, would refuse to submit to the 
authority of the rural County Council. In the second place, 
there would be very serious risk, not perhaps of jobbery, but at 
least of the suspicion of it. If a scheme were sanctioned by, still 
more if it obtained financial support from a County Council of 
which Lord X. was chairman, and the scheme was for a line 
running for some miles through Lord X.’s estate, it is perfectly 
obvious that things would be said that in the public interest 
are better left unspoken. There is a yet more serious objection. 
The management of railways is a subject on which the casual 
and anonymous newspaper correspondent is always prepared at 
a moment’s notice to instruct the general manager of the North 
Western or the Great Western. But, for all that, railways are 
really a highly technical subject. Those who have been concerned 
with them for years have accumulated a fund of information 
under various heads, technical, legal, political, financial, and 
economical, of whose very existence the outside public has no 
conception. The bulk of that information is concentrated in 
