662 
Light Railways. 
the municipalities should with the one hand levy taxation on 
these undertakings, and with the other pay over to them money 
contributions because they are not able to exist unaided. 
This, however, is not the only way in which these under- 
takings must be dependent for success on the goodwill of the 
local authorities ; for, as has been said, when they have to cross 
roads and streets they must always do so on the level. In 
many cases they will need to be laid either on the road or on 
the waste at the side of it. When they come into a town they 
can only possibly enter it down the middle of the street, and, 
practically speaking, this will not come to pass if the local 
authority sets its face against it. Some managers of lines of 
this class on the Continent have recently, in reply to the 
question whether it is better to lay the rails along the public 
road or on separate land bought for the purpose, answered that 
it ought in the abstract to be more convenient and more 
economical to lay them along the road, but that the local 
authorities have made such exaggerated demands in reference 
to the repair of the road and other matters that it has been 
found in the end cheaper to purchase an independent right of 
way. This, however, is not all. Local populations will have to 
accept the fact that they cannot get in station buildings, or indeed 
in any other respect, the same accommodation as that to which 
we have grown accustomed on the existing lines. To put it in 
the plain, straightforward language recently used to the people 
of New South Wales by one of their own Government engineers, 
“ the people of a district to be served must be content with 
slower speed, irregular running to time, less accommodation at 
stations and goods sheds, and, notwithstanding getting less, 
they must be prepared to pay more than those using the main 
lines to cover the extra cost of working.” 
Assuming that we have not now reached the point at which 
readers will say, “ On these terms it is not worth having light 
lines at all, and, therefore, we need not further discuss the 
question,” it remains to be considered by whom and on what 
terms these lines are to be constructed and worked. For con- 
struction by a public authority there is something, at least in 
the abstract, to be said. There is a considerable l’isk that small 
lines of this kind should be built, as it is commonly called, “for 
paper,” and so heavily handicapped at the outset with an inflated 
capital account. Such a result would be most disastrous. 
Anyone who knows how seriously Wales has suffered, for a 
whole generation, because its railways in the years of inflation 
that preceded the collapse of 1866 were mainly built on a basis 
which made their nominal capital something like three times 
