carried on in Spain, the readers | low tide. In Germany one of the great railway works is the bridge over the Rhine at Cologne, where the road and the rail are carried across together, superseding the famed bridge of boats, the bridge being five years in course of construction and costing £600,000. Its peculiarity is that the road bridge and the rail bridge, though resting on the same piers, are practically distinct bridges, the former having a carriage way and two footpaths, and the latter containing a double line of rails. In Holland, the most remarkable railway work is the bridge over the Hollandsch Diep, near Moerdijk. The water is here one mile five furlongs in length, but by means of stone piers thrown forward into the bed, the bridge is reduced to a length of seven furlongs. There are in all spans of 330 feet each, resting on stone piers 50 feet wide and 10 feet in thickness. The foundations were laid on the pneumatic system, on much the same principle as that adopted for some parts of the Tay Bridge works, and three of the foundations at the south end of the bridge are sunk to a depth of from 50 to 60 feet below the surface of the water at 14 About 1200 tons of iron were used in the bridge, which is on the lattice girder principle, and the cost of the work was about £460,000. A train takes between four and five minutes to cross the bridge, no great speed being allowed. The erection of the bridge was begun in May 1868, and finished in November 1871. The Sömmering Railway, opened in 1854, and connecting Vienna with Trieste, presents between Glognitz and Mürzzuschlag some extraordinary works in steep gradients, tunnels, and viaducts; and as the train runs down steep declivities and close to the brink of tremendous precipices, it claims to be one of the most terror-striking lines in the world. In the construction of the "Intercolonial Railway" in the Dominion of Canada, a number of large bridges of remarkable form have been built, showing lattice and truss girders in nearly every variety. In the piers provision is made to resist both the pressure down stream of an "icejam" in the rivers, and the upward strain on the mason work through the piled-up ice pressing against the lower surface of the girders, the stone-built piers being "joggled" with that view, CHAPTER IV. Thou hast to those in populous city pent Joanna Baillie. SPREAD OF THE RAILWAY SYSTEM-GROWTH IN THE UNITED KINGDOM -TRAFFIC AND REVENUE-RAILWAYS IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE— RAILWAYS IN INDIA-A RAILWAY TO INDIA-RAILWAYS IN CANADA -THE RAILWAYS OF THE WORLD-RAILWAYS IN THE FAR EAST. SPREAD OF THE RAILWAY SYSTEM. IN adapting to the railway sys- dent, a country life being as dis tem the words of Joanna Baillie, prefaced to this chapter, some liberty is undoubtedly taken with the idea that learned lady had in her mind when she penned her lines on Wordsworth. Yet what Wordsworth did in imagination for his readers, when he sang of nature to those "in populous city pent," and sang with a voice new and fresh as nature itself, that has the railway done in fact. It is not too much to aver that the growth of the railway system has effected a social revolution, slowly but surely, affecting the mode of life of many, and in a great degree changing the character of our towns. In the olden times, when men huddled together for defence and mutual protection, the cities showed narrow streets and contracted sites, and there was a sharp line of demarcation between the urban and the "landward" resi tasteful as it was inaccessible to our merchants and traders. How much this is changed we need hardly say. which disgorge their hundreds and thousands of merchants, clerks. shopmen, and even labouring men and women, upon the stations of London or Glasgow, tell how extensive is the practice of living out of town; and the complete desertion of the business streets of the metropolis after a stated hour in the evening, tells how completely the railway system has rendered possible the divorcement of places of work and places of residence. Not less remarkable in the connection now referred to is the growth of public holidays, the establishment of tourist and excursion facilities, and the mul tiplication of means by which glimpses of the grace and beauty of nature have been made possible The crowded trains, to all who have the power to en- | joy it, or, what is as much to the point, the desire to cultivate the power to enjoy it. Without burdening these pages with statistics, some figures illustrative of the growth of the railway systems of the world may be given, in order that a definite idea of the greatness of this social engine may be realised. GROWTH IN THE UNITED KINGDOM. anticipation, the transport of goods, on the contrary, fell short of what was expected. The canal lowered its tariff to the level of the railway charges, and increased its speed and its attention to customers. The canal, moreover, winding through Manchester, washed the walls of the warehouses of the merchants and manufacturers. At the other end it communicated directly with the Liverpool docks. The goods were therefore received directly from the ship, and delivered directly to the warehouse, or vice versa, without the cost, delay, and inconvenience of intermediate transshipment and cartage." Notwithstanding these difficulties, the goods traffic of the Liverpool and Manchester line soon reached 1000 tons a day; and no one who is familiar with the dock and shipping arrange the Believing that the principal part of the revenue would be derived from the conveyance of heavy goods, the promoters of the Liverpool and Manchester line estimated the receipts from passengers at £20,000 a year only; but only the experience of a few weeks was necessary to prove that from passengers a veryments of railways in our own day, large part of their revenue would be derived. In the three and a half months to the end of 1830, upwards of 71,000 passengers were carried upon the railway. Thus, by a very short experience, the original idea as to railways was superseded, and the value of the system in promoting the personal convenience and intercourse of the people was recognised. The growth of the goods traffic, though slower by comparison, was also great. There was a reason for the slowness of the growth of this traffic, so far at least as concerned the first railway. On this >oint Dr. Lardner says, "If the raffic in passengers exceeded all and who has witnessed It From 1825 to 1850 the rate of railway construction showed an average of 265 miles per annum ; from 1850 to 1860, an average of 381 miles per annum were constructed; and from 1860 to the end of 1875, the rate was 415 miles per annum. In the table showing the mileage of railway line per square mile of territory, prefixed to Mr. Frederick Martin's Statesman's Year Book, the United Kingdom stands second, the ratio being one mile of line for seven square miles. Belgium, as we shall subsequently show, stands first, its ratio being one in five. In Captain Tyler's report, from which some of the preceding figures have been drawn, there is a list given of triple lines and quadruple lines existing in places where the traffic has outgrown the power of a double line to carry it; showing 117 miles of a triple track, and 134 miles of line where there are "four or more lines of rails." This question of duplicating the railways to meet the demands of the for solution. It is a curious point, worthy of special recognition, that Mr. Charles Maclaren foresaw this in 1825, the words he wrote half a century ago having a singular value at the present moment : "Let us suppose, for instance, that the most eligible rate of motion is found to be 8 miles an hour for goods, and 16 miles for One consequence passengers. would probably follow from this, that as carriages travelling rapidly could not easily pass one another on the same rails, every great railway would have two sets of paths one for quick, and the other for slow vehicles; and it might perhaps be found expedient to have these paths of different breadths, strength, and dimensions. I say two sets (that is four paths) because on all much-frequented roads one path would be required for going and another for returning for each class of vehicles." It would seem from the expres sions here used that Mr. Maclaren had also foreseen the growth of single-line railways, which are of comparatively recent date, and in which the past twenty years has seen a fourfold increase, while the double lines have only increased 45 per cent in the same period. Coming to the distribution of lines in England, Scotland, and Ireland, the figures at the end of 1875 were as follows: Double Single Line. Line. Total growing traffic is one of those England & Wales 7329 4460 11,789 miles pressing upon railway managers Scotland Ireland. 1060 1661 2,721 39 509 1639 2,148 The above lines were owned | is shown by the following analysis, which we also obtain from Mr. D. Kinnear Clark's work, already quoted :— nominally by 583 separate companies, but from the large number of local lines, etc., managed under working agreement, there were only 125 companies actually engaged in conducting traffic, as we learn from Mr. D. Kinnear Clark's contribution to the series of books entitled British Manufacturing Industries. These companies are thus distributed : Law and parliamentary ex- Land and compensation stock 5.5 per cent. 19.5 50. " 8. 17. " 100 The actual fabrication of the railway has therefore employed less than two-thirds of the whole capital. The case of the Great Northern Company running from London to York, and embracing 636 miles of railway, is exceptional, it being calculated that 231 per cent of the capital was forestalled before ground was broken to make the line. In the case of the Trent Valley line, it has been remarked that the ultimate cost of constructing the whole line was probably not much more than the amount expended in obtaining permission to make it! As a contrast to this, the favourite example is that of the Peebles Railway, which was amalgamated with the North British in 1876 after a prosperous career of twentyone years, and the entire cost of which, including law, land, and line, was £6688 per mile, being about one half of what the unfortunate Eastern Counties Company paid for land alone! TRAFFIC AND REVENUE. To illustrate the growth of goods traffic in this country, the |