No One Objects To Walk One Mile If He Can Afterwards Ride The
Other Ten.
Besides these through trains, special trains could run on
occasions when numbers of people wanted to go to one spot, such as sheep
or cattle fairs and great markets.
Large tracts of country look to one
town as their central place, not by any means always the nearest market
town; to such places, for instance, as Gloucester and Reading, thousands
resort in the course of the year from hamlets at a considerable distance.
Such road trains as have been described would naturally converge on
provincial towns of this kind, and bring them thrice their present trade.
Country people only want facilities to travel exactly like city people.
It is, indeed, quite possible that when villages thus become accessible
many moderately well-to-do people will choose them for their residence,
in preference to large towns, for health and cheapness. If any number of
such persons took up their residence in villages, the advantage to
farmers would of course be that they would have good customers for all
minor produce at their doors. It is not too much to say that three parts
of England are quite as much in need of opening up as the backwoods of
America. When a new railroad track is pushed over prairie and through
primeval woods, settlements spring up beside it. When road trains run
through remote hamlets those remote hamlets will awake to a new life.
Many country towns of recent years have made superhuman efforts to get
the railway to their doors. Some have succeeded, some are still trying;
in no case has it been accomplished without an immense expenditure, and
for the most part these railroad branches are completely in the control
of the main line with which they are connected. In one or two cases
progress has been effected by means of tramways, notably one at
Wantage - an excellent idea and highly to be commended. All these are
signs that by slow degrees matters are tending towards some such scheme
as has been here sketched out. While local railroads are extremely
expensive, slow in construction, and always dominated by main lines, and
while tramways need rails, with the paraphernalia rails require, they
have this drawback - they are not flexible. The engines and cars that run
upon them must for ever adhere to the track: there may be goods, produce,
ricks, cows, fruit, hops, and what not, wanting to be landed only a
quarter of a mile distant, but the cars cannot go to the crops. The
railroad is rigid, everything must be brought to it. From town to town it
answers well, but it cannot suit itself and wind about from village to
hamlet, from farm to farm, up hill and down dale. The projected road
train is flexible and capable of coming to the crops. It can call at the
farmer's door, and wait by the gate of the field for the load. We have
lately seen France devote an enormous sum to the laying down of rails in
agricultural districts, to the making of canals, and generally to the
improvement of internal communication in provinces but thinly populated.
The industrious French have recognised that old countries, whose area is
limited, can only compete with America, whose area is almost unlimited,
by rendering transit easy and cheap.
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