All this now sounds inexpressibly droll, and yet this prophet of evil was not
entirely wrong; nay, in some important particulars he was more right than the
railway promoters, whom he so heartily detested. The railway did cost nearly
seven millions instead of four millions as calculated by the projectors, and
the cost of working before the amalgamation with the Grand Junction did
amount to 380,000 pounds per annum: two figure facts which would have
effectually crushed speculation could they have been proved in 1831; but then
the per contra of traffic was equally astounding in its overflow, instead of
one-third of the existing traffic, or 126,780 pounds a-year allowed by the
pamphleteer, the London and Birmingham earned a gross revenue of nearly
900,000 pounds, while still leaving a traffic in heavy goods on the canals
sufficient to pay from 6 to 30 pounds per cent. to the proprietors, in spite
of a reduction of rates of upwards of 50 pounds per cent. Indeed this
traffic actually increased on the Grand Junction Canal, since the opening of
the Birmingham Railway, from 750,000 pounds in 1836, to 1,160,000 pounds in
1847.

Perhaps on no point would the expectation of the most sanguine among the
early projectors of railways been more satisfactorily exceeded than in regard
to safety. Swiftness, and cheapness, and power, acute intelligent engineers
foresaw; but that millions of passengers should be whirled along at a speed
varying from twenty to fifty miles an hour with more safety than they could
have secured by walking a-foot, would have seemed an anticipation of the very
wildest character. Yet such is the case. In 1850, upwards of seventy
millions of souls were conveyed by railway; when eleven passengers were
killed and fifty-four injured, or less than one to each million of passengers
conveyed.

Even at the risk of seeming trite, prosy, and common-place, it is right to
remind the young generation who consider the purchase of a railway ticket