The rivals then commenced cutting one another’s throats by actually rendering the affair unprofitable, and paring down the fares by one third, trusting that those with the longest purse would be able to survive, and recoup themselves when the others had been driven off the road. Fifteen hundred pounds were lost in twelve months by the proprietors of the “Stag” and “Wonder” in this way; but they had the satisfaction of seeing the “Nimrod” off the road, and though the “Emerald” and “Hibernia” night coaches, extended for a time from Birmingham, loaded well from the rival yard, the famous “yellow belly,” as the “Wonder” was fondly called, went on, with fares raised again to 48_s._ inside and 30_s._ out, from the 30_s._ and £1 to which, in competition, they had fallen.
Thus did the “Wonder” maintain its pre-eminence in the little time left before the London and Birmingham Railway came, in 1838, to cut its journey short, and the Shrewsbury and Birmingham Railway, in 1849, to complete the work of sweeping _all_ the coaches off the road into the limbo of obsolete institutions. In its last few years the “Wonder” was accelerated by one hour on both up and down journeys, for, starting an hour later, it reached its destination at the same time as before. Indeed, at the very time when railway enterprise cut it off in mid-career, a further acceleration was contemplated. It was proposed to perform the journey in thirteen hours. To do this it would have been necessary to establish six-mile, instead of ten-mile stages, and to abandon all stopping for taking up intermediate passengers.
But in the last days of its entire journey the “Wonder” was made to do a remarkable thing. It left the “Bull and Mouth” at the moment when the train for Birmingham steamed out of Euston, and reached Birmingham twenty minutes earlier. That extraordinary feat was not repeated, and was only possible even then by reason of the rails being slippery with rain and the locomotive wheels losing grip, causing great delay. From 1839 the “Wonder” ran only between Shrewsbury and Birmingham, by way of Ironbridge and Madeley, and ended its career, as a two-horse coach, in 1842.
If Shrewsbury was a place to and from which came and went many fast coaches, it certainly sent forth one coach that was phenomenally slow. The “Shrewsbury and Chester Highflyer,” at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was very much less of a flyer than might have been expected from its name.