The Light Railway Bill contains, apparently, no provision under which this disability can be remedied, for it is improbable that the Commissioners would take action in respect of a private concern. The above difficulty was lately met with in the construction of a private narrow-gauge line for the Duke of Westminster, which crosses a main road. The matter was ultimately compromised by the insertion of a clause in the agreement to the effect that, should the county council give notice to discontinue the crossing, the Duke should be entitled to appeal to the Board of Trade for arbitration. There is, however, no assurance that the Board would consent to appoint an arbitrator if called upon, but it is very certain that if a provision legalizing such an appeal could be incorporated in the Bill a serious hardship would be thereby removed, and some encouragement given to private persons to embark capital in enterprises of the kind.
As a case in point, and doubtless there are plenty of others, a quarry owner of my acquaintance is at the present time conveying some 80,000 tons of stone annually by means of traction-engines from his works to the railway along 2½ miles of highway. The road authorities, levying £400 a year for extraordinary traffic, are utterly incapable of coping with the destructive action of the heavy loads, and the roads are in a state of disintegration that baffles description. The proprietor of the quarry would at once set about making a narrow-gauge line at his own expense, with the cordial good-will of the county and district councils and his neighbours generally, could he only obtain some guarantee that the permission to cross and, in some parts, run alongside the road, which to-day would be gratefully accorded, would not be suddenly revoked at a future date.
Perhaps those in charge of the Bill will see their way to give this point their consideration.
According to a correspondent in yesterday’s _Times_ projectors of private light railways have hitherto been very chary of risking their capital owing to the precarious nature of their running powers. In nine cases out of ten the light railway proposes to cross or skirt the highways at certain points, and the permission which may be given by one district council in such cases is revocable by the next. This must be so inevitably, for circumstances might well arise under which a level crossing, for instance, would become a public danger. The difficulty might well be met by an appeal to arbitration in all cases of proposed revocation of the running powers; and if the Board of Trade were to undertake to nominate the arbitrator, the projector ought to have no reasonable ground for timidity. The present Bill can only be regarded as proposing to set an example and provide occasional assistance to the construction of light railways. Seeing, therefore, that its chief result, if successful, will be to encourage a more extensive construction of railways, it is important that all obstacles in the way of private enterprise in this direction should be at once removed. The _Times_ correspondent suggests that the insertion of a clause providing for arbitration in all cases of dispute with the highway authorities would meet the difficulty.