A sign of the times immediately preceding railways was the appearance of the heavy covered luggage and goods vans, exclusively devoted to that class of traffic and carrying no passengers. How the heavy goods of Birmingham and other great towns were then conveyed along the roads is shown in the curious and very interesting old painting, engraved here, of Pickford & Co.’s London and Manchester Luggage Van. The roads between London and the great manufacturing towns at length became crowded with goods, and had it not been for the railways, they must at an early date have become altogether inadequate, and an era of great highway improvement and widening have set in, notwithstanding that quite two-thirds of the goods traffic at that time was water-borne, and went by those canals with which the genius of Brindley and Telford, and the enterprise of the Duke of Bridgewater and others, had half a century earlier intersected the trade routes and manufacturing centres of the country.
It is at once instructive and interesting here to glance at the figures prepared by the promoters of the London and Birmingham Railway, opened in 1838, by which they argued the pressing need of a railway, which should carry cheaper and quicker. They gave several sets of estimates, whose discrepancies are to be accounted for by the increasing volume of traffic; but, to reduce their figures to round numbers, it seems that in the year before the line was begun, the annual average of goods despatched between Birmingham and London was 144,000 tons, carried at rates of from fivepence to sixpence a mile per ton by the “Fly-boats” on the canal and by the vans and waggons. By canal the annual expenditure was £227,000, by road £113,000. Passengers, numbering 488,342, at an average of twopence a head per mile on the 109 miles, spent £447,646 in travelling.
[Illustration: PICKFORD’S LONDON AND MANCHESTER FLY VAN, 1826.
To those who unfailingly see the wise direction of Providence in everything, it would seem that Providence had thus raised up railway engineers and capitalists at the psychological moment; but the views of coach-proprietors, coachmen, guards, ostlers, innkeepers, and the innumerable others depending in one way or another upon the road for a living, did not, it is to be feared, look so complacently upon the new era which in many instances ruined them. Nor, perhaps, did those who were financially interested in canals ascribe the new order of things to providential interposition.