Even in the last days of the road, when railways had already begun to stretch the length and breadth of the land, the waggons on the less important highways continued very much as they had been accustomed to do; but with the second decade of the nineteenth century a demand for the quicker conveyance of goods arose on those great roads that gave access from the important manufacturing towns to London, or from London to the chief seaports. With this demand, in the improved condition of those roads, it now became for the first time possible to comply. On less frequented routes--roads leading to agricultural districts and sleepy old towns and villages that produced nothing for distant markets and wanted little from them--the common stage waggon and the flying waggon lingered. The Kendal Flying Waggon of 1816, pictured by Rowlandson, halting at a wayside inn to take up or set down goods and passengers and to change horses, lasted well on into the railway age; but in places nearer to and in more direct communication with the commerce of great cities, the type was early supplemented by later contrivances.
The first of these were the “Fly Vans,” of which the swift conveyances of Russell & Co., van proprietors, trading between London and the West of England, were typical. They were built on the model of the wooden hooded van seen in London streets at the present time, but considerably larger than now common. Russells had for many years continued a service of stage-waggons between the port of Falmouth and the Metropolis. Drawn by the then usual team of eight horses, augmented by two, or even four, more on many of the hills that make the west-country roads a constant succession of ups and downs, they had brought heavy goods and luggage that distance in twelve days, at the rate of three miles an hour, carrying passengers at a halfpenny a mile. But with the coming of the nineteenth century they found the stage-coaches, with their “rumble-tumbles,” beginning to carry people at a slightly higher fare, and performing the whole distance of 269 miles in three days and nights. Even the poorest found it cheaper to pay the higher fare and save the delays and expenses of the other nine days, and so Messrs. Russell found one branch of their trade decaying. They accordingly, about 1820, put their “Fly Vans” on the road, vehicles which did the journey in the same time as the ordinary stage-coaches of that period, and, running night and day, continued so to set forth and come to their journey’s end until the railway came and presently made away with fly vans, stage-coaches and mails alike.