Identifier: stagecoachmailin01harp (find matches)
Title: Stage-coach and mail in days of yore : a picturesque history of the coaching age
Year: 1903 (1900s)
Authors: Harper, Charles G. (Charles George), 1863-1943
Subjects: Horses Coaching (Transportation) -- History
Publisher: London : Chapman & Hall, limited
Contributing Library: Tufts University
Digitizing Sponsor: Tufts University and the National Science Foundation

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de routes and manufac-turing centres of the country. It is at once instructive and interesting here toglance at the figures prepared by the promoters ofthe London and Birmingham Railway, opened in1838, by Avhicli they argued the pressing need of arailway, which should carry cheaper and quicker.They gave several sets of estimates, whose discre-pancies are to be accounted for by the increasingvolume of traffic; but, to reduce their figures toround numbers, it seems that in the year beforethe line was begun, the annual average of goodsdespatched ))etween Birmingham and London Avas144,000 tons, carried at rates of from fivepence tosixpence a mile per ton by the Ply-boats on thecanal and by the vans and waggons. By canalthe annual expenditure Avas £227,000, by road£113,000. Passengers, numberins: 488,342, at anaverage of twopence a head per mile on the 109miles, spent £447,646 in travelling. To those Avho unfailingly see the wise directionof Providence in everything, it Avould seem that
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THE STAGE-WAGGONS 143 Providence had thus raised up railway engineersand cajntalists at the psychological moment; hutthe views of coach-proprietors, coachmen, guards,ostlers, innkeepers, and the innumerahle othersdepending in one way or another upon the roadfor a living, did not, it is to be feared, look socomplacently upon the new era which in manyinstances ruined them. Nor, perhaps, did thosewho were financially interested in canals ascribethe new order of things to providential inter-position. That, indeed, is providential Avhich advancesones own interests and preserves ones well-being,but misfortunes are generally given a very differentascription. The providential interpositions thatbenefited one class inflicted very great hardshipand loss upon another. The canals that were,before the introduction of railways, very great andkeen competitors Avith the waggons, were frozenup in severe winters, and all traffic along themstopped, and thus the whole of the carrying tradewent by road, g

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