ABSTRACT
The demands made upon the resources of railway shareholders are enormous. A few years since there was a general revival of trade, and the ordinary growth of traffic and the special pressure put upon all the great railway companies was such as to necessitate an immense outlay of capital in the creation of new works. The London and North Western, for example, had to widen their road so as to admit a fourth line of rails for the forty-two miles between Willesden and Bletchley, necessitating an almost continuous series of excavations and embankments, masonry on a gigantic scale, and also two tunnels ; and the widened line has since been continued through Northampton to Rugby. " W e are spending," said Mr. Moon at the spring meeting of 1875, "an awful lot of money. We are," he continued, "spending a million at Liverpool, a large amount upon the Manchester stations, and even the London station is insufficient for the traffic, and we find it impossible to go on year after year giving facilities to the public without spending large sums of money." Similarly the London and South Western spent £500,000 in improving their stations, completing the block system, and for increased rolling stock. The Great Western widened their main line near London. The Lancashire and Yorkshire made a number of
branch lines, and completed their block system. The Midland doubled their lines from Trent to Wigston, and from Chesterfield to Clay Cross, opened new lines in Notts and Derbyshire, made 20 miles of additional mineral branches, and meanwhile bore with what fortitude they could command the burden of more than £5,000,000 of unproductive capital on uncompleted works. The London and Brighton shareholders happily emerged, as their chairman expressed it, "from the depth of adversity' ' to " the position of a line paying a respectable dividend ; " b u t the expenditure of capital during four years increased nearly £40,000 a year.
