ABSTRACT
The great majority of the population could not aspire to bank accounts, frequent rail travel or summer holidays, but most people did enjoy a substantial range of services undreamt of at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Horse-bus services had developed out of short distance stagecoach services, and were complemented from the 1870s by horse tramways over routes where the volume of traffic justified the investment. Over the century, improvements in urban transport had enabled a section of the population, from the level of clerical workers upwards, to live some distance from their place of work. The rise in standards of passenger service was symbolised by the abolition of second class by the Midland Railway in 1874, since third class standards were now equal to second; other lines followed later. By the late nineteenth century, seaside resorts were the urban type whose population was growing most rapidly; they catered for all groups down to the more prosperous working-class.
