Railway Handicaps.

May I emphasise one point here: Railway companies built and paid for the roads with their own funds and were not assisted by general rating or votes of public money.

From 1825 until the present day railways have grown until nearly every part of the world is served by them. Moreover, the development of every country has been the direct result of transport facilities which could only have been given by rail.

The development of the motor car into a really serious medium for transport, dates, I think, from the termination of the War in 1918, when large numbers of vehicles and trained drivers were available for commercial purposes.

There were large numbers of vehicles previous to this date, but they did not enter into serious competition with existing transport services.

With the growth of motor traffic in England the roads came in for criticism, allied with objections from local bodies in regard to the repair of the roads which were being knocked to pieces by motor transport. The matter was, however, taken up by the Ministry of Transport and the following amounts have been spent on roads and bridges, etc., during the past few years:—

Of the expenditure for 1924–25, local bodies contributed (from current revenue), £51,135,603, and £1,150,562 was paid direct by the Ministry of Transport. In the same year local bodies spent (from loans), £10,890,131. (The railways pay about £7,000,000 in rates, out of which about 1 ¼ million is allocated for roads.) This very briefly covers the history of transport in England up to the present time.

The position of the railways in face of the radically altered transport condition of to-day (with serious competition arising from a new means of transport), is receiving the most earnest study of railway authorities all over the world.

The position, as everyone knows, has been brought about by the motor car and lorry and the popularisation of these vehicles as transport units. Communities which had been built up by rail services are, in many cases, now being served by motor services which picked and chose the class of traffic which paid them best. The railways, in almost every case, pioneered and developed the traffic now being lost to them. They provided many services which were necessary (and which they could economically undertake only so long as the whole of the traffic was carried by them), but which are not economical propositions when a large proportion of the best paying traffic was taken by a competitor.