Anticipations | Page 6

rackety, cramped, nor
tedious. One could be patient enough if one was neither being jarred, deafened, cut into
slices by draughts, and continually more densely caked in a filthy dust of coal; if one
could write smoothly and easily at a steady table, read papers, have one's hair cut, and
dine in comfort[9]--none of which things are possible at present, and none of which
require any new inventions, any revolutionary contrivances, or indeed anything but an
intelligent application of existing resources and known principles. Our rage for fast trains,
so far as long-distance travel is concerned, is largely a passion to end the extreme
discomfort involved. It is in the daily journey, on the suburban train, that daily tax of time,
that speed is in itself so eminently desirable, and it is just here that the conditions of
railway travel most hopelessly fail. It must always be remembered that the railway train,
as against the motor, has the advantage that its wholesale traction reduces the prime cost
by demanding only one engine for a great number of coaches. This will not serve the
first-class long-distance passenger, but it may the third. Against that economy one must
balance the necessary delay of a relatively infrequent service, which latter item becomes
relatively greater and greater in proportion to the former, the briefer the journey to be

made.
And it may be that many railways, which are neither capable of modification into
suburban motor tracks, nor of development into luxurious through routes, will find, in
spite of the loss of many elements of their old activity, that there is still a profit to be
made from a certain section of the heavy goods traffic, and from cheap excursions. These
are forms of work for which railways seem to be particularly adapted, and which the
diversion of a great portion of their passenger traffic would enable them to conduct even
more efficiently. It is difficult to imagine, for example, how any sort of road-car
organization could beat the railways at the business of distributing coal and timber and
similar goods, which are taken in bulk directly from the pit or wharf to local centres of
distribution.
It must always be remembered that at the worst the defeat of such a great organization as
the railway system does not involve its disappearance until a long period has elapsed. It
means at first no more than a period of modification and differentiation. Before extinction
can happen a certain amount of wealth in railway property must absolutely disappear.
Though under the stress of successful competition the capital value of the railways may
conceivably fall, and continue to fall, towards the marine store prices, fares and freights
pursue the sweated working expenses to the vanishing point, and the land occupied sink
to the level of not very eligible building sites: yet the railways will, nevertheless, continue
in operation until these downward limits are positively attained.
An imagination prone to the picturesque insists at this stage upon a vision of the latter
days of one of the less happily situated lines. Along a weedy embankment there pants and
clangs a patched and tarnished engine, its paint blistered, its parts leprously dull. It is
driven by an aged and sweated driver, and the burning garbage of its furnace distils a
choking reek into the air. A huge train of urban dust trucks bangs and clatters behind it,
en route to that sequestered dumping ground where rubbish is burnt to some industrial
end. But that is a lapse into the merely just possible, and at most a local tragedy. Almost
certainly the existing lines of railway will develop and differentiate, some in one
direction and some in another, according to the nature of the pressure upon them. Almost
all will probably be still in existence and in divers ways busy, spite of the swarming new
highways I have ventured to foreshadow, a hundred years from now.
In fact, we have to contemplate, not so much a supersession of the railways as a
modification and specialization of them in various directions, and the enormous
development beside them of competing and supplementary methods. And step by step
with these developments will come a very considerable acceleration of the ferry traffic of
the narrow seas through such improvements as the introduction of turbine engines. So far
as the high road and the longer journeys go this is the extent of our prophecy.[10]
But in the discussion of all questions of land locomotion one must come at last to the
knots of the network, to the central portions of the towns, the dense, vast towns of our
time, with their high ground values and their narrow, already almost impassable, streets. I
hope at a later stage to give some reasons for anticipating that the centripetal pressure