The Railways of Scotland; Their Present Position. with a Glance at Their Past and a Forecast of Their Future (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1890 Excerpt: ... II. The Outlook For The Future. We saw in the last chapter that universal and ubiquitous competition was the leading characteristic of the Scottish railway system. We saw too that the earliest lines were built without any thought of such conditions, merely for local traffic; that, for instance, in the immediate neighbourhood of Glasgow, there were, on the north side of the Clyde, alone, six independent companies; and that when, some twenty years later, the idea of through traffic first emerged, even then the railway magnates of the day contemplated nothing more than a series of allied companies forming separate links in a continuous chain; and that, accordingly, to take one example, the main high road from Carlisle to Aberdeen was divided into Caledonian, Scottish Central, Scottish Midland, and Aberdeen Line territory. Similarly it might have been shown that what is now the North British began--even confining ourselves to its main lines--as half-a-dozen separate companies. The Edinburgh and Berwick needed the alliance of the Edinburgh and Glasgow to bring it on to the west; that of the Edinburgh, Perth, and Dundee, to give it access to the north; while the Waverley route between Edinburgh and Carlisle was originally two separate systems, which met at Hawick. The Great North of Scotland is the result of almost as many amalgamations as it to-day has branches; while the Highland has absorbed the Inverness and Rossshire, the Sutherland, the Duke of Sutherland's, and the Sutherland and Caithness, into a single company, which, if not in capital and importance, in length of main line at least, is the equal of the Midland, the superior of the NorthWestern, and the inferior of the Great Western Railway alone. For practical purposes in all Scotland to-day there are o...