ENGLAND'S RAILWAY ARMY.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume IV, Issue 633, 25 October 1883, Page 3

ENGLAND'S RAILWAY ARMY.

The Builder publishes some interesting statistics of the English railways:—"'There are two armies in England, 1 says Sir E. Sullivan, ' a military army and an industrial army. We may put each roughly at 100,000 men. Sat 1 if the writer had consulted ■o popular a work as Our Railways, by Joteph Parsloe, he would have found that according to the returns of the Board of Trade, dated 5, of February, 1875, there were at that time 274,535 persons employed on the railways of England, Scotland, and Ireland.' It is one of the great defects in our railway returns that no annual account is rendered of the number of railway servants ; a line or two added to the Board of Trade returns would afford a Taluable set of statistical fact* on thia head. The nearest approach that we can make, in the abMQoe of later returns than that in question, is to calculate how many men were employed per mile in 1874, and to *pply the same proportion to the increased length of railways now open. On the 16,447 miles of railway open at the end of 1874, the number above cited allows 167 per-.. sons per mile. At that rate the number employed, in round figures, on, pur actual 18,000 miles, of railway, will be 300,000 men. The gross working expenditure on the railways of the United Kingdom for 18/4 amounted, to £86,612,712. If we roughly divide this as half paid for materials, and half for labour, it gives an average of very nearly .£9O per head for all the railway servants in that TeaV. The year 1878 is the last for which the analytic returns of the 1 Index to our Railway System ' have been published. The length of the line then open was 17,333 miles, which at 16*7 souls per mile gives 289,462 men. The total working expenditure for the United Kingdom for the same year was £33,189,368, the half of which, taken as before, comes to £57 per man per year. This gives a reduction in the rate of pay of about 6 per cent., and in point of fact the working expenses which, in 1874, were 55 per cent, of revenue, had fallen in. 1878 to 53 per cent. ; so that, as a rough check, the payments are not very disproportionate to the estimate of the number of men."