ENGLAND’S RAILWAY ARMY.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 3309, 9 November 1883, Page 2

ENGLAND’S RAILWAY ARMY.

“ The Builder” publishes some interesting statistics of the English railways “There are two armies in England,” say Sir E. Sullivan, “ a military army and an industrial army. We may put each roughly at 100,000 men. But if the writer had consulted so popular a work as ‘ Our Railways,’ by J, Parsloe, he would have found that according to the returns of the Board of Trade, dated February 5, 1835, 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 valuable sot of statistical facts on this head. The nearest approach that we can make, in the absence of later retnrns than that in question, is to calculate how many men were employed per mile in 1874, and to apply the same proportion to the increased length of railways now open. On the 16,447 miles of railways open at the end of 1874 the number cited allows 16.7 persons per mile. At that rate the number employed, in round figures, on our actual 18,000 miles of railway, will be 300,000 men. The gross working expenditure On the railways of the United Kingdom for 1874 amounted to £36,612,712. If we roughly divide this as half paid for materials, and half for labor, it gives an average of nearly £6O per head for all the railway servants in the year. The year 1882 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 17,383 miles, which, at 16.7 souls per mile, gives £289,462, 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.”