B. RAILWAYS - STATISTICS (cont.)

Working or Rolling Stock

The working or rolling stock of railways consists of locomotives with their tenders, passenger carriages, horse-boxes, carriage trucks, traveling post-offices with their tenders and vans, goods waggons, covered goods waggons, cattle trucks, coke and coal waggons, timber trucks, ballast waggons, and goods brake vans. Table III. (below) shows that in England and Wales there is nearly one locomotive per mile of line open, or for the United Kingdom three engines for every 4 miles. The greatest waggon stock per mile open is to be found in Scotland—nearly thirty-one per mile. The proportions of vehicles for traffic of all classes for each locomotive averaged at the end of the year 1883:—

Table III. Summary of the Quantities of Working Stock at the end of the year 1883.

The excessive proportion of fifty-two vehicles per engine in Scotland corresponds to the comparatively excessive number of train miles with goods and minerals, which are 20 per cent. more than the passenger-train miles, whilst in England they are 8 per cent. less, and in Ireland more than 50 per cent. less. The various proportions of rolling stock for twenty-one leading British railways (31st December 1883) are exhibited in detail in Table IV., arranged in order of the numerical proportions which the carrying stock for traffic bears to the locomotive stock:—

Here the number of vehicles varies from 5 per engine on the Metropolitan Railway, 7 on the District Railway, and 11.7 on the North London Railway—all of these specially passenger lines of dense traffic—to 54 per engine on the North-Eastern Railway, 59 on the North British Railway, and 65 on the Caledonian Railway—all these being specially lines of mineral traffic.





Read the rest of this article:
Railway, Railways - Table of Contents