ed it is the result of
accidental impediments, of avoidable difficulties that we travel to-day
on rails.

Railway travelling is at best a compromise. The quite conceivable ideal
of locomotive convenience, so far as travellers are concerned, is surely
a highly mobile conveyance capable of travelling easily and swiftly to
any desired point, traversing, at a reasonably controlled pace, the
ordinary roads and streets, and having access for higher rates of speed
and long-distance travelling to specialized ways restricted to swift
traffic, and possibly furnished with guide-rails. For the collection and
delivery of all sorts of perishable goods also the same system is
obviously altogether superior to the existing methods. Moreover, such a
system would admit of that secular progress in engines and vehicles that
the stereotyped conditions of the railway have almost completely
arrested, because it would allow almost any new pattern to be put at
once upon the ways without interference with the established traffic.
Had such an ideal been kept in view from the first the traveller would
now be able to get through his long-distance journeys at a pace of from
seventy miles or more an hour without changing, and without any of the
trouble, waiting, expense, and delay that arises between the household
or hotel and the actual rail. It was an ideal that must have been at
least possible to an intelligent person fifty years ago, and, had it
been resolutely pursued, the world, instead of fumbling from compromise
to compromise as it always has done and as it will do very probably for
many centuries yet, might have been provided to-day, not only with an
infinitely more practicable method of communication, but with one
capable of a steady and continual evolution from year to year.

But there was a more obvious path of development and one immediately
cheaper, and along that path went short-sighted Nineteenth Century
Progress, quite heedless of the possibility of ending in a _cul-de-sac_.
The first locomotives, apart from the heavy tradition of their ancestry,
were, like all experimental machinery, needlessly clumsy and heavy, and
their inventors, being men of insufficient faith, instead of working for
lightness and smoothness of motion, took the easier course of placing
them upon the tramways that were already in existence--chiefly for the
transit of heavy goods over soft roads. And from that followed a very
interesting and curious result.

The