witzerland has its little railway of twenty-five miles, from Zurich
to Baden. Spain has its two small lines, from Madrid to Aranjuez, and
from Barcelona to Mataro. Turkey and Greece, in the south-east;
Portugal, in the south-west; Sweden and Norway,[1] in the bleak north,
have yet to become members of the great European railway system.

In comparing all these continental railways with those of our own
country, we find many instructive differences. In the first place, the
engineering, as we lately remarked, is much less daring; there is not
so much capital at command, and the engineers, therefore, bend to
difficulties instead of cutting through them. Still, there are not
wanting engineering works of great magnitude. One such is the great
railway bridge over the Vistula, near Bromberg, the first stone of
which was laid with much form by the king of Prussia some short time
back, and which will form one link in the chain from Berlin to
Koenigsberg. Another is the double railway bridge over the Elbe at
Dresden, opened in April 1852, having a railway on its eastern half,
and an ordinary roadway on its western. The stupendous Cologne Bridge
will be for the future to talk about: at present, not a single railway
bridge, we believe, crosses the Rhine; so that Western Europe is, in
fact, not yet connected by the iron pathway with Eastern. Among the
many thousand miles of continental railway, there must, of course, be
numerous constructions of great skill and magnitude; but the ratio is
small compared with those of England.

Another feature, is the great prevalence of single lines of rail. In
England, there is so much wrangling against single lines, and so great
a tendency among directors to think that there _ought_ to be traffic
enough for more, that double lines prevail almost everywhere. In the
German railways, double lines are laid down only in places of great
traffic--single lines being the rule, and the others the exception.
Where there are only three or four departures per day, which is the
case on most German railways, one line, with carefully-managed
sidings, is amply sufficient. 'Express trains,' and 'first-class
trains,' and 'special trains,' and anything which disturbs the steady
jog-trot mode of proceeding, are very little known in Germany; the
general speed, including stoppages, is about twenty miles an hour.
Although the first-class fares are only a fraction above 1-1/2d. per
mile, and the second-class just over 1d.