e was absolutely
no reason to hurry on this trip, as we had "lashins" of time to spare
for our connection at the junction, and the passengers were all much
interested in the sport.

At the other end of the scale are the trains which run from New York
to Philadelphia (90 miles) in two hours, the train of the Reading
Railway that makes the run of 55 miles from Camden to Atlantic City in
52 minutes, and the Empire State Express which runs from New York to
Buffalo (436-1/2 miles) at the rate of over 50 miles an hour,
including stops. These, however, are exceptional, and the traveller
may find that trains known as the "Greased Lightning," "Cannon Ball,"
or "G-Whizz" do not exceed (if they even attain) 40 miles an hour. The
possibility of speed on an American railway is shown by the record run
of 436-1/2 miles in 6-3/4 hours, made on the New York Central Railroad
in 1895 (= 64.22 miles per hour, exclusive of stops), and by the run
of 148.8 miles in 137 minutes, made on the same railway in 1897. The
longest unbroken runs of regular trains are one of 146 miles on the
Chicago Limited train on the Pennsylvania route, and one of 143 miles
by the New York Central Railway running up the Hudson to Albany. As
experts will at once recognise, these are feats which compare well
with anything done on this side of the Atlantic.

In the matter of accidents the comparison with Great Britain is not
so overwhelmingly unfavourable as is sometimes supposed. If, indeed,
we accept the figures given by Mullhall in his "Dictionary of
Statistics," we have to admit that the proportion of accidents is
five times greater in the United States than in the United Kingdom.
The statistics collected by the Railroad Commissioners of
Massachusetts, however, reduce this ratio to five to four. The
safety of railway travelling differs hugely in different parts of
the country. Thus Mr. E.B. Dorsey shows ("English and American
Railways Compared") that the average number of miles a passenger can
travel in Massachusetts without being killed is 503,568,188, while
in the United Kingdom the number is only 172,965,362, leaving a
very comfortable margin of over 300,000,000 miles. On the whole,
however, it cannot be denied that there are more accidents in
American railway travelling than in European, and very many of them
from easily preventable causes. The whole spirit of the American
continent in such matters is more "casual" than that of Europe; the
American is more w