were desperate fights in various
parts of England between property-owners who were determined that their
land should not be entered upon for the purpose of railway surveying, and
surveyors who knew that the schemes of their companies would be
frustrated unless the surveys were made and the plans deposited by the
30th of November. To attain this end, force, fraud, and bribery were
freely made use of. The 30th of November, 1845, fell on a Sunday; but it
was no Sunday at the office near the Board of Trade. Vehicles were
driving up during the whole of the day, with agents and clerks bringing
plans and sections. In country districts, as the day approached, and on
the morning of the day, coaches-and-four were in greater request than
even at race-time, galloping at full speed to the nearest railway
station. On the Great Western Railway an express train was hired by the
agents of one new scheme. The engine broke down; the train came to a
stand-still at Maidenhead, and, in this state, was run into by another
express train hired by the agents of a rival project; the opposite
parties barely escaped with their lives, but contrived to reach London at
the last moment. On this eventful Sunday there were no fewer than ten of
these express trains on the Great Western Railway, and eighteen on the
Eastern Counties! One railway company was unable to deposit its papers
because another company surreptitiously bought, for a high sum, twenty of
the necessary sheets from the lithographic printer, and horses were
killed in madly running about in search of the missing documents before
the fraud was discovered. In some cases the lithographic stones were
stolen; and in one instance the printer was bribed, by a large sum, not
to finish in proper time the plans for a rival line. One eminent house
brought over four hundred lithographic printers from Belgium, and even
then, and with these, all the work ordered could not be executed. Some
of the plans were only two-thirds lithographed, the rest being filled up
by hand. However executed, the problem was to get these documents to
Whitehall before midnight on the 30th of November. Two guineas a mile
were in one instance paid for post-horses. One express train steamed up
to London 118 miles in an hour-and-a-half, nearly 80 miles an hour. An
established company having refused an express train to the promoters of a
rival scheme, the latter employed persons to get up a mock funeral
cortege, and e