and a rule was laid down that he who had passed the pillar must
go on, and the coming man go back. At the Goose Pool and Early Nook, it
was common for these coaches to stop; and there, as Jonathan would say,
passengers and coachmen 'liquored.' One coach, introduced by an
innkeeper, was a compound of two mourning coaches, an approximation to
the real railway coach, which still adheres, with multiplying exceptions,
to the stage coach type. One Dixon, who drove the 'Experiment' between
Darlington and Shildon, is the inventor of carriage lighting on the rail.
On a dark winter night, having compassion on his passengers, he would buy
a penny candle, and place it lighted amongst them, on the table of the
'Experiment'--the first railway coach (which, by the way, ended its days
at Shildon, as a railway cabin), being also the first coach on the rail
(first, second, and third class jammed all into one) that indulged its
customers with light in darkness."

CALCULATION AS TO RAILWAY SPEED.

The Editor of _The Scotsman_, having engaged in researches into the laws
of friction established by Vince and Coloumb, published the results in a
series of articles in his journal in 1824 showing how twenty miles an
hour was, on theoretic grounds, within the limits of possibility; and it
was to his writings on this point that Mr. Nicholas Wood alluded when he
spoke of the ridiculous expectation that engines would ever travel at the
rate of twenty, or even twelve miles an hour.

ALARMIST VIEWS.

A writer in the _Quarterly Review_, in 1825, was quite prophetical as to
the dangers connected with railway travelling. He observes:--"It is
certainly some consolation to those who are to be whirled at the rate of
18 or 20 miles an hour by means of a high-pressure engine, to be told
that there is no danger of being sea-sick while on shore, that they are
not to be scalded to death, nor drowned, nor dashed to pieces by the
bursting of a boiler; and that they need not mind being struck by the
flying off or breaking of a wheel. What can be more palpably absurd or
ridiculous than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling _twice as
fast_ as stage coaches! We should as soon expect the people of Woolwich
to suffer themselves to be fired off upon one of Congreve's Ricochet
Rockets, as trust themselves to the mercy of such a machine going at such
a rate. We will back old Father Thames against the Woolwich Railway for
any sum. We tru