ces, where the
traffic is unusually heavy, iron rails have been replaced by those of
steel.

And now see the enormous magnitude to which railway passenger-traffic has
grown. In the year 1873, 401,465,086 passengers were carried by day
tickets in Great Britain alone. But this was not all. For in that year
257,470 periodical tickets were issued by the different railways; and
assuming half of them to be annual, one-fourth half-yearly, and the
remainder quarterly tickets, and that their holders made only five
journeys each way weekly, this would give an additional number of
47,024,000 journeys, or a total of 448,489,086 passengers carried in
Great Britain in one year.

It is difficult to grasp the idea of the enormous number of persons
represented by these figures. The mind is merely bewildered by them, and
can form no adequate notion of their magnitude. To reckon them singly
would occupy twenty-five years, counting at the rate of one a second for
twelve hours every day. Or take another illustration. Supposing every
man, woman, and child in Great Britain to make ten journeys by rail
yearly, the number would greatly fall short of the passengers carried in
1873.

Mr. Porter, in his 'Progress of the Nation,' estimated that thirty
millions of passengers, or about eighty-two thousand a day, travelled by
coaches in Great Britain in 1834, an average distance of twelve miles
each, at an average cost of 5s. a passenger, or at the rate of 5d. a
mile; whereas above 448 millions are now carried by railway an average
distance of 8.5 miles each, at an average cost of 1s. 1.5d. per
passenger, or about three halfpence per mile, in considerably less than
one-fourth of the time.

But besides the above number of passengers, over one hundred and
sixty-two million tons of minerals and merchandise were carried by
railway in the United Kingdom in 1873, besides mails, cattle, parcels,
and other traffic. The distance run by passenger and goods trains in the
year was 162,561,304 miles; to accomplish which it is estimated that four
miles of railway must have been covered by running trains during every
second all the year round.

To perform this service, there were, in 1873, 11,255 locomotives at work
in the United Kingdom, consuming about four million tons of coal and
coke, and flashing into the air every minute some forty tons of water in
the form of steam in a high state of elasticity. There were also 24,644
passenger-carriages, 912