AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
In the early part of last year I accepted an invitation from the Commandant of the Royal Engineers at Chatham to lecture at the School of Military Engineering at the Brompton Barracks upon the subject of "The Working of an English Railway." On that occasion, the theme was necessarily approached from the point of view of the utility of the railways in the event of the country being invaded; and although this led up to a description, within certain limits, of the methods of working and managing the railways, there were, of course, many branches of the subject which could not be brought within the scope of an evening's lecture, and would indeed scarcely have interested the audience to whom it was addressed. The lecture, however, in the printed form in which it afterwards appeared, attracted a certain amount of attention on the part of those interested in such matters, which eventually resulted in a suggestion that I should endeavour to deal with the subject in a more comprehensive manner than had previously been contemplated. The result of my attempt (I fear a very inadequate one) to carry out this suggestion is embodied in the following pages.
I must not omit to acknowledge my obligations to Mr. Francis W. Webb, the Chief Locomotive Engineer
