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The First Part of an Exclusive Description of a "Commercial Motor" Inspection Trip.

25th June 1914, Page 11
25th June 1914
Page 11
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Page 11, 25th June 1914 — The First Part of an Exclusive Description of a "Commercial Motor" Inspection Trip.
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

We who are interested in the commercial-motor industry, and especially those of us whose headquarters are in London, are perhaps somewhat prone to allow the enormous organization of the L.G.O.C. to overshadow other, and in their way equally important, developments in the motorbus branch of the industry, to the detriment of the latter.

Some of us, may be, are a little inclined to disregard the fact that nowadays there are other large fleets, many of them of goods and passenger vehicles combined, of great importance in various parts of the country. We ourselves can safely say that we have always taken care to avoid such ill-balanced views ; w c consistently give p u blicity whenever possible to the doings of other great concerns. There is, of course, nothing quite like the London motorbus organization in t b e world ; ol.her undertakings which may be comparable have characteristics of an altogether different nature.

Why the Railway's Problem is Different.

Perhaps we can best illustrate this point of view by quoting two little incidents which came to our notice during a recent -complete investigat i o n tour which we have carried out in conjunction with the officials of the London and North-Western Railway Motor Department.

The Farmer's Sack of Flour.

On a certain single-deck motorbus route in a _provincial district, which shall be nameless at the moment, a farmer arrived one day with

a sack of flour at a cross-roads. He hailed the motor omnibus, which had arrived to its scheduled time at this picking-up point, and with deliberation and native ease hoisted the sack of flour in his arms and proceeded to make his way to the inside of the bus. The conductor, accustomed as •he was to little vagaries of this kind on the part of fare-paying passengers, was

somewhat nonplussed when he realized that this chance traveller intended to carry his sack of flour to a market town some five miles away, and, moreover, to do so free of cost to himself. He was emphatic in his opinion that such a little item as this should rightly he regarded as passenger's luggage, and no charge made for it. But that was not the official view.

The Town Crier and the Motorbus.

The other incident of which we would write was on another town-to-town provincial service belonging to the L. and N.W.R. Co., and it occurred within the writer's notice. We were approaching a market town in which what is locally known as a rose fete was billed to take place, and in a little village, with some ultra-guttural Welsh name, an individual, garbed in wondrous town-crier's uniform, climbed into the inside of the single-decker, and commenced clanging his bell and bawling out in Welsh notices with regard to the forthcoming festivities. It was only after protests on t h e part of the conductor that the aforesaid crier was persuaded to postpone his crying until arrival at his destination.

These two little incidents serve well to illustrate the homely class of traffic which has to be carried in many provincial districts.

The Intimacy of Locali Carrying.

On the goods-carrying side there is not, admittedly, so much variation as between city and provinces, but one is readily forced to a realization of the fact that railway officials, in efforts to provide adequately for goods and passenger-carrying requirements of way side villages and small country towns, have problems of their own which are unknown to those who have the organization of a great city motorbus undertaking in their charge.

From Llandudno to Lla,nrwst the conductor probably knows everyone of his passengers by sight and many of them personally. He knows where they will get on, and when they will get off, and, if he be observant and blest with a retentive memory, he is able to estimate, within a few Inindredweight, how many parcels they will bring back from the market town that they will claim to carry free of charge as hand luggage. It should be remembered that it is often a little difficult rigidly to enforce regulations and by-laws with, one's friends. So that the peremptory " stand-clearof-the-lift " attitude so prevalent in the Metropolis is unknown as between passenger and carrier in many parts of the Provinces.

The Railway's Way of Doing It.

It is because of these and similar differences that there are characteristics about the motor-vehicle organization of such a concern as the North-Western Railway Co. that are interesting from the socio logical, as well as from the meaineal, point of view.

One shudders to think what would be the attitude of a Cockney conductor at Marble Arch, shall we say, were he confronted by a passenger who wished to pay a penny from there to Oxford Circus, and to carry -with him, as part of the contract, a lawn mower, or a sack of potatoes, or did he have to check the exuberant outpourings of a Salvation-Army preacher on the top of a crowded West-bound doubledecker.

At the Other End from Eusten.

Standing at the bottom of a narrow hedge-covered lane running down to the wild shores of the desolate northern district of Anglesey, remote at least 18 miles from a railway, it is a little difficult to realise that within a few hundred yards there is standing one of the passenger-carrying units of the London and North-Western Railway Co. of England. It is not easy to persuade one's self that that isolated little spot, at the end of nowhere almost, is as much a part of the territory served by the company as is fardistant Euston Square. It is a wonderful object-lesson thus to travel to the extreme limits of the traffic organization of a great railway company, and thus to become impressed with the true extent of such a vast undertaking.

Wonderful Co-ordination of Departments.

Few people pause to consider how great the difficulties must be in welding together the innumerable facilities which a concern of this magnitude nowadays offers to the

public. For instance, the NorthWestern can carry you from Streatham Common direct to Pentretafarrn-y-fedw or even to Llanfairy'nghornwy. It is possible to travel from your own house in a London suburb, with your baggage, across London in a private railway motorbus, thence by fast passenger train diagonally across England, right up as far as Holyhead, and then again by motor vehicle to the inner recesses of the Welsh mountains or out to the extreme limits of rocky Anglesey. And all this is possible by virtue of the careful pre-arrangement and co-ordination of the various great departments of the London and North-Western Railway.

A Department and no Longer an Experiment.

We have arrived at the time, of course, when the motor vehicle is definitely accepted as a unit in the public traffic facilities of this and other countries. But a few years ago, only one or two isolated and independent services existed, and then solely as experiments. Regarded with cynical toleration by the other great operating departments in the early days, it was, we think, little realised that, within a few short years, the motor vehicle would actually be playing a prominent and necessary part in the business organization of most of the great railway companies, that regular services would be maintained to districts which had hitherto been quite isolated, that passengers and goods would be distributed as easily, as regularly, and as cheaply by motor vehicles of various kinds as for years they had been by goods train, passenger train, and the horsed vehicles running in connection with them. Yet here we are in 191.4 at a stage of development. in which all this had happened, with much more schemed ahead.

The Motor's Place in the Time Table.

The motor is no longer only an interesting and more-or-less doubtful accessory to railway methods ; it has -made good its elaim to a proper place in the time-table ; and it has enabled the directors already to find a means to accommodate the pressing needs for the, better travel of inhabitants in territories rightly belonging to the railway, but hitherto divorced from it physically.

The L. and N.W.R.'s Courteous Assistance.

It has been our pleasure during the past year or two, with the courteous assistance of the governing authorities, to investigate this question of the enthusiastic adopt.;on of the motor vehicle by some oi the principal railway companies of this country. On the present occasion we are happy to be able to write fully of the rapidly-growing motor-vehicle department of the London and North-Western Railway Company. When we expressed our desires in this direction to Mr. C. J. Bowen Cooke, the chief mechanical engineer of the company, he very readily offered us every facility to secure what information we desired, not only in connection with the passenger lines, but also with the established services of goods-carrying motor vehicles.

A Recently Completed Pro.gramme.

We have, as we have said, just completed a tour of the whole of the services which are at present operated by the L, and N.W.R. Co. Mr. F. W. Dingley, who is at the head of the newly-constituted motor department of the railway company, personally outlined, at the chief engineer's request, a comprehensive programme, which has taken us to Euston, Watford, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Liverpool, Chester, Leeds, Manchester, North Wales and Anglesey. We have watched the extra-metropolitan services of double-deckers, which correspond, in the facilities they offer, so closely to those on the outer routes of the L.G.O.C. We have spent a great deal of time in the huge Curzon Street goods depot at Birmingham, and have investigated, in conjunction with Mr. Hayes, the district goods superintendent, the method of working the fleet of Thornycroft 21-tonners in connection with the vast goods traffic of that great Midland centre. We have seen the diminutive parcelear engaged in the distribution of parcel traffic in residential districts like Pinner ; we have observed how isolated services of goods haulage between difficult points may he maintained with absolute satisfaction by Foden steam lorries, whilst in the docks at Liverpool we have had the opportunity to note how the same class of machine can facilitate the collation of hulk loads from various points on the river-side, ready in suitable quantities, for distribution over the network of the whole railway system. Then, finally, have we spent several days—and very pleasant ones they proved to be. under the personal guidance of Mr. G. R. Jackson, Mr. Dingley's chief assistant—in journeying over the extensive system of passenger services which the company maintains in various parts of North Wales, and which it is now busily engaged in developing in Anglesey.

G lods and Passengers.

We may broadly divide the motor department's activities at the present time into the two classes into which they naturally fall, viz., those

engaged in goods traffic, and those which maintain passenger services in connection with. the railway system. Probably the best manner in which we can write of the many impressions which we have secured during the past week is to deal with these two big divisions in turn, and then to summarize our conclusions with regard to the motor-vehicle department as a whole.

A Railway's Special Facilities and Difficulties.

It is no secret that the L. and N.W.R., after something like nine years of persistent experiment, and

of cut-and-come-again development, has at last derided that, not only is the motor vehicle a possibility, but that in its present efficient form it is an actual necessity. A railway company of course has facilities as well as problems which are unique to it as a trading concern. It has a huge existing mechanical organization, numberless depots, and a vast staff, which includes specialists in almost every line of business. These are factors which enable it to tackle the problem of the economical employment of motor vehicles in an altogether different manner to that which has to be employed by any newly-established operating concern.

It is obvious that a railway company, in order successfully to make use of the commercial motor, must evolve its own means of doing so. It would be foolish to attempt to establish a department as part of a railway company's system, and yet to organize it—shall we say—on lines similar to those employed by the L. G.O. C.

With all the facilities which such a concern possesses, one would naturally conclude that any great new movement like this, in its early stages, would encounter only problems which could he easily solved, and yet it has to be remembered that the difficulties, as a matter of fact, are correspondingly unique. Of necessity there are no huge concentrations of vehicles at any particular points. The Motor Department has to maintain, on the cantrary, a great number of small services. all of which are accessory to the railway at various parts of the system, and many of which are in the most isolated areas, cut off from the central organization, from repair shops and fully-equipped garages in all but the fact that the main railway connects them effectively and brings them into more or less close touch.

In the second part of the present article, which we shall publish on our next issue, we shall indicate the distribution of the company's fleet and write at some length of the goods motor services.


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