effort than a pair of villagers would make
over a game at bowls?

Easily as the whole thing seems to be taken,
there is a vast deal of hidden work that keeps
the line alive. One main secret of economical
and easy management consists in the
fact that the Company carries on for itself
the manufacture of all that it requires for
daily use. Carriages, waggons, engines, coke
and gas, are produced on railway premises
and by railway servants.

Besides the well-known London terminus
for passengers, the many stations built along
the lines, and the great termini at Liverpool
and Manchester, there are connected with
the railway business goods' depôts at Camden
Town and Haydon Square, London; at
Manchester, and at three separate spots in
Liverpool. There are also waggon and carriage
manufactories at Birmingham, rolling-mills
for rails at Crewe, and locomotive factories
at Crewe and Wolverton.

We will speak of the last first. The
locomotive depôt at Crewe employs about sixteen
hundred operatives, who are constantly
engaged in the manufacture of new engines and
tenders. So perfect is their organization and
their skill that they at some seasons turn out
a new engine with its accompanying tender
every week, and seldom produce less than
forty in a year.

The Wolverton factory gives employment
to about nine hundred workmen, and these
are engaged solely upon repairs and alterations.
Crewe is the nursery, and Wolverton
the hospital for locomotives. At the
Wolverton infirmary may be seen scores of
the metal steeds laid up, or rather laid down,
in regular wards, as distinct and orderly and
comfortable as the wards of Saint Bartholomew's.
There is the worn-out ward, the
ricketty ward, and the ''accidents" ward;
and there are sundry other wards, in all of
which locomotives are to be seen undergoing
cure. Red hot pieces of iron are being forcibly
administered here; holes are being probed,
and nuts screwed on there; steam-hammers
are battering; steam lathes are paring
the callosities; hundreds of locomotive
surgeons —stalwart, brawny-limbed and iron-
fisted —dress and bind up the cases in their
wards with a tremendous energy. There are
sickly looking locomotives being fitted with
brand new insides; there are several, in the
last stage of collapse, having strong doses of
copper rivets forced into their systems.
Metal giants, shakey about the knees, are
being fitted with new sets of joints. In short,
there is every conceivable stage of disorder
to be seen at Wolverton treated by surgeons,
who are seldom at a loss. In the most
desperate cases they effect a cure. Ninety-
nine out of every hundred of these battered
patients come out perfectly restored to their
bereaved stokers, to run upon the rails as
fast as ever, and with no diminution in their
healthy appetite for coke and water. Even
the one incurable among a hundred invalids
does not entirely perish. By the help of a
blast furnace and steam-hammer, he is beaten
young again, and eventually reproduced as
a new locomotive, called perhaps the
Phœnix.

Nothing is wasted in the railway hospital.
The broken nails —the very hoof-parings and
hair-cuttings and mane-trimmings of these
iron steeds—are turned to useful purposes.
Odd lumps of iron, crooked bits of boiler-
plate, bruised wheels and fractured spokes
are heaped in piles upon the blast furnace;
and, when of a bright white heat are welded
together. Many of these welded masses
are again exposed to a like heat; and then,
brought under the action of a great steam
hammer, become fit for duty as axles, or
cranks, or anything requiring strength and
temper.

In addition to the kind of work thus indicated
there are, in various parts of the dozen
acres covered by the hospital at Wolverton,
many other operations to be watched. Huge
and solid bars of iron or of copper are there cut
through whilst cold and hard, as readily as
a cook snips carrots in her kitchen; engines
driving wheels of eight feet in diameter may
be seen placed on a steam-lathe and spun like
humming-tops, whilst shavings fly from their
hard sides as freely as deal chips. Great
steam pIanes, too, cut and trim, and smooth
the most rugged metal surfaces.

Wolverton, having been formed entirely by
the Company, is a railway colony. Not a hut
stood where Wolverton now is when the
directors determined to establish their
locomotive hospital. Now, hundreds of pretty
red-bricked model cottages, a neat model
church, a model school-room, and an
operatives' library, a mechanics' institute, shops,
and even an apothecary's store, are there
established; all neat, clean and orderly, and
all exclusively belonging to the railway
world.

At Crewe the works are on a larger scale.
There, too, the Company has built a little
town, let out at very low rates to the operatives
and their superintendents. This is the
great North-Western nursery, where
locomotives, still in the first month, are reared
by means of a steam dietary, and whence
some of the greatest public characters of
railway life have issued. Some engines are
to be seen at Crewe of an entirely new
construction, and of such power, that their
builders offer to convey the mails by them
from London to Edinburgh in less than four
hours.

Much consideration must be taken for the
food of working locomotives. To keep the
whole stud of the North-Western Railway
properly fed, it is required that six enormous
coke-baking establishments should be at
work incessantly, the consumption being at
the rate of a thousand tons a day. Would it
be possible to conceive any line of road so