Cusack Patrick Roney
Published: 2012-01-01
Total Pages: 396
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Previous to describing the Mont Cenis Railway, we will ask the reader to place himself mentally with us in the train belonging to one or other of the two railway companies which, leaving the great British metropolis at four different points, Charing Cross or Cannon Street (South Eastern), Victoria or Ludgate Hill (London, Chatham and Dover), arrives by either route at a point common to both?the Admiralty Pier, Dover, in two hours and five minutes from the time of its departure. The South Eastern Company carries the land mails, both ordinary and extraordinary, as well as the bulk of the passengers; on the other hand, its rival carrying fewer passengers, and the distance being ten miles less, almost invariably arrives first at the Admiralty Pier, and thus enables those whom she (ships, trains, and locomotives are of the feminine gender) conveys, to secure some of the sofas, reclined upon which, the ceremony of seasickness can (as we know well, by great and varied experience) be performed with far greater ease, grace, precision, and satisfaction, than by him or her who is destined to perform it sitting or standing. At the time that the traveller touches terra firma at Calais, he has completed 110 miles of journeying, if he have travelled by the South Eastern Line, ten miles less, if he have committed himself to the London, Chatham and Dover. The original railway distance from Calais to Paris was 236 English miles, but thanks to two shortenings, the first between Creil and Paris, the secondbetween Hazebrouch and Arras, by which latter the detour to the neighbourhood of Lille was avoided, the length was diminished to 203 miles; and now, since the opening of the line between Calais and Boulogne, in April of the present year, the mail trains take this route to and from Paris, by which a ...