Graham Trust mentions the large number of passengers on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway

Resource Type: Audio | Posted on 5th August 2011 by Liam Physick

Graham Trust explains how the founders of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway expected that it would primarily carry goods, but instead most of its revenue came from passenger services

Interviewee: Graham Trust

Interviewee Gender: Male

Date of Interview: 16th November 2010

Interview Transcript

Jenny: So, really, I mean, this station would, would have been a hive of activity at that time, just . . .

Graham: Oh yeah.

Jenny: . . . creating that energy to, sort of, power those carriages.

Graham: Yeah, there would, there would be a hell of a lot of noise, I would imagine, and the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was enormously successful, unexpectedly so in terms of passenger numbers, if you bear in mind that the Railway, the plans for the Railway were started in round about 1821 and it was anticipated from the start that this would be principally a railway to serve the merchants of Liverpool and Manchester and they would carry, the bulk of what they, they carried would be freight and, and that didn’t happen. Possibly two reasons for that. Firstly, when the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened, the canal proprietors slashed their rates of carriage . . . slashed, slashed their rates of carriage which, coincidentally, that was one of the reasons why the Railway came in in the first place, because they, the Railway, cos the merchants of Liverpool and Manchester felt they were being exploited by the canal proprietors with their excessive levies, and indeed, the fact that they slashed their rates as soon as the Railway opened tells a, a, a story, they were charging massively.

Jenny: Yeah, yeah.

Graham: So, because of that, the Railway didn’t carry as much freight as it was anticipating, cos it was uncompetitive, relatively uncompetitive, but the passenger aspect of the Railway was unexpectedly successful, and every year, of the 15 years that the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was in existence, the receipts from passengers exceeded the receipts from freight.

Tagged under: liverpool and manchester railway, carriages, goods, passengers, freight, canals

Categorised under: The Station & Railway Pioneers

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