Excerpt from Railway Reform: Its Importance and Practicability Considered as Affecting the Nation, the Shareholders, and the Government IN 1844 an Act of Parliament was passed for the purpose of enabling Government to purchase on certain specified terms all railways in the United Kingdom that from that time forward should be constructed. To protect, however, the interests of the shareholders, and give ample time to the nation and the Legislature to have full experience of the management of our railways by companies, it was enacted, that twenty-one years should elapse before our present system should become subject to any change, or the rights of proprietorship or management of the directors be in any way interfered with. It will, therefore, be seen that in 1865 this Act comes into operation, and five-stubs of the existing railway mileage will eventually become subject to its provisions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.