Oswestry to Newtown or from Newtown to Oswestry, and even private friends fell out as to the exact spot on the proposed route at which the actual work should begin!  “Discord triumphs—local prejudice is rampart—personal ill-will abounds—as a necessary consequence no one will apply for the unappropriated shares.  Dissolution alone is imminent,” cries the distracted editor.

It was certainly becoming apparent that this was no time for further dallying.  The Shrewsbury and Welshpool undertaking, it was reported, was enlisting “an amount of public interest and support seldom equalled in the history of railways,”

and early in 1856 the directors of the Oswestry and Newtown line found it expedient to assure the community that “preparations for letting the contract were in active progress” and the first sod was to be cut on April 11th.  Alas for the optimism of eager pioneers and the credulity of an impatient public!  April 11th came and proved nothing else than a slightly belated “All Fools Day”!  No sod was cut.  Not a spade or a barrow was visible, and the operation might, by all appearances be postponed till the Greek Kalends.  Patience, already sorely tried, became utterly exhausted.  In June the Shrewsbury and Welshpool Railway Bill was read a third time in the House of Commons, and thus the rival scheme loomed still larger upon the horizon.  Men had yet to learn that railways could be co-operative as well as competitive.

But so fully, indeed, was the popular mind at that time obsessed with the rivalry of routes that a rumour was started imputing to the directors of the Oswestry and Newtown Company the intention of “disuniting the line between Oswestry and Welshpool.”  As if there were not disunion enough already!  More genial humorists launched the story that the Prince of Wales was coming down expressly to cut the first sod and had ordered a new pair of “navvys” for the occasion to be made by a Welshpool bootmaker.  Feeling, however, was rising again, which was not moderated by the apologia of the directorate suggestive that it was all due to differences between them and the engineers.  The engineers themselves were more or less at variance, and, in April 1856, Mr. Barlow, the chief, finding it impossible to agree with his assistant, Mr. Piercy, resigned.

Matters had come to so critical a juncture that eventually, by some happy inspiration, a “committee of investigation”

was appointed to examine “the affairs, position and financial state of the Company.”  The Rev. C. T. C. Luxmoore was elected to preside at this inquiry with Mr. Peploe Cartwright of Oswestry as his deputy, and they issued a voluminous report containing a series of recommendations, of which one of the most interesting is that, to reduce expenditure, the earthworks should be limited to a single line, “in all other respects making preparations for a double line.”  That, as travellers over the Cambrian to-day are aware, save for the length between Oswestry and Llanymynech, and between Buttington and Welshpool on the Oswestry and Newtown section, was eventually the course adopted.  Bridges, including those over the Vyrnwy at Llanymynech, and the Severn at Pool Quay, were built with an extra span for a second pair of rails, but the girders still remain without further completion.  The directors did not escape pointed reference to their “heavy responsibilities,” but there was at least the “consolitary fact” that, despite enormous expenditure already incurred, “provided the arrears of deposit, calls and interest are paid up, a sum of £60,000 over and above the Parliamentary deposit of £18,000 invested in the hands of the Accountant-General, will be at once available for the works, an amount little short of sufficient to form half the line,” and the shareholders are urged, “manfully confronting the difficulties that present themselves” to “merge all local jealousies and differences of opinion, in a hearty and unanimous effort to carry out the works.”

It is a long and tortuous story and well may a journalist of those days, bemoan the perplexity of the local historian “when he turns over the files of the various newspapers, to see in one number the praises of certain gentlemen sung by admiring editors and enthusiastic correspondents, and in the

next frantic outbursts from distracted shareholders against the devoted heads of the same gentlemen, who, but one short week before were the admired of all the shareholding admirers.  One week he would find a noble lord wafted to the skies on the breath of a public meeting, but in the next ‘the breath thus vainly spent’ would blow his lordship up in a very different fashion, and those whose cheers had wafted my lord to that elevated position, would fain keep him there, so that sublunary affairs as far as regarded railways, would be out of his reach.  Then he would find another gentleman on the directory, one day the idol and leading speaker of every meeting, called on the next a ‘strife-engendering-judge,’ and his place filled by another on the board.  Presto! and this same gentleman, again turns up trumps!  A professional gentleman is the pet of the whole company, but speedily a woe is pronounced upon lawyers.  Again the wheel turns round, and the solicitor’s great exertions and painstaking attention to the interests of the line are acknowledged.” [34]

“Our historian would next discover ‘much talkee’ (as John Chinaman would say) anent a certain, or rather uncertain, ‘blighting influence’ which arrested the progress of some of the works, and to get to the bottom of which a ‘committee of investigation’ was appointed.  He would open his eyes when he saw the revelations made by that committee, and would wonder how in the name of fortune—or misfortune—the shareholders could be such ‘geese’ (to apply a term

used by one of the best directors the line ever had) as to allow affairs to go on as they had done.  He would find that committee triumphant in the praises of the people, but snubbed by another committee who conducted the ceremony of cutting a first sod that would not have been cut this century but for them.  When the investigation committee’s work was ended (but not finished!) he would find rival claimants for honour:—Mr. Soandso here, Mr. Whatshisname there, and other gentlemen elsewhere discovering that they were the ‘saviours of the line’—‘unravellers of the mystery’ while the line was yet in jeopardy, and the mystery as dark as Erebus.  He would then go on to disputes with contractors and engineers, a law suit commenced here, and threatened there,—directors retiring, and shareholders well-nigh at their wits end.  Lawyers are again at a ‘Premium’ and three are appointed to lay their heads together in order to make heads of agreement, for the guidance of new contractors, while the old ones, who the shareholders were afraid would sack the company, were themselves sacked!”

That, indeed, is the usual fate of those who attempt to follow dead controversies through their never-ending labyrinths.  A sentimental historian has said that “the world is full of the odour of faded violets”; but, in looking back over these yellow pages of the past, the scent which greets us is sometimes hardly as fragrant; and were it not for purposes of comprehensive record, many of these acrid, but not unamusing, incidents might be decently left buried in oblivion.  Happily, however, even the battle of the Oswestry and