railways are not built by resolution alone, or the whole countryside would soon have become heavy with steam.  As a matter of fact, it soon was, but not the sort of steam which drives locomotives or urges on the progress of practical railway construction.  Ever since 1844, reliance had been placed in the possibility of assistance from one or both of the great lines which already had access to the Welsh border.  Hope was first centred in the North Western, which had designs on a line from Shrewsbury into Montgomeryshire, but, in the Oswestry area, wistful eyes turned towards Paddington, and in propitiation of expected favours to come, four men with Great Western interests,—Mr. W. Ormsby-Gore, who became its first chairman; Sir Watkin, who later succeeded him in the chair; Col. Wynn, M.P., and Mr. Rowland James Venables,—were placed on the Oswestry and Newtown Board.  The Earl

of Powis, though a “North Westerner,” was found to be not without ready desire to look at things all round.  He was for a line to Shrewsbury, and also a line to Oswestry, but not to Oswestry alone.  Even the line to Oswestry, according to North Western notions, was to be a branch either from Garthmyl or Criggion, according to whether the Shrewsbury and Montgomeryshire line went by the Rea Valley or by Alberbury, and that was not at all to Oswestrian taste.  In the end, however, his lordship agreed to support the Oswestry project, and to take the value of his land,—some £10,000,—in shares, provided the possessor of Powis Castle was allowed to nominate a director, as the owner of Wynnstay was on the Great Western Board.  The condition was readily granted, and the Oswestry and Newtown Bill, freed from North Western opposition, was allowed to pass.  It obtained Royal Assent on June 26th, 1855, and the first general meeting was held at Welshpool on July 21st of that year.

Local rivalries, however, were not so easily dispelled.  Welshpool’s impartiality as between the Shrewsbury and the Oswestry lines was anathema at the latter town, where Mr. Whalley, speaking for nearly an hour and a half, readily persuaded a great meeting to register its insistence on the Oswestry scheme as an extension of the Llanidloes and Newtown, and so form another link in the chain that was to bind Manchester and Milford.  Anyhow, Oswestry must be made “the initial town and not Newtown.”  In support of this the local promoters looked for substantial aid from the Great Western.  But that company proved singularly unready to render any assistance.  “Not only,” said Mr. Abraham Howell, in giving evidence before Lord Stanley’s Committee some years later, “did the Great Western not aid in the capital for the Oswestry, but they did not support the Shrewsbury. 

On the contrary they opposed it with all their efforts at every step.  They also, by a manœuvre which their position of power over the Oswestry Company and their railway experience enabled them to carry out, succeeded in separating the Shrewsbury from the main line, and causing it to drift into the hands of the North Western.  They, on the day of, or immediately before the Wharncliffe meeting of the Oswestry Company, got their friends to pay into the bankers in respect of their shares, and give their proxies to the extent of the ¼th in money, against the clauses in the Shrewsbury bill, by which it was intended to connect it with the Oswestry.  By this means they cut off from the Welsh line their head and outlet at Shrewsbury, leaving them with the Oswestry head only, to which place they, the Great Western, alone had access, and therefore, under their exclusive power; a result which proved highly detrimental to the Oswestry and the Welshpool lines.  During the five years from 1855 to 1859 the advantage given to the Great Western interest placed our company practically under their control.”

Small wonder that public impatience began to show signs of strain.  Cynical allusions appeared in the Press.  “The only danger in making oneself liable for new schemes,” wrote one captious critic, “arises from the possibility of their being proceeded with.”  Not even the “glorious news” of the fall of Sebastopol sufficed to deflect the local mind from the irritating habits of a dilatory directorate.  After all, the Crimea was a long way off,—much further than Chirk,—to which place, the Great Western Company, on taking over the Shrewsbury and Chester line, had, under the profession of “revising” the fares, substantially raised them.  This habit is one to which the community has become more accustomed in recent years, but that was a first experience of the ways of powerful

monopolists, and it effectively emphasised the contention that it was high time “an independent” railway company, more directly under local control, should materialise.

Addresses were exchanged between Oswestry and Welshpool, much after the manner of diplomatic “Notes,” some of them phrased in the spirited language which diplomats know so well how to cloak in conventional formulas.  Occasionally even the conventional formulas were dispensed with.  Questions concerning the legality of certain assemblies were pugnaciously raised and as pugnaciously answered.  Four hours’ somewhat heated discussion at an extraordinary meeting of shareholders at Welshpool carried matters no further than the decision that the first sod, when it was cut, should be of Montgomeryshire soil, “but whether,” adds a critical commentator, “at Llanymynech, Welshpool or Newtown, no one knows.”  Fresh controversy arose concerning the secretaryship, to which office Mr. Princep had been appointed by Mr. Ormsby-Gore, after a very fleeting appearance on the kaleidoscopic scene of a Mr. Farmer, and the old rivalry of Great Western and North Western “interests” re-appeared in fresh form.  The “Oswestry Advertizer,” pointing the warning finger at the fate of another Welsh railway which, after £25,000 out of a total capital of £400,000 had been raised, found everything “swallowed up in the gulph of Chancery” under the winding-up Acts, proclaimed,—“We are almost afraid the Oswestry and Newtown is doomed to the same end.”  It certainly looked as if a true prophet was writing that dirge!

“It is hardly possible,” says Mr. Howell, “to conceive a more deplorable state than that to which the company was reduced during this period of five years of Great-western regime.  Every shilling that could be realized of the proceeds

of a very superior share list was expended, debt was accumulated, every resource was exhausted; but comparatively little was done in the execution of the works; the company was involved in four chancery suits, of large proportions, and a law suit, and with other suits in prospect.  It was necessary to provide £45,000 in cash, towards relieving the chairman from a personal liability of £75,000, and to let free the action of the company from the chancery suits; also further sums to discharge the claims of the contractors and carry on the works.”  So moribund, indeed, did the whole affair seem, that the North Western, treating it as practically extinct, began to consider a scheme for converting the Shropshire Union Canal, already in their hands, as a railway to Newtown!

And here were the promoters of this ill-starred project fighting amongst themselves.  One party was for keeping back the line from Oswestry till, as a newspaper writer put it, “a rival to Shrewsbury is brought into condition to do it damage.”  Another was for complicating it with other new schemes.  One of the sternest of all controversies still raged round the moot point whether the line was to run from