VI. THE RAILWAYS AND THE PASSAGE.
The London, Chatham and Dover Railway Company, in bringing their Hne to Dover, reckoned on making the cross-Channel passenger service a source of profit to their undertaking. They secured the Dover and Calais Mail contract in 1863, and, with it, the passenger traffic, which at once put the newly-formed railway in keen competition with the South Eastern Railway Company. The S.E. Company had their own harbour and steam packets at Folkestone, where they had already secured a well-established cross-Channel traffic, for although the sea route to Boulogne was longer, the journey beyond to Paris was shorter. Two years later the two Companies entered into a Continental agreement, by which all the railway receipts, attributable to the Channel Passage, along all parts of their systems between Margate and Hastings, were pooled, and divided in agreed proportions between the two Companies, depriving Continental travellers of any benefit that might have arisen from competition.
In the year 1863, when the Railway Company took over the Passage, the number of passengers was 123,053. It will be interesting, later, to compare that annual total with the increased number after the flight of nearly half a century ; but it will be more significant to notice the decrease of the annual total to 108,103, in 1870, five years after the Continental agreement had been brought into force. If natural causes had operated, there would have been the same steady increase in the Dover and Calais passengers as in preceding years; but the fact was the ill-matched pair of Railway Chairmen, before the ink of their agreement was dry, began to devise means of evading it by securing, on each side, the large.st share of Continental traffic for their own lines. Naturally, the South Eastern Company would do their best for their own harbour at Folkestone, in spite of the fact that the London and Chatham would take a share of the pool ; but the London and Chatham, having no proprietary interest in Dover Harbour, diverted a part of their Continental traffic at a point of their line beyond the limits of the Continental agreement, by a branch line from Sittingbourne to Queenborough, and thence by a line of steam packets to Flushing. This project was followed by two counter-moves by the South Eastern Company — one to open a new route via Port Victoria, near Queenborough ; and the other to build a large and attractive station just beyond the limits of Folkestone at Shorncliffe. These devices to get outside the Continental agreement were productive of little profit to the Railway Companies, and led to expensive litigation. The Flushing route proved to be only a " side show," the London and Chatham Company soon coming to the conclusion that the Dover route was their main stay. Railway rivalries and diversions in the " Seventies " had kept down the annual total of the Dover and Calais passengers to 197, 916, but as soon as the London, Chatham and Dover Railway Company made up their minds to make the most of Dover, the passengers increased, the annual total in 1888 being 235,695 ; and by the end of the " Eighties " the annual total touched 300,000; the year 1889 seeing an increase of nearly 1,000 passengers a week.