Page:Motors and motor-driving (1902).djvu/387

distance tickets. The fact that will assert itself directly we have a proper supply of easy, quick, and comfortable motor-cars available, is the fact just named—i.e. that we live on roads and do not live on railways. The circumstance that a motor-car can stop at the garden gate if we live by a highway, or drive up the carriage-drive and draw up level with the porch if we live within lodge-gates, and take a man direct to the door of his office, or of his friend, or wherever he wants to go to, is bound to make the motor-car beat the train for all short-distance work. Let us take a concrete example. A British householder living in the middle of Kent—say thirty miles from the coast—is going to take his family to the seaside for the usual three weeks. At present the procedure is as follows: When the boxes- are corded and the children and nurses 'collected,' they are packed into carriages or an omnibus and taken to the local station on a branch line. There the party and its impedimenta are put into the railway for twenty minutes or so—i.e. till they reach the main-line station. Here the babies and the bicycles are taken out, and after a wait of perhaps half an hour are repacked into the main-line train which carries the party to Bathington West. Here there is another breaking of bulk and temper, and the family is got into cabs and omnibuses and driven to the hotel or lodgings. To accomplish this journey there have been no less than three gettings in and out. If, however, it were possible for the householder to engage a light motor-car for himself and his wife and eldest daughter, a motor-brake for the children and servants, and a light steam-van for the luggage, bicycles, buckets and spades, and perambulators, which would load up, not against time, but quietly at the front and back doors, and unload at the hotel or lodgings, what a vast deal of fuss and worry would be saved! Even if the journey, conducted at twelve miles an hour, took two hours and a half, it would hardly be so long as the time required for (1) driving two miles to the local station, say twenty minutes; (2) getting tickets and arranging luggage, &c., fifteen minutes; (3) going in local train to Buffling Junction, say twenty