Before starting the Express train, we must not fail to note one new class of passengers, recruited by the speed of railways, viz., the number of gentlemen in breeches, boots, and spurs, with their pinks just peeping from under their rough jackets, who, during the season, get down to Aylesbury, Bletchley, and even Wolverton, to hunt, and back home again to dinner.  But the signal sounds.  The express train moves off; two gentlemen at the last moment are, in vain, crying out for Punch and the Times, while an unheeded hammering at the closed door of the booking-office announces that somebody is too late.  There is always some one too late.  On this occasion it was a young gentleman in a pair of light top-boots, and a mamma and papa with half-a-dozen children and two nursery-maids in a slow capacious fly.

We cannot bestow unqualified praise upon the station arrangements at Euston.  Comfort has been sacrificed to magnificence.  The platform arrangements for departing and arriving trains are good, simple, and comprehensive; but the waiting-rooms, refreshment stand, and other conveniences are as ill-contrived as possible; while a vast hall with magnificent roof and scagliola pillars, appears to have swallowed up all the money and all the light of the establishment.

The first-class waiting-room is dull to a fearful degree, and furnished in the dowdiest style of economy.  The second-class room is a dark cavern, with nothing better than a borrowed light.

The refreshment counters are enclosed in a sort of circular glazed pew, open to all the drafts of a grand, cold, uncomfortable hall, into which few ladies will venture.

A refreshment-room should be the ante-room to the waiting-room, and the two should be so arranged with reference to the booking-office and cloak-rooms, that strangers find their way without asking a dozen questions from busy porters and musing policemen.

Euston Station reminds us of an architect’s house, where a magnificent portico and hall leads to dungeon-like dining-room, and mean drawing-room.  Why are our architects so inferior to our engineers?

On the platform is the door of the telegraph office, which also has offices for receiving and transmitting messages at all the principal stations.

THE MIXED TRAIN.

The Mixed train on this line holds an intermediate rank between the Parliamentary and the Express, consisting as it does of first and second-class carriages, at lower fares than the one and higher than the other, stopping at fewer stations than the Parliamentary, and at more than the Express; but worth notice on the present occasion, because it is by these trains only that horses and carriages are allowed to be conveyed.

Carriages require very careful packing on a truck.  At the principal stations this may be very well left to the practised porters, but at road-side stations it is a point which should be looked to; for it has not unfrequently happened that the jogging, lateral motion of the railway has heated the axles of a carriage or truck, so that at the end of the journey the wheels have been found as fast as if they had been welded, and quite unfit to travel.