CHAPTER XXIII. 
THE “RAILWAY NEWS,” THE INTERNATIONAL RAILWAY CONGRESS, AND A TRIP TO
SPAIN AND PORTUGAL

In Chapter XX I recorded the death of my old friend W. F. Mills, which took place whilst I was writing that chapter.  Now, as I pen these lines, I hear of the loss of another old familiar railway friend; not indeed a sentient being like you, dear reader, or him or me, yet a friend that lacked neither perception nor feeling.

The Railway News on Saturday, the 30th day of November, 1918, issued its last number, and, as a separate entity, ceased to be, its existence then merging into that of the Railway Gazette.  I am sad and sorry for I knew it well.  For forty years it was my week-end companion; for ten years or more, in the April of life, I contributed regularly to its pages; and never, during all the years, have its columns been closed to my pen.  One of its editors, F. McDermott, has long been my friend, and its first editor, Edward McDermott, his father, a grand old man, was kind to me in my salad days and encouraged my budding scribbling proclivities.  He and Samuel Smiles, the author of Self Help (then Secretary of the South Eastern Railway), were, in 1864, its joint founders.

“Death,” the Psalmist saith, “is certain to all.”  In 1893, the railway world lost one whom it could ill spare.  In the month of March, after a short illness, Sir George Findlay died at the early age of 63.  Gifted of the gods, in the midst of his work, young in mind and spirit, his faculties in full vigour, he was suddenly called away.  His funeral, I need not say, was attended by railway men from all parts of the kingdom.  I was one of those who travelled to London to follow his remains to their resting place.

Further public railway legislation was enacted in 1893 and 1894, and four important Acts were passed.  The first was the Railway Regulation Act, 1893.  It dealt with the hours of labour of railway servants, a subject which for some time previously had been enjoying the attention of the Press.  It culminated in the appointment of a Parliamentary Committee.  In February, 1891, a Select Committee, consisting of 24 members, with Sir Michael Hicks Beach as chairman, was formed, “To inquire whether, and if so, in what way, the hours of railway servants should be restricted by legislation.”  The Committee examined numerous railway servants and officials, and reported to Parliament, in June, 1892.  I was summoned by the Committee to give evidence and appeared before them in London on 24th March of that year.  My business was to furnish facts concerning the hours of duty of the employees on my own railway and the conditions of their work.  This I did pretty fully and embraced the opportunity of showing how different were the circumstances of Irish railways compared with English, and how legislation suitable to one country might be very unsuitable to the other.  It scarcely needed saying that England was an industrial