Colossal Passenger Traffic.

The return to more prosperous times recorded in the case of the Home main line railways is also reflected in the working of the London Underground Railways. The London underground group (comprising a number of underground railways, omnibus undertakings and street tramway concerns), carried some 2,175,000,000 passengers in 1929. The railways in the group handled 18 per cent. of this business; the motor buses 73 per cent., and the street tramcars 9 per cent. These figures bring out in striking manner the predominance of the motor omnibus in London transport. Nowhere else in the capital cities of the world does the omnibus secure such an enormous share of the passenger business offering. Traffic receipts of the London underground combine amounted in the aggregate to £17,300,000, an increase of £200,000 over 1928. The underground undertaking, it is interesting to note, employs some 45,000 regular workers, and the average weekly wage paid per man is approximately £4 3s. London's population now stands at something like 8,800,000 persons. This, of course, is quite apart from the hundreds of thousands of visitors that annually make their way from every corner of the earth, to the great modern Babylon. In 1929 the journeys per head of the population over the Underground concern worked out at 512. In the future there will probably be seen many extensions outwards of the underground railways, and plans are under way for the spending of £13,500,000 upon these extension works.