Pre-WW1 railway acts political procedure

[Ken H]

Its my understanding that every new railway needed an act of parliament till fairly recently or maybe its still done.

But I am interested in what happened pre grouping with a myriad of small railways, joint committes etc
I assume the bill would have been introduced into one of the 2 houses and subject to scrutiny before passing to the other house, then receiving royal assent

Did these bills have committee stages? Who could lobby MPs or peers and did they. Were the bills substantially changed by the houses of Parliament?
Were any bills thrown out? Were any lost by not being completed before a parliamentary year?

Were the bills largely copied from existing acts or was each one drafted from scratch? Who wrote them?

And what did this process cost? I assume the railways got a fat bill for all this.

Lets make this a general discussion on pre grouping railway acts

 

[Rescars]

Apologies all. This post is an error which I don't seem to be able to delete.

 

[Dr Hoo]

Worth noting that for much of the 19th Century loads of things could only be ‘regularised’ by an act of parliament. Even changing your name (before Deed Polls) or getting a divorce. There were loads of ‘private acts’ that did not go through multi-stage scrutiny.
Railway Acts were pretty standard in terms of things like compulsory purchase of land and protection against being deemed a ‘nuisance’.
Various people like solicitors and land agents could prepare routine private bills for individuals and small companies.

 

[Rescars]

The Oxford Companion has quite a lengthy section about Parliament and Legislation, which clarifies the difference between Public General Acts (dealing with matters of broad public policy) and Local and Personal Acts (relating to the powers of companies to acquire land, etc). AIUI, some of the very early (pre-Victorian) Acts afforded greater powers to the companies concerned than was the case later.

 

[etr221]

Railway companies were 'statutory' companies - i.e. each company needed its own act to exist, they could not be created under the Companies Acts until relatively (the preservation and privatisation era, but others doubtless know more). These acts not only gave the company the right to exist, but also to (compulsorily) acquire land, and in many ways controlled how the company could conduct its business (so many railways obtained acts to say they could use elecric traction). So the larger, more important, companies would be proposing bills (to become acts) almost every year. There were (AIUI - I'm others will know more) specialist firms of parliamentary agents to drive the process, but (again AIUI) all these bills/acts went through the standard parliamentary process (although it may not have been quite the same as for major public bills). Any interested party could (AIUI) petition parliament for or against a bill, and provide evidence in support of their petition, although I don't know the details of how this was done. A fairly early act was the Railway Clauses Consolidation Act, which laid down a lot of standard things, that consequently did not need to be provided for specifically for each company; and there was also lot of legislation as to how railways should be run (various Regulation of Railways Acts come up fairly frequently on this forum!).

Like all bills, all of the above bills needed to be passed by parliament - and quite often they weren't, for one reason or another, or were amended - so for the proposing company it was a case of give up, or try again in the following session ... and so a lot of interesting schemes failed to materialise (even if if the money could have been found)

 

[DerekC]

As @etr221 says, there were an awful lot of schemes that never reached the Bill stage, and Bills that didn't become Acts. There was lots and lots of lobbying of parliament by existing railways (or in the early days promoters of Bills in the same area) to try to stop progress of particular schemes. A decent history of almost any railway from the 1840s onwards will give you a snapshot of the sort of thing that went on. I have a book called "The Railways of Hertfordshire" (interesting to me because I was brought up there) which gives some details of every scheme that planned to build a railway through the county. It lists 60 "unrealised schemes" between the Grand Northern Railway of 1834 (London to York via Cambridge, Lincoln, Gainsborough and Selby) and the Leighton Buzzard & Hitchin Light Railway of 1902, all of which would have needed an Act of Parliament authorising construction for them to proceed. Many of them failed to get finance. There was a lot of wheeling and dealing too. For example the Direct Northern and the London & York, both promoted in 1844 with very similar routes, after much lobbying of the Board of Trade which would make recommendations to Parliament as to which scheme it preferred, decided to amalgamate and become the Great Northern.