10) It’s the start of a pigeon race! You might not think that there was much connection between homing pigeons and the railways, yet here you can see British Railways releasing about fifteen thousand pigeons from Newcastle at Welwyn Garden City Station.

You probably know that pigeon fanciers hold races to see whose bird can get home first. And this is where the railways come in, for all the pigeons you see here came from the north in ten railway vans. On occasions like this the baskets are piled up by the side of the train, and then at a given moment the doors are slipped open and the pigeons fly out on their 250-mile journey home. That should give you some idea of the great variety of loads the railways carry.

Now all these various kinds of traffic, which totalled over 280 million tons in 1949, have to be dealt with in different ways. Let us look for a moment at the way British Railways deal with general merchandise.