RAIL TO TARANAKI.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 140, 15 June 1932, Page 6

RAIL TO TARANAKI.

The announcement that the Main TrunkStratford railway line will be completed in about three months comes as welcome news to those who have waited so long in the hope that this very necessary connection would be finished before they died. It is just forty years since a railwayroute exploration party from Auckland traversed the forest country through -which the line has now been made and spied out the likely quality of the great, silent region for settlement. Since then several townships and a great many farms and homesteads have been established where the bush that once extended unbroken for nearly a hundred miles has been cut and burned away. The country is of such a character that motor road maintenance is costly and difficult; it is a district that can best be served by a railway for all heavy traffic. For many years settlers in ■the Ohura and other places along this North Taranaki route have been handicapped by the want of reliable and cheap transport. Now that their long-deferred hopes are about to be realised, it is to be expected that they will give the railway the business support that will justify the construction of the line.

The value of the Okahukura-Stratford connection, however, is not to be measured alone by the amount of settlement and business along the new route. Auckland City, the Waikato and the King Country, will all be'benefited by a rail service with Taranaki, and the comparative isolation of that province will be lessened by easy direct communication with the northern parts of the Dominion. Interprovincial traffic is likely to be stimulated greatly when this important link in the communications of the island is t$ last ready for business. —J-C.