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Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 139, 15 June 1938, Page 11

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ROYAL COMMISSION. REPORT ON RAILWAYS. AMAZING RECOMMENDATION. (By Telegraph.—Own Correspondent.) WELLINGTON', this .lav. The decision to spend about £1.000,000 on a loii" tunnel from Mtmgaroa to Cross Creek, in order to avoid tin- Rimutaka incline, has brought to mind some railway history, showing that even a lioyal Commission may seriously err. A report on the railway undertakings of the colony in JSSO was presented to Parliament, so completely discounting I the Wellington-Manawatu railway, on I which construction had been commenced, that it wart abandoned.

On the "onimission's recommendation work was resumed on the Wairarapa railway from Masterton to Mauriceville, and ultimately rail connection was given to Wellington by this route, involving a climb over the mountains on a 1 in I") graile, necessitating the use of a rack rail and special locomotives. Recently the Prime Minister expressed wonderment that people had ever tried to build a railway on such a route. Unprofitable Undertaking. The alternative way out of Wellington through the Manawatu did not appeal to the Royal Commission of ISSO. "We consider the proposal premature," it said, "on the ground that tlie value of the land which the line would serve has been greatly over-rated and that the undertaking would be an unprofitable rine which the Colony would not be justified in entering upon. "We advise that the expenditure now going on at tlie Wellington end Ik? at once stopped, and the labour employed thereon transferred to the MastertonMaut iceville section.'' Wellington opinion on this verdict was expressed in the characteristically frank manner of the Press of those days. The Commission was referred to as "The Flying Squadron'' because it covered so much ground in a short time, the critical editor adding: "It performed its duties in a scandalously lax. perfunctory and incompetent manner, and actually condemned the railway without going over the line of route." Big Dividends. Time has justified the Commission's critics, for the private company which completed the Wellingtoii-Manawatu railway—the Covernment of that time presenting it with all the construction works and material, including six tunnels near Wellington and the ironwork for a large bridge at Porirua —paid nearly a quarter of a million in dividends. and sold it« assets to the Covernment for about a million sterling in 1908, w hen the line was required to complete the Main Trunk system lietween Auckland and Wellington. And a million must be spent to-day in order to make reasonably efficient the rival route so favoured by "The Flving Squadron" whose views were officially | accepted in 1880.