The Otira Tunnel.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 19259, 14 March 1928, Page 8

The Otira Tunnel.

The Rev. C. A. Tobin writes to us to-day enclosing an Auckland report of some remarks on the Otira Tunnel by Professor B. E. Murphy, of Victoria College, and asking us to give our readers ''the true statement." Professor Murphy wonders if " the whole "blessed West Coast" is worth the interest the tunnel is costing, which he fixes at £400,000 a year in order to support some wild rumour he seems to have heard that the tunnel cost eight million pounds. But eight millions is a daring plunge even for a Professor who loves an argument quite as much as he loves statistics, and sometimes a little more. It was announced by Mr Coates in February, 1923, six months before it was opened for public traffic, that "the total cost of the " Otira-Arthur's Pass section was estimated at £1,300,000." In the Railways Statement issued the following year (after the tunnel was open for traffic), and summarised in The Press of September 26th, 1924, the " approxi"mate capital cost" was given as £1,500,000, so that whatever rate of growth we allow it since (including even £400,000 a year for interest!) it could not have reached the half of eight millions by the time Professor Murphy met his romantic informant. But • the point is that the " whole "blessed West Coast" is quite beyond any estimate in thousands or hundreds of thousands a year, and is in any case not the only justification of the Otira tunnel. No one asks whether Auckland is worth, to Invercargill, the cost of its linking up with Wellington, or whether the whole blessed North Island need' be kept in contact with the blessed South. The Dominion is one, and must be regarded as one even by those who cannot see across Cook Strait, but if the West Coast did have to justify its connexion with the East Coast it would have no difficulty in doing so in terms that even a Northerner might understand.