New Rail Haulage Rates Urged

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30405, 2 April 1964, Page 3

New Rail Haulage Rates Urged

(N.Z. Press Association)

WELLINGTON, April 1.

Differential haulage charges levied by the Railways Department should be replaced by new rates based on actual haulage costs, said Mr A. E. McQueen, a senior lecturer in geography at Victoria University, tonight.

He was addressing the Wellington section of the Institute of Transport on differential railway rating in a developing economy. Tracing the history of railway rating, Mr McQueen said the national policy was based

on the assumption that differential rating had been and still was highly desirable. Its use meant that low value goods were carried at or under cost while commodities of higher value bore charges above total cost.

Below-cost freight rates for the products of a particular industry gave it a financial concession. Rates reflecting real cost would reveal the extent of any subsidy required by a particular industry. Hidden subsidies should be brought into the open in that way so that they could be justified or condemned. Mr McQueen demonstrated how the growth of local industry had resulted in changing demands for railway and other forms of transport and said changes in railway rating policies had been evolving since 1938.

In future there was likely to be an increasing trend towards negotiated haulage contracts between the department and 'individual industries.

The community would benefit from the projected change because charges would reflect

real costs and manufactured articles would be carried at lower rates than under the differential rating system. The department would also benefit because it would be guaranteed traffic for which it could plan the most efficient use of its capital equipment. “I see such developments as advances in which the respective roles of road and rail are being sorted out by negotiation based on more refined cost analysis and by more en-

lightened management than has existed in the past,” he said.

“Such progress can take place only if the transport policies based on the traditional and inflexible differential railway rating practices are amended or eased out and replaced by transport management in which the ideals are based on facts rather than on assumptions now of questionable validity,” Mr McQueen said.