PROTEST BY CHAMBER

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30513, 7 August 1964, Page 14

PROTEST BY CHAMBER

Rail Charges To N.L

A protest is to be sent to the Minister of Railways (Mr McAlpine) by the Canterbury Chamber of Commerce about rail charges between South Island centres and the North Island.

The president of the chamber’s council (Mr E. Fraser) said at the monthly meeting last evening that a firm had been charged £l9 3s 4d for a consignment from Belfast to Auckland via the Aramoana. The distance involved was 655 miles, he said, and if this had been calculated on the Railways Department’s continuous goods scale, the charge would have been only £l5 3s 7d.

Mr Fraser said the charge from Belfast to Picton (209 miles) was £6 Ils 9d, from Picton to Wellington on the Aramoana (20 miles), £3 ss, and from Wellington to Auckland (426 miles), £9 6s 7d. In a reply to the company concerned, the Railways Department said the three-com-ponent system of charging offered transport charges sufficiently attractive to hold business to the Aramoana on a reasonably competitive basis while the application of aggregate mileage could “onlyresult in a serious loss of rail revenue which would be quite unjustified having regard to rail operating costs.”