Bus Drivers’ Meeting

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30738, 30 April 1965, Page 10

Bus Drivers’ Meeting

Sir, —I have been doing some research on the 1932 tramway strike, which was actually a lock-out. Mr A. T. Donnelly, later Sir Arthur Donnelly, the chairman of the tribunal, said that the strike ought not to have occurred, and set most of the blame on the board. A visiting Rotary president condemned the use of force by the “specials” against tramway men. These facts proved my friend Tom Bryce to be right and “1932” to be wrong.—Yours, etc., DISILLUSIONED NATIONALIST.

April 29, 1965. Telephone Equipment

Sir, —The article about CHTV3 causing the telephone exchanges to become overloaded gave me the impression that the telephone exchanges are just a mass of uncontrolled wires and a heap of broken switches, inadequate to handle such emergencies. It has been brought to my notice that some of the equipment has been in use for more than 35 years. If this is so, why does not the Government install up-to-date reliable equipment? I see new exchanges going up, and out-of-date equipment going in. Why does not the Government put in up-to-date crossbar equipment (as in Australia) instead of waiting for the “never-never” plan of electronics to be developed?— Yours, etc., INTERESTED USER. April 26, 1965. [The Post Office's regional engineer (Mr H. W. Wilkinson) replies: “In telling the reporter of the position in the telephone exchanges' I used terms which are in every-day use in my work but which, understandably, led to the erroneous impression of physically broken and tangled equipment I stated that traffic was jamming the exchange but that physical damage was very minor. A traffic jam is generally envisaged as vehicles blocking roads, even in collision, and so on. A telephone traffic jam does not produce physical chaos, but

the quantity of electrical speech paths becomes inadequate to meet the demand for them: a proportion of calls cannot be established when desired. Any commercially economic telephone system is vulnerable to con gestion and to this sort of failure in the event of over loading which is grossly in excess of normal peak traffic. The equipment being installed in new exchanges in Christchurch is identical with that still being installed by telephone administrators in many major countries throughout the world.”]