A RAILWAY TRAVELLER'S COMPLAINT.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 800, 25 April 1910, Page 4

A RAILWAY TRAVELLER'S COMPLAINT.

Sir,—l have just returned from a few days' trip up the Main Trunk, and feel it my duty to give a little of my experience on the train. I travelled in a secondclass ordinary car, and found to my surpriso and discomfort that most of the adults in that "non-smoking car" were smoking almost all along the routo from Marton to Taumarunui; card-playing and drinking were also freely.. indulged' in, and I am not surprised at a writer in one of the northern papers speaking of the Main Trunk route as "a drunken, disgusting track." The car was well filled. I sat' near the end, and on two or three occasions saw ladies, who were passing through, brought to, a, standstill at the lavatory end, and kept standing there for somo time, looking like simpletons, until a minister of the Gospel undertook to forco the door, and .then found the lavatory jammed by a number ,of drunken men with bottles still to.their mouths,, until he eleared the passage and enabled the ladies, to get through. Surely this state of things ought not to be allowed on any railway much, less on one of the principal routes in the Dominion. A private detective on the train, to bring the violators of the railway regulations to their, bearings, might be the means of much good by reducing the abuse.—l am, etc., 1 . MAIN TRUNK TRAVELLER.