RAILWAY OUTLOOK

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 108, 3 November 1923, Page 7

RAILWAY OUTLOOK

COMPETITION OF ROADS

SHOULD SPUR LINES BE CLOSED?

AND MONEY &rJiNT ON MAIN LINES. (By a Traveller.) In their perigrinations about the Dominion,, the Minister of Railways and the General Manager must have acquired a wealth of useful information regarding the present state and future prospects of the New Zealand railway system. They ought now to be able to take a general survey of the situation, and form in their minds some conception of the most desirable course to pursue in laying down a railway policy in harmony with the tendencies of the time. On the correctness of their judgment and foresight, on their freedom from anything like parochial and political influence on their sheer reliancs on the test of what is best tor the. whole Dominion, the success of the railways almost wholly depend. ' ' •

lhe ordinary traveller by the railways has no such broad basis of information to go on; he must simply judge by what he sees and hears. The present "writer, having done a great deal of railway travelling recently by all classes of trains alter some years absence from the country cannot help noticing the changing tendencies of transport. Wherever, for instance, the roads are good and the country is fairly easy, as in- Canterbury and the Hanawatu and Taranaki, the local trams, which fifteen or twenty years ago were well and profitably patronised, are now travelling practically empty. It is nard to see how they could possibly pay with so few' passengers. One saw Irom the roadside, for example, trains o£ six passenger coaches travelling between Palmerston North and Foxton during Manawatu Show time, with fewer than thirty people aboard, and that was near Longburn. There would be fewer later on in the journey. One travelled between Palmerston and Marton by a local with practically a whole coach to oneself. The examples could be multiplied.

It was notable, too, that what few passengers there were did not appear to be local people. Most of them were commercial travellers doing the small towns. MOTOR BEATS TRAIN. _ What is the cause of this dimunition in local passenger traffic as compared with a decade or so ago? One had only to look out of the carriage windows at the road alongside and see car after car loaded, more or less, passing the train. These were the people who in those earlier years before the motor age would have been travelling by train with a horse and trap to meet them at their destination to take them finally home Now they go straight from one place to another by motor, out and home again. It is vastly more convenient so, and usually much pleasanter. Only the roads and the railways suffer. If this were all, it would not be quite so bad. Where the rub conies, in that hurts the railway authorities is that in several: places, notably round Falmerston and up to Wanganui the public motor vehicle is actively and successfully competing with the railway between two given points. There is a regular motor service betweenPalraerston land Wanganui at a figure which is a very considerable inducement for the traveller to take the road before the rail. There are popular and paying motor; services between Palmerston and Feilding, and between Palmerston and Foxton, and also between Marton and Wanganui. This motor competition has come to stay, and perhaps to win. One%vonders what a private railway company would do about it. In America similar competition has caused the closing down of many inter-urban electric railways and some steam lines. England, with its_ dense population, has felt the competition of the road, and is likely to feel it worse. What are the New Zealand Railways going to do about it? The Minister has suggested the closing down of certain non-payable lines with the Palmerston-Foxton railway—one of the oldest in the North Island—as an example. • LONG DISTANCE RAIL HOLDS ITS OWN. ' j There are certain aspects of this change m transport that need attention. >. First, to the ordinary traveller it does not seem that long distance and express passenger traffic is showing any decrease on the railways. On the contrary, it would appear—superficially, at anyrate—that such trains are paying their way. The competition of public motor vehicles so far is limited to distances not exceeding' about fifty miles. Over long distances, both for passengers and probably for freight, also, the railway still holds its own. Suppose, however, there is a great improvement in the roads of the Dominion, suppose that they are brought up to tlje Taranaki standard. The cost of motor haulage will be reduced accordingly per ton-mile and long-distance traffic on the railways will be affected. That, however, is for the future. In the meantime, and for the present, certain things are quite clear. First, spur lines—the so-called feeder lines of the Minister and General Manager—do not pay and are never likely to pay, unless they form as with the Palmerston-Fox-ton line, a prospective link with other lines.

This, is of course, when the Levin-Mar-ton deviation is built, as it should be built within the next ten years. The only other exception to existing spur lines is when they tap difficult country, where road transport would always' be costly and limited and whore, at the same time there is traffic to warrant the existence of such a line. This would cover some of the Central Otago and Southland lines. Nearly all the Canterbury spur lines come under the category of useless non-payable railways. In the Wairarapa there is the Woo'dsideGreytown line as a minor example of the spur line which is quite unnecessary today, It is doubtful whether the Opunake branch line still incomplete would ever have been started if Taranaki had had then the splendid roads it has today.

The conclusion'one must arrive at is that it would pay to scrap all such spur lines in easy, well-roaded country suitable for motor traffic. They are not really feeder lines; rather are they in the nature of suckers, bleeding instead of feeding the main railway system. SOME SUGGESTIONS; The second point is that, if the main trunk lines are to hold their own in longdistance traffic in the face of improved roads, those main lines of railway must j themselves be improved. Most of their length was constructed in the days when money was even shorter than it is today and railways were made, something like roads, in the cheapest manner possible. There is also the bad old story of political influence which accounts for some of the worst sections in the main lines. Unless these main lines are improved, freight and passenger traffic will continue to go over to the roads. The Palmerston-Wanganui motor' passepgy

service is an instance, and the Welling-ton-Manawatu motor freight-service. The final conclusions that one would draw are that, wherever the country is suitable, the road should precede tie railway to build up settlement, for good roads make far more lor settlement than an odd line of railway; that main lines of railway, especially the North Island Main Trunk system, should be straightened, shortened, and levelled wherever possible to make for economical hauling of trains and much faster running than a I present; that the existing spur lines should be scrapped wherever they come under the category described above, and no more should be built as feeders unless they tap a coal field or some other natural resource that will give a regular volume of payable traffic. Our railway problem is admittedly a very difficult one, and its difficulties are increased by parochial influences. Whatever conclusions the heads of our railway system come to, they ought not to let themselves be swayed by any such considerations of local pull and political influence. The ordinary ?olk that travel by the trains and the business people, including farmers, that use the railway for the transport of goods, are the people that matter.