RAIL-ROAD PACT

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 50, 27 August 1930, Page 10

RAIL-ROAD PACT

10, END TRANSPORT WAR

! ", ■ " (,»GESTEI) SOLUTION

t*tt6'oF EWJAt: TREATMENT

(By S. R. Quivis.)

Ewm tho windows of the train Kbnost all the way between Wellington Sad' Auckland, the traveller by the |[am Trunk is seldom out of sight of gome toad or other, even in the heart Sj£! the King Country, and on the road Jtawj speeding along, racing the train, « flashing past in tho opposite direction. This is a commonplace over the sferetot covered in tho daytime along £he Manawatu line and near Auckland, but it is strange to catch the flashing of headlights at tho most unexpected points in darkest New Zealand;' at thip time of the year that 4ract of two hundred and odd miles .between Marton and Mercer, on which ior the train traveller, now that the Daylight Limited has ceased to run, ihe' Bun never rises any more than it Goes in the interminable Antarctic night which this stage of the jjourney so much resembles. Antarctic perhaps outside, but in the Carriage, amid an' atmosphere stuffy .with steam heat from the engine and Vitiated with the fumes of stale tobacco and the exhalations of cramped and feverish humanity, one envies the man behind the headlights his freedom :pt fresh air and the open road. The Inconvenience of Main Trunk travel itnust make many long for the day when ihe aeroplane will annihilate time and tspaee, and bridge with one swift swoop ±he terrors of the gap that keep the two chief cities of the North Island jjmd of New Zealand still so strangely Soreign to each other. Then it will be Clothing to ■ leave Wellington the time the express leaves now—two o'clock — Sine in. Auckland, see a show in the Evening, sleep,in a comfortable* bed, Jjave a Sunday morning's golf or a j^puise on the harbour, lunch, and fly ■back to dinner'in the Capital City. jXou can get up to Auckland and back pa the week-end now, but it means two Slights in the train. COMING OP THE MOTOR. In the meantime there is the motor. S&jtween Wellington and Auckland it las not yet arrived as' a formidable *»Val to the railway, but its competition fe even now perceptible. On the Limitcoming down from Auckland on gjnnday_ night, was. a holiday-making (banner from Murchison, who told the JBarriage that he was sorry he had binissed.the service ear, for he wanted Jceenly to see the country in the North Island, and.the train took him through la darkness both ways, and he might riever get the chance again. And he Jneant'what he said, though, as he admitted, it would have cost him a good Seal more .to return by car. Once the teal GreaJ North Koad comes, via the jientral route, with the attractions of National Palk on a bitumen highway, the public will bid a valedictory in military fashion 'to the Main Trunk, and its passenger traffic, will go the way iS local railway traffic in ■ almost every district of New Zealand. On a bitumen load or anything, so good as the.roads itbey are building all over the country iaow, tar-sealed and crisp, the' service «sar will do the' distance in under twelve hours, including stops. And what will the railways do then? JPhe Government, which is the railways, .will doubtless try to pass legislation jjriving tho service car off the road by taxation,- or even by direct veto. Or %, may cease, to.build new and better itpoads, and let existing good roads go Ss.rack and ruin, for the service ear jubuld, never compete with a railway jSWr the. old macadam road. One has rinly to take a .drive out. of Auckland Up Titirangi in. an Auckland bus over jtlie baekblocks type of road of twenty jrears ago to realise that it is. the madjern road and the modern vehicle that jmako modern motoring possible. It might have been, feasible ten years •go for a Government to have wiped oat competition after the manner of |be American trust. To-day it is imjfrwsible. The motor is übiquitous, and The motorist is the voter also, and no government could long survive a highhanded arbitrary action of that kind. History has shown ami events are showing to-day in every part of the Trprld how hard it is to go back and withdraw from the people benefits and liberties once granted. FAILURE OF MONOPOLY. SEhere is,- of course, another alternate which has.already been tried, not ■with, any impressive success, and that is for the railways or.' other public bodies, like municipalities, to buy out ilieir competitors and take over the wad transport service. The public can Wee for itself what "Wellington, for instance, has done with its buses and ihe railways with their purchases here and elsewhere. The sight of the railways running rival bus and train seryicea is a sight for the gods—and one can leave it at that. And the city tramways losing heavily on their bus services is another sight. It is a marvel ;that the Auckland Bus Company manages to keep going under similar conditions, but then that's private enterprise. No permanent and complete solution of •^ie problem seems to offer on these Jines. What, then, is to be done? Are the gsads to make bankrupt and derelict $ie railways or the railways to tuin the toads? Either way the country stands ,Sjt> lose enormously, for both are public jgimcerns, built with public money out jpf loans on which interest has to be paid and principal repaid. As things are and still more so as ?ftey will be, if _ the full programme of jjrilway, construction is completed in SJfew Zealand, with an average cost for ;i£ew construction of nearly £40,000 per mile as compared with £.14,000 of existing open lines, it will be obviously im> possible for anybody on earth, be ho ifen times the genius of Mr. Sterling or tow much-quoted Sir Henry Thornton, cjfe Canadian National fame,, to make w railways pay on strictly commercial, lines, that is, working expenses, jj&intena'nco, interest on capital investfi&L, and provision. ,of sinking fund. It fs doubtful whether the new lines would $ay, even if there were no road transjVbrt as competitor., And yet one feels instinctively, even if one could not argue tho point with an academic economist, that the policy of filling in the missing links and completing the railysQJ system of Now Zealand, no matter ■sjjapsiihe cost, is both correct and wise, j^mt. this, feeling is deeply rooted in iif>e hearts, if not in the minds, of the people is clearly shown by the outcry VjjfMoeal residents when it is proposed ip close 'down a,line in which they aro interested. WHEN ROAD AND RAIL WERE FRIENDS. It was in musing on these things— s{oad and railway and rival transport— faring the silent vigils of the late hours in the long run through the darkness of tjie King Country, with the glimpse of dim-lit window of some cotter's Sattirday night or the flash of headlights round a curve as constant reminders of the existence of the road side by side with the railway, that an idea took shape which may help toward a solution of the difficulties of the day. ' Perhaps it was the pitching and lurch- - Imb §#,<! bumping pi the carriage, for (fß^iroJTf^c&s "ttia'veHTn g--fast, and eWber

the rolling stock or tho permanent way or both seemed to be rougher than they used to be ton years ago, that suggested that road auQ railway are not so far asunder in New Zealand as they are elsewhere where the motion is so different, certainly not far enough to justify a transport war. And ono remembered from actual experience .that in this particular part of New Zealand the rail preceded the road in tho work of settlement, and was blessed on its arrival by tho mud-blockaded backblocks family, the younger generation of which, enriched by the railway, flips past the express on a car over roads for which the metal was transported by the railway gratis or for a song. It was only 18 years.ago that with the motor pioneers this now sleepless Main Trunk traveller took' the first car through from Wellington to Auckland via tho King Country along tho routo of that very road, cutting tracks, bridging streams, fascining quagmires, and resorting to block and tackle and even the horse, where automotive effort failed, where now the car is used for everyday traffic over roads equal to the best in prebitumen or pre-concrete days. The baekblocks settler, if there are any baekblocks these days, may still use the railway—for his lime and manure—but in person he travels by car, scorning, as rfc were, the hand of tho benefactor that plucked him from the mud, and fomenting a deadly enmity between former allies, the road and rail, that together helped to make him and his family what they are. FINDING A FORMULA. When war is-on and yet in the interests of all peace is desired, it is customary for the modern peacemaker to look for a formula—a "formula — a sort of magic idea expressed in, diplomatic language to which both combatants can subscribe without loss ofmana, and live under it, once it is ratified, in peace. Something like the League of Nations "Covenant or the Kellogg Pact would do, though we have no Briands or Mac Donalds here to order the diction. In default and in the absence of these past-masters, let us roughly suggest the following: — Whereas in the past the road and railway in New Zealand have advanced hand in hand to the settlement of the country,and have contributed equally to the prosperity of the people, and Whereas the said road and railway have both been built out of public moneys and, asset or liability, are alike the property and responsibility of the people, and Whereas the road has been maintained and extended and improved out of rates on property and out of special taxation, but , Wnereas the railway is supposed to pay for itself out of its earnings from the fares and freights it charges the people, and I Whereas there seems no just cause I In. the nature of things way two j means: of public transport which '■ serve a common purpose of moving tne people and their goods from place to place, as required, should receive different treatment from the people, The People of New Zealand do hereby Resolve — That henceforward their roads and railways shall receive EQUAL | TREATMENT, and that either both shall be compelled to pay their way I or, alternatively, both shall be maintained, extended; and improved as to their permanent formation, but not j as to the vehicles and rolling stock that ply upon them, out of rates or special taxation or both. CASE FOR THE PACT. The case for the Road-Bail Peace Pact shall be put briefly, as space is closing in. The reason why road and rail have been treated differently in the past lies in the history of transport in the Old Country, where the railway originated just about a century ago with the opening of the Manchester-Liverpool line by George Stephenson's Rocket. The road had been the King's Highway from time immemorial, but the railway was an upstart, a newcomer, an intruder and competitor. It had to be promoted by private enterprise against the fiercest opposition at the start from landowners and road transport interests, and later, when it was seen there was much money in it, there was a boom in railway building that covered Britain with1 competing lines, now recognised as eminently wasteful. Some companies have never paid a 3 per cent, dividend from their inauguration to the present time, and they-are not likely to pay any now. It, was the same in America, only worse. Both countries have endeavoured to rationalise their railways in recent years_ by compulsory legislative amalgamations. Development on the Continent of Europe was wiser. It was soon recognised that railways were a form 'of public transport like roads, and not suitable to unlimited private competitive enterprise. Hence most of the Continental railways are run by the State, as in New Zealand, and railway travel is cheaper in Europe than almost anywhere in the world. Though New Zealand has State railways, the tradition that railways are strictly commercial concerns has come to us from the Old Country and has dictated a policy of cheap construction at the start which has proved far from cheap in the long run, as witness the Tawa Flat tunnels, the Auckland deviation, and the huge expense new being undergone here and in other parts to modernise our rough-and-ready pioneering lines. Again, New Zealand is by its physical conformation one of the most difficult countries in tho world for the building of railways. That those under construction now are costing so much more than those built in the past is simply due to the fact that the hard jobs have been left to the last. BOTH ON SAME FOOTING. Neither roads nor railways could pay on a strictly commercial basis in New Zealand until this country had a population, and a tourist traflic like that of Switzerland, Figures could be produced to show that the roads are costing this country far more than tho railways, but while a fuss is made and the axe is going through th© railways, nothing is being done about the roads, because the public do not look on them in the same light. Once tho conception takes root that the only real difference between rail and'road is that tho rail will take vehicles of only one gauge and the road vehicles of any gauge, up to a limit, there will be little difficulty in seeing that equal treatment for both is a fair thing. Tho fact that on English railways there are_ thousands of private trucks belonging to private firms running all over, the country, and that the trains of different companies run over each other's lines, will help toward an understanding. It might be feasible for the State to look after the permanent way and let a private company run the service, charging a small rental, equal in proportion to the petrol tax's aid to the Toads.

Where are the rates going to come from to pay for tho construction and upkeep of the permanent way—that is, the interest on tho loans borrowed to build but not to equip the railways, for the equipment corresponds to the service cars and the garages and petrol stations on the roads? Well, the railways have added a great deal of value to the lands they servo, and the cities, too, and no contribution has been made to the railways from these sources in the past. So it might be regarded as a retribution rather than a contribution to cost to suggest that the revenue from the present land tax would go a long way towards helping to pay the interest on the actual cost of construction of onr railways. But these details tare for -the financial oxperfc. All one

presumes to do for tho present is to offer this idea of a Road-Rail Pact, born in the travail of a labouring Auckland express, as a means of outlawing our internecine economic war of rival transport systems, just as the BriandKellogg Pact is designed to end the wot oi matione.