BOOK EARLY

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 96, 20 October 1933, Page 6

BOOK EARLY

IF TRAVELLING SMOKER

(By "Old Grouch.")

Quite gone are the days when smoking carriages were just not as nice as they should be, and when the . occasional lady who travelled in th,em was not nearly as nice as that. Completely gone are the days when children were forbidden, on pain of serious trouble, to enter one unaccompanied, and when father was a low-down sort of person if he indulged his selfishness without regard to the inevitable ruination of the morals of his young. . ■ .

The all night smokers on the ;Main Trunk line are still carriages for men and are occupied by men, but this is far from the rule on the day trips to, say, New Plymouth or Napier, and on the Wairarapa train, or on a run to Palmerston North. The man traveller must get in early if he wishos to "travel smoker" on these trips, for tho Railway Department apparently still insists that the smoking carriage is not quite nice for women, and maintains smokers in short supply.

Men who smoke and men wlio don't smoko do not object to wives arid daughters (preferably old enough to sit still and bo beyond the peanut and orango stage), but they do object when they arrive just on train* time and wander up and do-\yh with at least a full carriage complement, men and wives and daughters, looking for a second or third smoking carriage that' is not there. Has the time not come for a replacarding of railway carriages— non-smoking and just carriages, say, half and half. ;. '

On the suburban lines a certain number, of carriages carry tho legend "Schoolboys" or "Schoolgirls," but any-

how few people—and particularly young i^cople—hold much stock in legends nowadays.

There is something about those carriages that schoolboys and schoolgirls do not like too well, and so they move further along, leaving all doors open behind them, to the homely atmosphere of the smoker. ..