CARRYING MAILS

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 86, 8 October 1935, Page 3

CARRYING MAILS

VARIETY IN TRANSPORT

For the carriage of his Majesty's mails the Post Office uses every form of conveyance which will give reliable service. It has utilised a variety of j vessels, ranging from a floating crane jto warships, and its land transport i activities bring in much more than the übiquitous • railway and service car. The road services as employed throughout the Dominion for transport of mails exceed 1300, of which about 900 are conducted on contract lor a fixed period of three years. The lact that I New Zealand still has its backblocks jis demonstrated by the nature of some jof the contract mail services, for they include the use of pack-horse, carts, and launches. The railways absorb about half of the expenditure on transport of inland mails. There are some road motor contracts which closely resemble the railways in their importance as trunk routes, covering a distance of up to 200 miles and connecting with a large number of feeder services.

The greatest contrast in methods of mail transit is provided on the West Coast of the South' Island, where at the northern end a contractor makes a "flying" start by using a motor-car for fourteen miles, and then faces twenty miles of extremely' rough country, traversing the first fifteen in a spring cart which takes the mail across swamps and practically unformed roads. Finally, he completes the trip on horseback, reaching a little settlement whose inhabitants rarely see the outside world and depend for contact upon the mailman who makes the trip once a week.

These experiences could have been paralleled in South Westland .until the advent this year of a weekly air-mail service covering the route from Hokitika to Haast, Bruce Bay and Okuru. The greater portion of this1 route was formerly served for mail .purposes once a fortnight, packhorses being utilised, and the journey taking between two and three days. Now the South Westland Air Travel Company's service takes scarcely as many hours. The mail load carried by its aeroplanes is rapidly increasing, and in July constituted a record,,the total weight being- 16501b, which was more than a third as much again as the.average for the previous three months...