RAILWAY WASTE.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLI, Issue 9588, 4 September 1913, Page 4

RAILWAY WASTE.

While the North Island has continued to cry out for badly-needed railways in past years, the South Island has been plentifully supplied with extravagant grants for money for lines which are not likely to open up new country, and the utility of which is decidedly questionable. The, Midland railway has ofton been quoted as an instance of this extravagance, and tho hope has been expressed that the present Government will not continue to spend large sums of money on tho Otira tunnel while the rail less north is left to its fate. Another glaring instance of wasteful expenditure is given in the return just prepared by tho Public Works Department, showing the amount of money spent upon the section of the South Island Main Trunk railway lying between Picton and Waipara. This was one of tho notorious political railways of the profligate days of decadent politics, and it provides a glaring example of tho unbusinesslike methods which have been pursued in the past in this nil-important department of State activity. Just on £900,0(10 has been spent on this line, taking the cost of the eighteen miles from Picton to Blenheim into account, and at least two-thirds of this sum has never had the remotest chance of earning interest. At least £'600,000 has been used in carrying tho railway to points where it is not the least likely to do business, and at the present- rate of construction another ton years will pass and another £900,000 will be spent, before Christchurch is connected with Blenheim. In the meantime this huge sum of money is a burden on the paying lines of the Dominion. It might have been spent in districts where railways were needed, and would thus have accelerate! the settlement of rich lands in this island. But loyal constituencies had to he fed with grants of money, and the Dominion as a whole paid the piper. The time has surely come when such waste of public money must cease. Tho present (iovernment has already shown that it does not truckle to parish appeals in the servile manner of its predecessors, and it is to be hoped that in this important matter of railway construction tho Dominion s interests will no longer he sacrificed to the-exi-gencies of the constituency. .