WOES OF RAILWAYMEN

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 59, Issue 4220, 6 December 1939, Page 9

WOES OF RAILWAYMEN

LOST LUGGAGE. An official described ’ the recent search over the railway systems for the two missing vans of luggage for Scarborough as comparable to looking for a needle in a haystack, with the added complication that the “needle” kept moving, writes a correspondent by the latest mail from Home. He was not exaggerating the scope and magnitude of the search when it is remembered that the L.N.E.R. own more than 39,000 covered vans and over 16,700 miles of line, including sidings. On the L.N.E.R. system alone 6,680,000 journeys have already been made by loaded waggons this year, but at the same time the chances of a waggon going astray in transit and becoming the object of a special search are 1 in 100,000. The chances that the particular waggon concerned should contain passengers’ luggage are infinitesimal, since such traffic is normally dispatched in luggage vans of passenger trains, or in special vehicles of which an individual daily census is taken all over the system. At very busy holiday times, however, use is made of vehicles fitted with automatic brakes and designed for travelling on express freight trains, to dispatch full truck loads of parcels, traffic or passengers’ luggage between large stations. The object of the arrangement is two-fold, viz., to secure direct loading, thereby relieving ordinary passenger trains, and, secondly, to avoid handling at intermediate stations.