A Double Responsibility.

The responsibility for making a success of the railways does not rest with the railway people only. The responsibility is much wider than that. Certainly the railway people have to give service, and give that service at the lowest possible cost. That is what we are endeavouring to do, and, as the figures show, with success. But the collective responsibility for the success of the railways embodies more than this. The best efforts of the railway people in the direction indicated will be inadequate to make the railways as opportunity may offer. All too often we have traffic diverted from the railway on the most trivial grounds. For an advantage that even the smallest consideration would show to be but temporary, if not wholly evanescent, people will sometimes divert their traffic from the national institution. Such action will have its undoubted reaction. Uneconomic services cannot be permanent, and the net result must be that ultimately, through the weakening of national and more permanent institutions such as the railways, definite loss to the community will result, which the community must ultimately make up.

General Manager

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