“Your railway, when you come to understand it,” says Ruskin, “is only a device for making the world smaller.” When one visualises the isolation of peoples in the prerailway era and contrasts the transport difficulties of that period with the rapid contacts made possible to-day along the steel ways of the world, Ruskin's observation needs no elaboration. But though the railway has been the chief means of transport for more than a century, there is room for still better understanding of its facilities and functions, and of its general capacity to serve the every day transport requirements of the people. The following article upon parcels traffic is intended as an aid to such understanding.

The New Zealand Railways parcels revenue for March, 1931, increased to the extent of £4,000 over that for February, 1931, and the inter-island parcels traffic for March-April, 1931 showed an increase of £1,000 in revenue over that for the corresponding period of last year. Behind these figures there lies an interesting story of transportation service on the part of our railways—the carrying of parcels from, and to any station from Opua, in the far North, to Bluff, in the extreme South. Parcels of all descriptions “from a needle to an anchor,” are given economical, safe and speedy transit by the railways. In the railway interpretation of the term and under certain conditions “a parcel” is practically any article that is transportable by rail—passengers' luggage, groceries, wearing apparel, bicycles, perambulators, sewing machines, motor goods, canoes and canaries, cats and dogs, and so on throughout the animate and inanimate creation.

For the purpose of assessing the charges on parcels consigned by rail it has been found expedient to arrange a tabular scale of weights and charges on a graduated mileage basis (on a continuous line of railway), as follows:—

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Careful study of the table appended demonstrates what the railway “when you come to understand it,” can do when it comes to a question of giving economical service to the people. Nor is this the whole story. Rapidity in the transit of parcels is a no less important aspect of this service. For example, a parcel railed at 7 p.m. in Wellington is delivered at Auckland, 426 miles distant, the following morning, or if Invercargill (about 550 miles from Wellington) be the destination, the parcel (railed at 7 p.m.) reaches the southern city the following evening.

This aspect of the parcels service, however, applies only in cases where the consignor desires the speediest possible transit, in which case, for a slightly increased charge, the parcel is given express transit, i.e., forwarded by express or fast passenger train.