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Railway Progress In New Zealand
General Manager's Message.

With the approach of New Zealand's centennial year, I think most people will be looking back over the years within the range of their personal experience to make comparisons between conditions in the earlier parts of the century they know and those existing to-day.

I have been doing this so far as the Railways are concerned, and as forty years is the normal term of a railwayman's direct association with the service, I have taken 1898 as a starting point for a brief review.

The graph pictured on the opposite page gives a visual indication of some of the principal developments referred to.

Commenting on the working features of railway operating depicted on that chart, it should be noted that in the past forty years the passenger traffic has grown from 6,708,725 passenger journeys in the year 1898 to 22,441,212 in 1938, the cost of the coal used in the respective years has increased from £48,820 to £690,029; likewise the cost of stores and material purchased by the Department (apart from coal) has grown from £207,000 to £905,694. Wages paid by the Department have increased from £623,267 to £4,902,226. In the same forty-year period goods tonnage handled in the individual years has grown from 2,628,746 tons to 7,516,049 tons. The capacity of the wagons provided to carry the goods has been increased from 54,398 tons in 1898 to 267,559 tons in 1938, or by nearly five times, whilst the length of our railway lines has been increased only from 2,055 to 3,323 miles.

These figures will, I think, make it plain what we mean when we talk about the “increased density of traffic—particularly when it is realised that the number of wagons has increased from 8,768 to 27,235, the number of passenger vehicles from 543 to 1,481, and that the train miles have increased from 3,666,483 to 12,777,852. In other words, whilst the route miles of track available for the trains to run on have increased in the ratio of about 1½ to 1, train miles have increased in the ratio of 3½ to 1.

There has also been a notable increase in the locomotive tractive effort available. In 1898 it was 1,879,449 lbs. as compared with 10,684,559 in 1938.

The number of staff has increased from 6,051 members in 1898 to 22,963 members in 1938. But how different is the service they have to operate!

In 1898 the largest locomotive running on our Railways (the “U” class) weighed only 63 tons in working trim, as compared with 136 tons of our present “K” class engines.

In 1898 there was no Westinghouse brake, there were no electric headlights, there was no tablet system, no automatic signalling, no electric lighting of cars, no train control system; and of course the many amenities our modern stations provide were unthought of, and multiple-unit electric trains, rail-cars, sleeping-cars, hot and cold water, and steam heating in carriages, as well as many other improvements that the present-day user of the rail enjoys, were still to be realised.

So when the “old-timers” tell of the problems that confronted them in the earlier days of the Railways, those who work and use the services to-day can see the greater scale upon which railway transport is worked, and know that our problems are certainly no less than were theirs.

An examination of the development of traffic in the intervening period of this skeleton forty-year review shows a remarkable consistency in the upward trend. It gives assurance that in the years to come the many improvements now in hand to make possible still higher standards of transport service to the public will be fully appreciated by a practical recognition of the value of the Railway Service to the community as a whole.

General Manager.