3 Ton Mileage, Minor Railway Sections, Year to 31 March 1886

On four of the six minor sections the calculation is simple as all goods were carried between the two terminuses. The Nelson and Whangarei sections involve more complicated calculations.

Nelson Section. Inspection of outward and inward figures shows that almost all goods received by the five country stations had come from Nelson page 290 station, and almost all goods dispatched had been consigned to Nelson station. The main exception to this generalisation is that 17.8 per cent of traffic was in or out of ‘Port and Wharf’, which involved a journey of about .75 miles beyond Nelson station. All traffic from country stations was first calculated as if it was solely between country and Nelson station. Then to this total was added the ‘Port and Wharf’ traffic, which was calculated for the .75-mile Nelson/Port journey.

Whangarei Section. Inspection of the statistics for this 7-mile section showed that there was no easy way of establishing the flow of traffic between its three stations—Kamo (with its coal mines), Whangarei, and Wharf. However it was noted that the mix of commodities was very similar to that on the 8-mile Kawakawa section; both carrying mainly ‘Minerals’ (i.e. coal) (Kawakawa 93.60%, Whangarei 89.49%) and ‘Merchandise’ (Kawakawa 3.57%, Whangarei 9.97%). On the Kawakawa section each ton-mile of goods traffic brought in 4.4385 pence in revenue. Applying the same earning rate to the Whangarei goods revenue of £3,826 13s 7d gives a ton-mileage figure of 206,917. These various calculations give the following results:

Section	Ton-mileage
Kawakawa	252,080
Whangarei	206,917
Nelson	195,236
Picton	245,034
Greymouth	1,085,952
Westport	1,961,229
TOTAL	3,946,448