The Rail Brings Back Romance.

Settled in the snug routine of the daily round, and served as they are by all the modern means of transport, city dwellers may know nothing of that colourful romance in life that marks the first coming of the rail to new territory. But some of the elders, perhaps, remember the days when a train connection meant no less than the very breath of civilisation to the widely scattered and severely isolated communities that they in their youth assisted to settle.

That the coming of the rail can still arouse romance was vividly seen on the 29th June of this year, when on the Mohaka Viaduct the last rivet was hammered, and the last spike was driven on the track that brings into active being the portion of the North Island East Coast Railway between Napier and Wairoa.

There was an air of joyous expectancy about all the settlers—young, old and middle aged—who had gathered from miles around along the route of the new railway, at the temporary Wairoa terminus, and at all the new little stopping places on the way.

The rail-car Arai-te-uru, was the first passenger-carrying unit to make the through passage from Wellington to Wairoa. Many eyes watched the car, freighted with its fifty passengers, as it ran smoothly and steadily across the awe-inspiring height of the Mohaka Viaduct, on that narrow trail of steel above the delicate geometric tracery of those stupendous piers, which rise from the swift deeps of the Mohaka river, 315 feet below. And spontaneous bursts of cheering from Maori and pakeha alike greeted its arrival on the northern side of the great gulch, and again as it rolled to a stop at the Wairoa end of the line. It was thus, in circumstances of genuine and whole-hearted public rejoicing, that this modern means of contact and transport for the people as a whole, made its effective first appearance in the fertile hinterland of Poverty Bay.

Experience in New Zealand, as in all other countries suitably served by rail, shows clearly that progress and prosperity follow close on the trail of the iron horse; and the glamour of its coming owes much to the knowledge that the rich promise of better times the shrill train whistle brings, is usually fulfilled beyond the brightest expectations.

Another thing about the railway that aids romance is the fact that it represents the united effort of so many people. The greatest of all land transport services is no one-man affair. The running of a railway is only possible by the community effort of numbers of men, experts in the varied details of a large and complicated undertaking upon which heavy fixed capital investment has been made. Once laid and manned, the railway is ready for the transport of every kind of load, in mass quantities beyond the power of any other form of land transport.

Besides the benefits thus rendered for the development of the country and the extension of settlements throughout the newly-reached territory, there will be, after the official opening of the East Coast line to Wairoa, a new range of holiday resorts made easily available to the people of other districts; and this again helps to bring back for New Zealanders and visitors alike, the age of rail-made romance.