ON THE GOVERNMENT RAILWAYS
Take a seat beside me on the train from Auckland to Rotorua, and see
how one part of New Zealand looks out-of-doors. We shoot from the city
out into a rich farming district. The fields are green with luxuriant
grass, or black where the soil is being turned up for planting. Near
Auckland the farms and farmhouses are small. The pioneer cabins are not
so big as those in the newly cleared regions of the United States. In
many places there is a scarcity of lumber. The average farmhouse is a
wooden cottage of four, five, or six rooms roofed with galvanized iron
and there are no barns, no stables, no outbuildings. The stock feed in
the fields all the year round, for the grass is always green, and the
winters are not severe.
We ride over plains covered with bush, a sort of thick scrub growth
not unlike dwarf cedars, and then follow for miles the banks of the
Waikato River, the largest in New Zealand. Now we are in another
farming section. Here the holdings are larger. We cross a big farm
where there are droves of cattle and sheep. The sheep are feeding on
turnips, biting them out of the ground in which they are growing. We
pass through some rolling fields that look like the blue-grass country
of Kentucky and others that remind one of the meadows of old England.
Here and there are groves of cabbage trees, each with its tall trunk
ending in a feather duster of green leaves.
As we proceed we come into a region of ferns. They cover the hills, and
in the valleys rise into trees shaped like umbrellas. The whole earth
is matted with them. The tree ferns have stems as thick as a telegraph
pole and some rise fifteen feet without a branch.
Farther south we enter the highlands. We pass through forests of tall
trees wrapped around with vines, their wide-spreading branches thick
with leaves. Many of them are loaded with flowering vines, which
ornament the living as well as the dead boughs, hanging down amid the
green leaves or wrapping themselves around the dead limbs to make them
green again.
As we go I examine the railroad. Like all in the Dominion, it belongs
to the government, and its officials are civil-service employees. The
conductor, who is called the guard, comes through from time to time and
punches the tickets. This is a regular feature of New Zealand travel.
I hardly settle down after one punch before the guard or an inspector
comes and asks for my ticket once more, and at the end of a long
journey it is as full of holes as a sieve.
The smaller stations serve also as post-offices. They have signs
showing that they are government savings banks and government
life-insurance offices as well. At every stop a bell is rung half a
minute before the train starts, and every now and then there is a
five-minute halt that the passengers may get out and buy a cup of tea
or a glass of whisky or beer at the hotels, which are always found
close by the larger stations. The whisky is Scotch, and has a smoky,
peaty taste. Tea is fourpence a cup and everyone takes it with sugar
and milk; it is strong, but not bad. Coffee is not sold, for no one
wants it. The New Zealanders are great eaters of meat and drinkers of
tea. Nevertheless, they are generally of the lean, athletic build. I
suppose this is partly on account of the exercise everyone gets in the
out-of-door sports.
[Illustration: The railroad from Auckland to Rotorua passes through
field after field of turnips, where sheep bite the vegetables from the
ground. New Zealanders say that a good turnip country is a good sheep
country.]
[Illustration: About the only privately owned railroad tracks in the
Dominion are light lines built to get out lumber and coal. They act as
feeders to the government system with which they are connected.]
My chief complaint against these government railroads is their poor
heating arrangements. To-day the weather is chilly and every passenger
has a travelling blanket wrapped around his feet. I have one of fox
skin, and to this I have added my rubber hot water bottle. I take it
from my bag and have it filled from time to time by the girls at the
station tea shops. One young woman is amazed at my request. She wonders
why I want the hot water. At last a smile creeps from her lips to her
eyes. She says, “Oh, I understand. You want it for the bai-by (baby).”
“Yes, my dear,” I say, as I hand her a shilling, “but I am the bai-by.”
One hears a good deal of the English cockney accent in New Zealand. “A”
is frequently like “i” or “y.” I find that I have to translate what
is said on the streets or in other public places before I understand
what it means. This is the case in the stores. In buying the fox skin I
spoke of, I asked the department store clerk at Auckland where the rugs
were kept. He said:
“Go through that aisle and down by the lices.”
I could not think what he meant by “the lices,” and a brief vision of
crawling insects and frowzy hair came before my eyes until on the other
side of the store I saw some white lace with carpets and rugs beyond
and then I knew the young man meant laces. As for the letter “h,” it
is worse mistreated in New Zealand than in London itself, on when it
should be off, and off when it should be on.
Still, these faults in pronunciation are not heard among the better
class New Zealanders. They pride themselves on speaking pure English,
and claim that they are far superior to the Australians in their use of
the mother tongue. Of late, a decided movement has been started in the
schools and throughout the country for pure English.
The gauge of the railway from Auckland to Rotorua is only three feet
six inches, which is the width of all the three thousand miles of
track in the two islands. In 1870, when the government took over the
few short lines then operated and began its railroad-construction
programme, it was faced with the problem of building through a rough
and mountainous country with as little expense as possible. So the
narrow gauge was adopted. Nevertheless, the cost has been enormous.
The total capital invested in railways is now almost a quarter of a
billion dollars, or an average, including all equipment and buildings,
of upward of sixty thousand dollars per mile. Exceptionally steep
grades have had to be overcome. There is a three-mile stretch on the
line between Auckland and Wellington where the trains climb up one
foot in every fifteen. This is said to be the steepest railroad grade
in the world. It is where the line passes over Rimutaka Mountain. Two
engines are used to make the ascent, and the locomotives going down are
equipped with steel shoes which grip a centre rail and act as brakes.
In places there are windbreaks built to protect the trains from the
terrific blasts that sweep over the mountains. On two occasions the
cars have been blown from the tracks.
Other items in construction costs are the numerous bridges and tunnels.
There are many rivers fed by heavy rainfalls, and at frequent intervals
long spans of steel and concrete are found. On the west coast of the
South Island is the Otira Tunnel, which runs for five miles under
mountains. The power used in the tunnel is electricity. This road was
built to bring coal from the western fields to the eastern railroad
connections.
The longest run in the Dominion is that from Wellington to Auckland,
a distance of but four hundred and twenty-six miles. This is the only
road in the country on which sleeping cars are used. The New Zealand
sleeper, which is only fifty feet long, is by no means the roomy affair
to which we are accustomed in the States. The car is divided into two-
or four-berth compartments reached by a narrow corridor extending along
its whole length. While my berth was being made up I had to stand in
the hallway with the other three occupants of my compartment.
Though our cars were small, and much of the journey was over steep
grades, the going was not nearly as bumpy as one would suppose, for
the engineers take pains to run their trains smoothly and do not jerk
and jostle the passengers at every start and stop as is often the
case in the States. Practically all the engines and coaches used on
the Dominion railroads are now built in New Zealand, either in the
government railway shops or by a private firm.
The New Zealand government believes that the railroads exist for the
people, and is managing them in their interests and for the development
of the country. It does not try to make a large profit, being entirely
satisfied with a return of from three to four per cent. per annum. In
the past, surplus revenues have been returned to the taxpayers in the
shape of reduced freight rates and passenger fares, but in the years
of depression after the World War the lines earned less than three per
cent.
The regular passenger rate is two cents a mile. Young people under
twenty-one who are learning a trade or business and must go to work by
rail are allowed reduced fares. All students may travel on cut rates,
and in districts where there are no schools the railroads take children
to and from those that are nearest free of charge. This is true
whether they are going to private or to public schools. The government
considers this service worth what it costs because it promotes popular
education. Now and then special trains are run to take the school
children out over the country for practical lessons in geography. The
charge for such excursions just about covers the cost of running the
extra trains, and any school can have an instructive trip of this kind
upon the request of the teacher in charge.
One New Zealander with whom I talked said:
“It is our idea that the railroads are the servants of the people. We
want to bring every farmer’s produce to the markets at the lowest cost,
and to make it possible for our people to compete with those of other
lands in the markets of the world. If we can build railroads so that
the man one hundred miles from the seaboard can get his produce aboard
ship at the same cost as the man who lives only ten miles away, the
first man’s land becomes as valuable as that of the land-holder near
the coast. Then we get more taxes out of him and he becomes a more
prosperous member of the community. We are now devoting the roads
largely to opening up new country, and are pushing them out into the
public lands.”
“I notice that you have more than fifteen thousand government railway
employees,” said I. “Is not the service on the railroads seriously
affected by the fact that the government runs them? Do not the clerks
and the trainmen vote to keep in power the politicians who promise them
the most in the way of raising their wages or enabling them to hold
their jobs?”
“I don’t think there has been any attempt to do anything of that kind,
and I doubt if it could succeed,” was the reply. “Our civil-service
rules are rigid and we maintain them. There are special boards to which
railroad employees may bring their grievances. Furthermore, when a new
party comes in, there is no wholesale overturning of the government
service such as, I understand, used to prevail in your country. Only
the elected officials are changed. Promotion in government service is
by seniority, and few men, if any, get their jobs through political
pull.”