CHAPTER XXX
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.
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.
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.”