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.