Local Railway Management.

Press, Volume LIV, Issue 16167, 22 March 1918, Page 6

Local Railway Management.

Local business men will be very easily satisfied if they are content with the reply given by the General Manager of Railways to the. deputation which waited upon him yesterday to complain of many irritating defects in the management of the Christchurch-Lyttelton railway. 3lr Hilcy was presented with a long list of complaints, relating to storage charges, haulage charges, qualified receipts, tariff anomalies, delays in handling goods, pilfering of goods, and the working of the late trains. He was told that the general impression in this part of the Dominion is that the Department regards tho public as made for the railways, and not tho railways for tho public, that the Department's policy appears to be the harassing of the public, and that the railways sometimes seem to be a curse rather than a blessing. Responsible business men do not commit themselves to opinions liko these without good reason, and Mr Hiley, who must realise this, has no doubt decided in his own mind that some extensive improvements ought to be made. His reply, as we have indicated, was quite an inadequate one. The complaints were directed at Departmental policy, and at the local administration of that policy, both of which operate against the efficient conduct of business. Tho points upon which the policy and administration wcro criticised are points which are unrelated to conditions affected 1)y the war; indeed, some of the harassing practices of tho local authorities are of long standing. Mr Hiley, nevertheless, pleaded that the war is to blame. Allowance should be made for tho shortage of the staff; present conditions could not he compared with

the conditions of three or four years ago; the business men must not forgot the changed conditions; thousands of men have left the service; the Department has serious difficulties to contend with; and so on. When all of this is admitted, there is still no excuse for the faults and anomalies, of policy and administration, which have no relation to the shortage of porters or the difficulty of finding smart shunters. Tho General Manager did, it is true, undertake to send the Chief Traffic Manager and another senior official to investigate the whole, matter. It seems to us, however, that the Department, if it conducted tho railways as they ought to be conducted, would not find itself in the position of thus confessing the necessity of opening its eyes for a time in order to discover; what it has been doing. That being the position, the local public will not feel very confident that good results will come of the Commission—as it may be called —to which tho Manager- has transferred responsibility in the matter. The public will regret that the deputation did not ask Mr Hiley to explain exactly why the Department refused to recognise the folly of cutting off the lato train between Christchurch and Lyttelton, for a frank Departmental explanation would liavo been of great interest to us all. A glimpse of the Department's mind' was afforded, however, hy the General Manager's remark that "so far " as the situation of Christchurch was " concerned, they should not blame the "'Department foi- its geographical handicap." This very strange remark is offered, apparently, as a defence of the Department, but actually it is the reverso, since it implies that the Department's wooden-headed policy is to ignore "geographical handicaps" and to make no enquiry as to the possible existence of spccial circumstances which might make its plans or policy absurd and even highly injurious. The Department, in fact, appears to claim that if geography stands in- the way of the Department's policy being satisfactory, it is tho geography, and not tho policy, that must bo altered. So long as this extraordinary idea rules the Head Office, so long, we are afraid, will there be occasion for complaint and excuse for some of the hard tnings said of the Department yesterday.