Laying the ghost trains

Press, 19 April 1979, Page 18

Laying the ghost trains

Because Nelson is one of the more prosperous areas of the South Island the people of that province will probably not receive much sympathy for the hurt they are bound to feel at the removal of a subsidy on some of their road transport.

Since 1957 the main highway between Blenheim and Nelson has been a “notional railway’’ for the purposes of calculating passenger fares and the charges for freight. The difference between the actual cost of road transport on this road and the assumed railway charges for the journey has been met by a subsidy from the State.

The arrangement has probably been a good deal for taxpayers: had a railway been built to link Picton and Nelson the subsidy to meet the loss on running it would almost certainly have been very much more than the 82 million a year that the present subsidy is costing. This cannot be held up as a reason for subsidising road transport in and out of Nelson, any more than it could be used as an argument for subsidies elsewhere.

Such grievance as the people of Nelson feel about the Government's decision to end the subsidy next October must be founded on the argument that a political decision this week has undone a political promise of two decades ago. They are entitled to be

angry about the change: and some others outside Nelson who have had benefit from the subsidy may share the annoyance. Perhaps the people of Nelson may have marvelled that the subsidy continued for so long. Certainly the reliance on road transport has helped to ensure that the highway system through difficult terrain has been vastly improved in the last decade or so.

One result of the removal of the subsidy should be an immediate review of the merits of restoring a regular and appropriate shipping service to Nelson. Consideration of a shipping revival should not stop at a link between Nelson and Wellington. If it were practicable to employ car and rail ferries a link with Picton should be taken into account. In practice a three-port service might even be inevitable, and it would at least ensure that the Nelson economy remained close to the rest of South Island industry.

When all the political belabouring is over it should not be too much to hope that the Minister of Transport will be able to come out with a plan that can be looked at not merely as appeasement for the loss of a subsidy, but as a possible way of improving the transport system, and of sustaining and boosting Nelson’s economy. This is important to the rest of the South Island as well.