The Feilding Star, Oroua & Kiwitea Counties Gazette Published .Daily. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 28, 1896. LoOCOMOTION.

Feilding Star, Volume XVIII, Issue 103, 28 October 1896, Page 2

The Feilding Star, Oroua & Kiwitea Counties Gazette Published .Daily. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 28, 1896. LoOCOMOTION.

______ Q | What was looked upon fifty years ago as impossible in the way of rapid travelling is now an accomplished fact, and improvements in speed are sti'l being contemplated by scientific men. The latest notion, we learn from an English exchange is to have rolling steamers and sliding mail boats. The i steamer known as the Ernest Brazin is to roll on wheels on the briny ocean, and so quickly that the voyage from Havre to New York will be accomplished in four days, and, as the French press tersely puts it, the Britith merchant fleet may throw up the sponge, besides which sea sickness will be as extinct as the plagues of the Middle Ages. But the most interesting of all these inventions is undoubtedly the sliding steamer, which has already been launched in the Porte de France, Martinique. It is called the Avenir, and is expected to outdo the Ernest Brazin as completely as this vesssel has surpassed the ordinary Transatlantic 1 steamer. The principle on which it is constructed has been borrowed from the trailw&y skates exhibited at the Exposition of 1889, which moved smoothly, swiftly, and noiselessly on water that was ingeaioMf injected between the skates and the rails. But this principle has been differently applied. Thus it is on a layer of air, and not of water, that the Avenir skjUns along. The air is forced betweea the bottom of the hull and the sea water. Externally, according to the vague description given, there is nothing to distinguish. <&» vessel from J

any other, but underneath the hull | there are a numberof parallel keels, be- 1 tween which are compartments for the admimission of air, so that the vessel's bottom does not actually touch the water, but skates on a layer of air I above by means of a screw. The | Avenir, it is said, will accomplish the trip from Martinique to Havre in five days. At this rate we may expect to be transferred from Wellington to London is something like twenty-one days. No doubt it will be said passengers will undergo considerable more risk* to life and limb— but that was what was dreaded at the time railways were first introduced, and as in that case the ratio of accidents— fatal or otherwise — has not increased it is more than probable the new mode may be quite as safe.