RAILWAY SLEEPERS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 5566, 30 January 1879, Page 3

RAILWAY SLEEPERS.

(From the Manawatu Times.)

According to a Wellington contemporary, “ the Public Works Department experienced great difficulty in obtaining the necessary sleepers for the railway works now in hand, in consequence of having for some time discontinued the practice of obtaining hardwood sleepers from Tasmania. It is even now feared that, owing to the difficulty of procuring sleepers in New Zealand, the Government will be obliged to send large orders out of the colony. Offers for supplying a million sleepers from Tasmania have been received, and as a temporary measure to prevent the stoppage of one or two works now approaching completion, 50,000 have been ordered from Tasmania.” The above is taken from the Post, and is about the purest specimen of misrepresentation one can well imagine. The real difficulty in obtaining sleepers is not that set down by the Post, but because the Government has persistently refused to advertise tenders in papers published in the very heart of a timber country. . . . It is well known that the great timber country of the West Coast is that particular part lying between Orous Bridge and Haloombe, taking in Palmerston and Feilding. In that portion of the Manawatu there are no less than ten sawmills, and a supply of thousands of acres of the very best totara and other hard timber. When the Minister of Public Works asserts that a supply of sleepers has to be Imported because of inability to obtain them in this colony, we give the statement a pointblank denial. Let the Government act in the same manner as would a private firm—make its wants known and seek to purchase in the proper market, and we pledge our reputation that there will be no need to call upon the resources of Tasmania. As a case in point of the wilful culpability of the Public Works Department, we may mention that a day or two since we were informed by the proprietor of the Kairakau Sawmill that although he was cutting down some magnificent totora there was little demand for it. Upon asking his reason for not going in for some of the large tenders for sleepers advertised in the Wellington and Wanganui papers, he stated that he never saw either one or the other, and consequently knew nothing about them. And Mr. Wylds is not singular in his experience. For the enlightenment of Mr. Blackett, the Minister of Public Works, and our contemporary the Post, we may state that not only could the Manawatu supply three million of sleepers, but in the patch of bush between Palmerston and Feilding there is enough timber to keep twenty mills going for the next twenty years, cutting ten thousand feet per day. This is no claptrap, but the opinion of an expert from the Wairarapa, who has been over the land with a view of erecting a mill. If we were so self-sacrificing as to devote our space to ad-

vertising gratis the wants of the Government, we feel quite convinced that the million sleepers would not only bo but that there would be a pretty keen competition for the contract. We protest against the grand resources and illimitable supply of this couutry being thus studiously ignored, and the public money sent out of the colony to procure an article which lies before our very doors.