DIVERSION OF THE WINTON-KINGSTON LINE.

Southland Times, Issue 1622, 20 August 1872, Page 3

DIVERSION OF THE WINTON-KINGSTON LINE.

Sib, — With reference to the Winton to Kingston line, the Engineer-in-chief's railway report,, as given in your issue of Friday, says : — " Surveys, have been made to avoid the two crossings of the Oreti River, which were intended in the first surreys, and comparative estimates are being prepared." We therefore have it now on good authority that this miserable farce is being played out in earnest. There are two points — Winton and Kingston — about seventy miles apart, which it was proposed to connect by rail. A competent engineer (late Mr Paterson) surveyed the connecting medium, and finding the shortest, straigbtest, and apparently cheapest line ot connection to be practically level, and that which would give the largest accommodation to the public, selected it — as might be expected — for the proposed railway. Query — Whether would you call it a piece of stupidity or a piece of jobbery that surveys should be made and estimates prepared for the purpose of comparing this line, so selected, with one well known to be a little longer, a great deal more crooked, more difficult and apparently more expensive to make, and which would traverse the edge of, but be occasionally quite isolated from, about 600 square miles of railway- feeding territory ? You would probably answer in charity that such a " comparison" must be the result of honest stupidity. So bs it then. But it would be well for all parties if the Engineer-in-chief confined the operations of the honeststupidity section of his department to the vicinity of head-quarters. Suppose trains to be passing to and from Kingston on the line wbich avoids the two Oreti crossings, they (the trains) would be absolutely useless to the inhabitants of the country on the west Bide of that river — they would be useless and tantalizing. — I am, <_c, Osbtz. Aug. 17, 1872.