FROM THE WATCH TOWER

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 857, 28 December 1929, Page 8

FROM THE WATCH TOWER

By “THE LOOK-OUT MAN.” THE FAMINE A message from Antarctica states that the members of the Byrd expedition are running short of cigarettes. They’ve wireless sets and gramophones; indeed, they are replete With loads of gadgets planned Antarctic rigours to defeat. And yet amid their luxury the bold explorers fret— What use is Christmas pudding if you lack a cigarette? With scientific foods they're fortified against the cold, (The merits of these articles in sundry ads. are told), And where their predecessors trudged they fly a proud machine. Yet life is dull and incomplete sans Lady Nicotine. Oh fragrant weed, that never grew Reside the Bay of Whales. How weak we men (and wom*V) are without our coffin nails! What impotence and irritable longing it begets In beggars, bards, and Byrd-men to be short of cigarettes! * * » SALUBRIOUS Every city has its salubrious corner, and in Auckland there is none more spiced with tingling aromas than the immediate industrial vicinity round about Westfield. It is a happy coincidence that both the main road and the railway, the gateways to the City from the south, enter through this busy neck of land, where the active scents of innumerable processes float upon the breeze. There is no reproach implied by this state of affairs. Even the best regulated industrial plant has to manifest outward symptoms of its existence. Besides, habitual travellers returning Shomeward are glad of the wind’s familiar greeting. They even make a little jest of it: “All is not quiet on the Westfield front.” It is what might be called a stock joke.

KINGLY CHARIOT \

Having had the opportunity of meeting a man who has just imported a £3,000 car, we take the liberty of presenting him to patrons of the column. He was very unassuming and even offhand about his lustrous new possession, a silken creature that responds at a touch with a mere 150 horsepower or so. The authentic price of the machine was £3,000, landed in New Zealand, and one saw at once that nothing could be added to such an engineering epic. Air cushions, armchair seats, speed, flexibility—a car to put half the North Island within reach on a day’s cruise. These envious reflections were interrupted by the arrival of a mechanic. He had come along to fix up the wind-shield wiper.

* * * LOUNGE LIZARDS

A new era in railway travel is signalised by the provision of lounge cars on the Daylight Limited trains. This is a remarkable demonstration of progress for a country in which not so long ago racegoers were conveyed in, open trucks. The Railway Department is moving with the times, but there are certain points that demand explanation before the lounge cars will appear as an unmixed evil. Constant patrons of the railways will wish to know how admission to the lounges is to be regulated. Will it be possible to “hog” the lounges?. That is, may someone select the choicest easy chair when the train is ascending Parnell Rise, and not vacate it till it till it is descending the hill into Thorndon? And, if so, will the guard be authorised to give aid and evict the offender? Perhaps in the first days of the lounge cars the daylight expresses will be the scene of terrific struggles for places. It is a delicate problem, only to be solved by making every car a lounge car, thus eliminating unseemly competition. FAVOURED SEATS The Railway Department’s latest move to popularise distance travel by train may spur service car interests to make a corresponding gesture in the pursuit of luxury. The next development may be lounge cars or charabancs on the long runs in the course of which it is now the occasional fate of the traveller to spend hours on that throne of the casual patron, the dickey seat. Among hardy wayfarers of an older generation the dickey seat was a welcomed innovation. No one seemed to mind being sentenced to its beautiful isolation. But a new generation is now arising, and provident travellers when they are booking their places are careful to specify front seats. Since there can be no more than two or three front seats in even the finest creations of the coachbuilder’s art, this brings a new problem to the business of catering for highway travel. Ser vice car agencies are daily requested to book ten or a dozen people in the space provided for only two. It is a problem that can only be solved by the adoption of railway precedent and the provision of lounge cars, in which there -will be no front seats, and no invidious distinctions.