THE NELSON AND WESTPORT RAILWAY.

Westport Times, Volume III, Issue 531, 17 July 1869, Page 2

THE NELSON AND WESTPORT RAILWAY.

(From the Nelson Examiner.) We are glad to see the Westport Times taking a candid view of the railway scheme, and the more so as, on former occasions, the project was cried down in that journal after a very senseless fashion. Now our contemporary admits that the idea is a grand one, and hopes the people of the West Coast are sufficiently alive to the advantages of a railway, which it says would he the most wholesome and magnificent " pill" that Separation could possibly get. It is true our contemporary is rather sceptical as to the chance of the work being undertaken, and speaks somewhat disparagingly of the country through which the line would pass. Of the value of the estate which the company who constructed the railway would receive, opinions may differ. If the land to be given was all of a first-rate agricultural quality, no offer suck as tho pre. sent one would have been made. It is because much of the land is mountainous, that it was proposed to give two millions of acres for the execution of the work. But the land has value apart from its capacity for growing corn or rearing stock. Hundreds of thousands of acres are known to be highly auriferous, and without speaking of other minerals, it contains coal, which for extent, quality, and facilities of working, is nowhere to be surpassed. This vast wealth has remained hitherto unproductive for want of capital to turn it to account in an economical manner. The railway would render accessible to the miner the numberless tributary valleys of the Grey and Buller. It would enable him to live in the inland districts at a reasonable rate, and save him much of the toil he has now to undergo in procuring his provisions. Prospecting would be encouraged, new fields would be opened, townships spring up, and the whole country benefited to an incalculable degree. And as it is evident from Colonel Maude's letter to Mr Morrison, that the parties likely to engage in the undertaking have an eye to the coalfields both at Mount Eochfort and the Grey, the Company which engaged to make the railway would not be long with the capital they propose to possess, in opening coal-fields which would give large and immediate returns. Our contemporary may smile at what he calls " the poetical features of the scheme," but to our mind nothing which has beeu proposed wears an impracticable aspect. We repeat what we have often before said, that few of the schemes brought before the notice of capitalists offer more certain chances of success than the Nelson and West Coast Eailway.