Peter Carr
In the Cambridge cafe aptly for years known as Deli on the Corner, the interior comes to a sharp and narrow pointed extremity. It looks out at the nearby Duke Street roundabout and what used to be the Central Hotel.
Sitting on a shelf in this narrow confine was a black and white photograph taken around the start of the 20th century with the camera, on this site, pointing out towards the long-standing butchery on the opposite side of Victoria Street.
The vista was of an extremely wide road – no grass-topped median strip in those days. So why the extreme width of the road in such a small town? Because this is where the Auckland to Wellington railway was planned to transit on a north-south journey linking the prosperity and bustle of the Queen City with the slow-moving bureaucracy alongside wind-strewn shore of Port Nicholson.
Goodness knows why this was the (then) plan as the topography to the south embracing Taupo and the ravines that herald the start of the Desert Road should have told any engineer worth his socks that the feat was nigh impossible. It is history now, but common sense prevailed, the line was moved to the west and the last spike driven to complete the construction in 1908.
So why this treatise on rail transport? Well, it is really about the wider subject of multi-transport types and infrastructure.
It is no secret that we, this once-proud nation, repair yesterday’s infrastructure to maintain the status quo of the past. We do not replace totally inadequate roads with what is now needed to handle a huge number of cars and the over-large 16-metre-long B-train high sided trucks that thunder along the roads.
The current roading mess north of Gisborne is a prime example of political wavering supporting engineering ineptitude. Pity really, for NZTA (yes, I still use that title) have fine engineers and there are excellent roading engineering firms capable of providing high-standard roads promoting both safety and high speed where appropriate.
The current pothole saga is a case in point. Slapping in a spade-full of hot asphalt to allegedly bring a state highway back to ‘prime’ condition is a fallacy. Throwing down another thousand orange cones is a bureaucrat’s way of apparently slowing down the average speed of travel. Rubbish.
The very recent call for overnight passenger rail reinstatement – plus three other daylight passenger trains – is in the too-hard basket for the railway company. They are predominantly freight driven using narrow-gauge track that produces an average speed Auckland to Wellington of 40kmh. I frequently follow trucks well exceeding their permitted 90kmh as they thunder along the highways giving a direct point-to-point delivery that the rail system with never achieve.
If there is to be a reinstatement of any passenger rail it should be in the hands of a separate company who knows what they are doing. Preferably a European one. I well remember telling the (then) Chair of the Regional Council that the subsidy (that’s you and me paying as taxpayers) for the passenger rail shambles that links Hamilton to Auckland would be too high to stomach. And last week the true figures came to light. The subsidy to date is 86 per cent. This is criminal and a prime example of local government wielding the stick of poor governance to seek glorification.
