believe the railways of their country are nothing less than speedways.
"My! you go so fast on the Main Trunk Express that you can hardly see anything," said a New Zealand woman excitedly to a neighbor.
It was worse than this on the daylight-to-dark section of the Midland Branch. So rapidly did the train cover the ground in the tussocky hills that one frightened passenger publicly complained of the speed. The oscillation was so severe, said he, that women were thrown off their seats, and articles fell from the parcel racks. Probably this train was one of those composed of old and light carriages that, as I found, often rock like ships at sea.
West Coast trains are more conservative. One of these plodders participated in a handicap race on the Greymouth-Reefton line with two young men—and the men won! They missed the train at the depot, but they started in pursuit, and though it had twenty yards' start, they overtook it after running about two hundred yards. This was a splendid performance for an untrained scratch team, but a magistrate saw in it a violation of the trespass law, and fined the men.
Speed in construction is another popular joke subject with New Zealanders. A hundred miles of railway takes many years to build.
"When will the North Auckland line be completed?" I asked an Auckland manufacturer.
"God knows," he answered, with a sigh.
