PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS — SECTION H. 
169 
Our engineering and architectural public works in Australasia 
must be considered in the aggregate if we would realise their 
magnitude, and we can gauge this by the expenditure upon them, 
which amounts to some £200,000,000 sterling, of which about 
£120,000,000 have been spent on railways. This latter sum has not 
been inflated by large preliminary expenses in battles with rival 
lines, as in England and elsewhere, but, as regards the extent 
and quality of the works, is on the whole no doubt really good 
value for the outlay; yet I make bold to assert that a large portion 
of this expenditure has been premature, when the needs of the 
colonists over large areas, now for a long time served by lines of a 
branch or pioneer character, are considered, and as indicated by the 
fact that a service of one or two trains per diem has been, and is likely 
to be tor some time yet, quite sufficient for such needs. These lines, 
with others outside the main trunk routes, have been built and 
prepared for a traffic yet to come j and, when it does come in the future, 
who shall say that the whole system of haulage for which they have 
been designed will not have been largely revolutionised, and hundreds 
of thousands, or rather millions, of pounds be found practically thrown 
away on works quite unnecessarily high in first cost, and entailing a 
burden in maintenance and interest that is cruelly felt directly any 
period of financial depression occurs. One great evil of this over- 
building for a very limited traffic is that it places a premium upon 
demands for working at much higher speed than the traffic warrants, 
and entails a corresponding loss in working; for high speed, as every 
engineer knows, means rapidly increasing cost in every department of 
working, and the haulage of heavier rolling-stock ; and what this 
means let me point out by a few figures : — Generally, and if the goods 
wagons were always worked to their full load capacity, the proportion 
of dead load to paying load may be taken as 1 to 1*75 or 2 ; but, 
allowing for “ empties” and the varying conditions of roadside traffic, 
I do not think we should be far out to take the reverse of this pro- 
portion as the prevailing general and actual average, or a dead load 
of 1*75 to 2 tons to a paying load of 1 ton; in other words, on 
the railways of Australasia is hauled an aggregate dead weight 
of from 21,000,000 to 24,000,000 tons of rolling-stock for trans- 
port of 12,000,000 tons of goods per annum! Granted that much 
of this is at present unavoidable from the exigencies of traffic, 
and a large margin is still left for the exercise of economy, in the 
construction and working on many lines, where necessity demands 
provision for traffic that must be comparatively limited for a long time 
to come. 
While the financial conditions of these colonies will make the 
study of the utmost economy in the working of existing lines to be 
incumbent on their engineers, the extended construction of new lines 
cannot be long delayed, with vast areas awaiting population coming 
from natural increase, from immigration, and from the exodus of city 
populations driven back on to the country lands ; but the difficulty of 
providing the interest on capital outlay, for sufficient mileage of the 
normal type of line to open out the country, would be too great, and 
therefore the consideration of the construction of good serviceable 
pioneer and feeder lines at a lower limit of cost is one of considerable 
importance. 
