A.—4.

100

written in on the issue of the ticket. Season school tickets are in the usual form ' children under fourteen years of age pay one-fourth of the ordinary fares for a single or return ticket, from fourteen to eighteen, one-half a certificate being required from the teacher as to the child being under tuition and under age. Books of excess-fare tickets, not numbered, are issued to Stationmasters, who fill in both the ticket and butt, returning the butts when each book is used to the Audit, where they are checked against the ticket collector's return of excessfare tickets collected. This return is made by the collectors daily, and includes all the ordinary school and excess-fare tickets collected. Excess-fare tickets are used for flag stations. Dog tickets similar to ordinary tickets are issued for values without name of the "to" station. The price is printed on the ticket, the prices being 6'd., Is., 25., 35., 45., 4s. 6d., which are available for distances not exceeding 10, 25, 50, 75, 105, and over 105 miles severally from the issuing station. Parcels, horses, and carriages are way-billed in the usual manner, and are now treated as part of the passenger traffic. Till recently they were included in goods. The parcel way-bills are not forwarded to the Audit, which relies for their correctness on the receiving station. If the parcels abstracts of the two stations differ, the way-bills are sent for No daily returns of passenger traffic are made. The only return is the classi-fication-sheet, which is made weekly, and is entered in the Audit Office into the ticket check-book. Tickets are collected at small stations as the passengers leave the trains, by porters or by the Stationmasters, and, for large stations, at the last stopping station before the terminal. In no case are they collected by guards. Collected tickets are returned to Audit and checked against the returns of issues. Trainbooks are not used, but the ticket collectors make daily returns of the tickets collected by each train. Goods are way-billed in the usual manner, and the way-bills are sent up for audit in support of the weekly abstracts. After being audited, which takes usually about three days, they are returned to the stations and posted in books. Press copies are taken at the sending station, and the way-bills are entered in the ware-house-book at the receiving station. These entries and also the entries of the ledger accounts are required to be made before the way-bills leave the station. The usual weekly abstracts of goods outwards are checked against those of the inwards traffic, and a monthly balanced summary of the traffic of the line is made in the Traffic Audit. Nothing is required from the stations but the weekly abstracts and the weekly account-current. At present the abstract-books kept on the stations are also sent up for audit, a course so inconvenient as regards especially distant stations, that it is about to be abandoned in favour of a system of local inspection. A Travelling Inspector has recently been appointed who, it is expected, will audit the stations, between eighty and ninety in number, twice in each year —an expectation which, considering the distance of some of the lines, will probably hardly be fulfilled. Ledger accounts are rendered monthly, and are supposed to be paid during the ensuing month. The opinion of the Traffic Auditor is that the cross-checking of the inwards and outwards traffic abstracts is not sufficient to secure a detection of all errors in the accounts. It was after trying this plan that the summary balance-sheet was brought into use. He is also of opinion that the weekly system of account is more applicable to the circumstances of the colony than the monthly Goods are sometimes, for the sake of speedy delivery, sent without way-bills or any intermediate note. The way-bills are sent as soon as possible afterwards. There are two accounts-current sent up from the station, one for goods and one for coaching traffic. This is the weakest part of the system in use in South