Still can’t get there from here by train

New Zealand was hardly alone after 1920 in lacking a way of planning its road and railway networks together; roads were planned by the Main Highways Board and then the National Roads Board, railways by the Railways Department and never the twain did meet. There was no opportunity for what today we would call joined-up thinking; there was no structure for it and certainly no culture of it in practice, and this worked against Railways’ interests. It also explains (at least in part) why in 1954 the Government opted for a motorway-based solution for Auckland’s issues. The establishment of a unified Ministry of Transport in 1968 did not address the issue either. It did some overall planning in aviation policy and ports policy, and contributed to land transport policy, but that was all; the critical weakness was that the road management remained with the Ministry of Works & Development as-was, this partly because of some tortuous bureaucratic politics, I gather, and no love lost either between the respective agencies, as I found out years later. Essentially, there was no understanding of the need for a coherent strategy for all land transport, never mind all transport modes as a whole.