Commuter rail service? Give me a ticket, please

IF Dunedin Railways runs a commuter service to Port Chalmers, I commit to using it once a week so long as I am not out of town.

This will not be a hardship. I will try for a lefthand window seat on the way in and a righthand one on the way back, so that I can watch the harbour. But it won’t matter if I miss those seats, because I will read my phone, or a book, or the Otago Daily Times, which I can’t do in my car.

Daily commuters may feel the same way.

People who live in town will have an even better reason to go by train, because they can make a great day of it. Call in at the shops and cafes down Port’s funky main street, catch the container cranes working at the end and then to the left, Careys Bay; to the right, circle round past Back Beach, or catch the Port to Port ferry across to Portobello and back.

The country is full of smallbusiness owners thinking and working hard to get through Covid19, trying to adapt and not at all giving up.

Come on, Dunedin Railways, give it a go.

Clive Matthewson

Port Chalmers

Polio epidemic

THANK you, Mary Horn (Letters, 6.5.20), for jogging my memory of the polio epidemic, which was also referred to at that time as infantile paralysis, being that it was first thought to be a disease suffered only by the very young.

Having just started at Wakari School at the age of 5, I remember being told soon after that school lessons would now be at home.

While I don't recall at that age any lessons being sent home, I do remember Mum tuning into a daily radio programme that catered for infant learning. Was it called ‘‘Listen with Mother’’? That may have come later but I remember the title.

In those days, the radio was the only live contact anyone had with the outside world. How different today, but how similar are the circumstances.

Lois Galer

Maori Hill