Like so many others, I love the feel of train travel and in the olden days could book my car, get a sleeper and rattle along to Sydney from Murwillumbah. Arriving refreshed in the morning, I unloaded my car. It was truly a great service at a good price.
On a recent trip to England, I had a couple of realisations. The first was the very high cost of rail travel. It was cheaper to go from London to Edinburgh by air. I haven’t seen any discussion around the ticket cost of the local train.
Railway technology is very old, starting in the 1830s. That’s even before cars and steamboats and it needs heavy infrastructure. It is still successful for long haul, high density, heavy traffic, so to bring back the local rattler must be the stuff of dreams.
I need to politely refute Louise Doran’s ‘couple of cyclists so bloody minded’ as I am one of many who would use this beautiful graded country path. I am a retired doctor, healthy at over 70 and I want to stay that way but I will not risk my life cycling on the roads.
The other realisation from the ‘olde country’ is the profusion of traditional common paths through the entire land. In contrast, the Aboriginal ancestral songlines have been brutally crossed by taut barbed wire.
This overgrown line is our only chance for a traffic free common path between the settlements of our region. I would love to see both but feel that a choice is necessary.
While we bicker, developers are rubbing their palms.
The local train is dead. Long live our common path.
David Miller Brunswick Heads
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
