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department. During the five years of the company’s existence, the ratepayers paid only £600 of nearly £10,000 levied.

In 1879 the government of the day acknowledged that the railway must be bought sooner or later. When the refusal of rates placed the company in a quandary there was little difficulty in persuading the administration of 1884 to come to its rescue, except that the directors stood out for a better offer than the first one made. Unscrupulous members of Parliament then seized the opportunity to propose that other branch lines built under the terms of a later and easier Act, should be bought at the same time. Indeed, several were included, although not without serious objections and a minor scandal. Few members criticized the purchase of the Methven line and those that did acknowledged that it was to some extent justified. Only the high interest rate prevented the line from paying its way.⁷⁷ The government had abandoned another scheme for serving the interior by means of a ‘grand central trunk railway’ from Oxford to Temuka. Moreover, the Mount Somers branch was being extended without direct charge on the southern district. The price paid for the line—£72,000—was only a little less than the company had spent but it had to meet unpaid interest to shareholders.

The people of the district found to their dismay that the Railways Department, having assumed full control, was determined not to lose heavily on the line. It reduced the service ‘for want of patronage’, and the daily mail delivery at Methven disappeared. It ran no extra trains to suit racegoers. Complaints were made of heavier charges than on other lines.

No doubt Rakaia benefited from the branch line, as it both encouraged the development of farming in the area and channelled much traffic through Rakaia which would otherwise have gone through Ashburton. As many as 86,063 sheep were loaded there or at flag stations on the line in the year 1897-8. This number appears to be a record for the county. So also was the 24,188 tons of grain sent from Rakaia in the year 1901–2.⁷⁸

Methven became a village after the company fixed on the post office as the terminus for the railway. Before that time, Robert Patton, who had named his farm ‘Methven’ after his native place in Perthshire, had sold ten acres to a blacksmith wishing to set up business. A saddler’s shop and a post office soon followed and probably several cottages. However, when the company made its decision, McKerrow and Company of Rakaia bought eighty acres