New Zealand Steam

By way of a change from Bluebell matters, here are some photos of New Zealand Steam.

First up, some photos from the Glenbrook Railway, near Auckland. This was a gala weekend, with six engines in steam, as well as numerous vintage carriages - one six wheeler dating back to 1879. To British eyes, lots will look familiar, but lots will also look quite alien. Locos range from an F class 0-6-T and L class 2-4-0T, dating from the 1870s / 1880s, through to a pair of JA 4-8-2s, one of which I was lucky to get a cab ride on along the line. The line also has a 2-4-0+0-4-2 Mallet, I believe the only such loco in preservation, but it is not currently in service.

No claims being made for photographic quality, but hopefully the subject matter is of interest, with features of interest to loco spotters, C&W, P/Way plant and S&T afficionados - not least interesting rotating dummy signals like a crude LBSCR Tommy Dodd (and complete absence of block machines, catch points...)

Glenbrook Railway steam fayre - a set on Flickr

Tom

 

Have only just had a new roof and solar panels to pay for, otherwise I'd be off like a shot to Kiwi land - nice mixture of British infrastructure and different looking locos. Decent standard of cricket, too!

John

 

I was in New Zealand from 20 February to 20 March. Too late to make a booking, we drove to Whangerei to see the excursion from Auckland on 23 February. not sure of the rail distance but the road is 166km; the way the railway winds around it's probably nearer to 200km. Just like home it arrived 1hr 40min late!

Other calls were at the Bay of Islands Railway at Kawakawa (where our guard was preparing for a holiday to the Ffestiniog next year), the Goldfields Railway at Waihi, the Weka Pass Railway at Waipara, the Plains at Ashburton and Oamaru Harbour. Plus of course, a look at NZR operations wherever possible. My impressions, like my last visit, were of sadness at a country that has seemingly turned its back on the passenger railway except for the Auckland and Wellington commuter operations. Or, as put by a volunteer at the Plains Railway, "the [national] railway has turned its back on the country". The long-distance passenger services are aimed at the tourist, comprising daily services from Christchurch to Greymouth and to Picton and a three-times-a-week train between Auckland and Wellington. The result is that few New Zealand citizens (and thereby voters) see the railway as relevant to their lives; not a situation that will engender political support.

The preservation groups clearly had limited resources with Glenbrook probably the best. Like so much of the New Zealand economy, they suffer from the sparse population which just cannot give the "home market" that we have in Britain. Our activities are followed with admiration and (in the nicest way) envy.

One interesting feature was freight only seemed to run on a five-day week; no shortage of maintenance time there then!

 

Auckland - Wellington is still a great journey and you get rare Brush tri-bo electric loco haulage over the central part. NZ has so much scenery, it's unfair. I had a few days in Wellington a couple of years ago and there is much of interest to the enthusiast on the network round Wellington apart from everything else NZ has to offer like the local scenery and the ferry to Picton. Sadly, I believe the ex-Otira Japanese EO electrics which top and tailed a set of BR Mark IIs in the rush hour have now been withdrawn. The Fell Locomotive Museum (and the trackbed of the Rimutaka incline), the tramway museum and the Wellington funicular are well worth visiting. Rimutaka

 

Some photos from the surviving relics of the Fell system railway that climbed the Rimutaka incline in New Zealand. This consisted of three miles of line, over which all mainline trains had to travel, at an average gradient of 1 in 15. To assist this journey, a Fell system railway was built and kept in use for eighty years. This has a centre rail; the locos (which were 0-4-2T) had four cylinders: two driving the normal wheels in conventional fashion, and two driving a set of horizontal wheels that bore against the centre rail. There were also special brake vans that had brakes on both the normal wheels and the centre rail. Each train to be worked over the incline had to be split up and remarshalled with engines and brake vans distributed along its length before working up or down, at an average speed - climbing - of only about 4 mph. So slow that, in later years, it was common practice for passengers to jump off the train, run ahead, take a photo and then get back on for the next section of the climb!

Anyway, a few photos and an explanation of the system here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamessquared/8718933816/in/set-72157633444044502/
Tom

 

I went into the pit at the Fell Museum and took some photos of the underside of the preserved loco. I can't upload them because they're colour slides. One thing that Tom doesn't mention is that NZR eventually developed special diesel railcars that could climb Rimutaka and this made passenger journeys a good deal more practical. Overall the Fell system struck me as a most expensive and complex way of avoiding building a long tunnel. I believe that the original decision was based as much on the difficulties of ventilation as on cost.

 

Pics underneath plus of the trackbed. http://www.railwayanapage.com/rimutaka.htm

 

Re the railcars - my mother in law remembers using those to travel to Wellington as a child, would have been in the early fifties. But unlike more typical European mountain railways, which tend to be self-contained dead-end branches, this was in the middle of a mainline, so every ton of goods and passenger had to be hauled up and down the incline, with the associated disruption. The closest British comparison I can really think of would be the way some very early railways were laid out, with sections of more or less level track designed for loco haulage interspersed with inclined planes designed for rope haulage. But not many railways like that lasted into the 1950s!

Tom