v. Westland Coal and Timber

12th November 2007

The Westland province of New Zealand’s South Island was connected to the east coast by the Midland line, a spectacular crossing of the Southern Alps. At the summit was a five mile tunnel, and more often than not, as the train emerged from the western portal it was raining. The line was surrounded by jungle! Only 12 months before my visit to Westland I had been in New Guinea, the third part of Australasia, which was at that time still administered from Canberra. There were no railways in New Guinea, but the flying made up for that! I found myself on the equator in really high mountains covered in dense vegetation and drenched in 300 inches of rain in a year. Now way to the south at latitude 42º it looked almost the same, but there was snow on the peaks and 4-8-2’s in the valleys!
The old Westland Province is naturally rich in timber, and also in coal. The NZR tapped these resources with a network of branch lines that were worked almost entirely by steam engines, many of them over fifty years old. Elderly tank engines and superannuated Pacifics gathered the coal, sawn timber and logs from branch lines, some with gradients as steep as 1 in 25, requiring a central Fell rail to assist braking. Then three times a day trains departed Greymouth for the east coast. They came steaming up the narrow Otira River valley drawn by double headed J’s, and stormed through the platform at Otira with regulators wide open, crossing into the arrival siding and working hard almost to the buffers. With the gear in reverse they rolled back into the level yard, where triple headed Eo class electrics waited for the even steeper climb into the Arthur’s Pass tunnel. Even as I marveled at these operations a ship was sailing south from Japan, its deck loaded with locomotives from Mitsubishi Industries that would end it all.
Riding goods trains in that rugged and temperate jungle was a wonderful experience, made possible by very welcoming crews. There was an ARHS/NZRLS special touring the South Island at much the same time as my visit, which I hopped aboard a few times. By 1967 steam was getting scarce, and grand “last chance” tours were part of the scene, so it features in some of this collection. But hand firing a lanky North British J class into the mountains with over 500 tons of coal and timber behind the tender was hard to beat!

The Mokihinui Line	Conns Creek Bridge	Morning Shift	A Rarity For The Miners
Coaling The Hard Way	Unstaged	Stranded In The Jungle	Small Scale
Braking Power	Yes, It Works!	Perfectly Matched	Bush Organic
The Things That Remain	Once Was A Compound	Soggy Westland	The Changeover
A Thousand Horses In Hand	The Face Off	Forty Years On	Extra Loading
Hard At It	Hot Box!	Mo To The Rescue	Blowing Off