Much of the locomotive power on New Zealand's Vogel-era railways was provided by small British-built tank engines like the 2-4-0T D and 0-6-0T F class. D 170, built in Glasgow in 1880, is currently on static display at Helensville.

Toffs and toasts: on 7 September 1878 Dunedin's mayor hosted a lavish banquet to celebrate the arrival of the first train from Christchurch. The completion of this railway was one of the major achievements of the Vogel era.

Just after 6 a.m. on 7 September 1878, this Rogers steam locomotive, K 88 Washington, left Christchurch hauling the first train to run on the newly completed railway to Dunedin. When it arrived in the southern city 12½ hours later it received a tumultuous welcome, with the mayor hosting a banquet in honour of the occasion.

The two K-class engines brought to New Zealand earlier that year, named Washington and Lincoln, were the first American-built locomotives to operate in this country. These ‘showy little engines’ impressed initially sceptical observers with their pulling power and high speeds, and a further six were imported in 1879 to haul Christchurch–Dunedin express trains.

From the mid-1880s the Ks were superseded by new, larger locomotives and relegated to secondary duties. After being withdrawn from service in the 1920s, K 88 was dumped in the Ōreti River. It was salvaged in the 1970s and painstakingly restored at the Plains Vintage Railway at Tinwald, Ashburton, where it continues to operate – providing a remarkable link to one of the great moments of the Vogel era of rail construction.

This painting shows the Canterbury provincial railway’s locomotive Pilgrim during its historic first journey at Ferrymead in December 1863. Painted by the renowned rail artist W.W. Stewart, it captures something of the excitement and novelty of early rail experiments.

While this photograph of railway ‘navvies’ (labourers) was taken some years later, it gives a sense of the working conditions and methods employed during the4 Vogel era. Rail construction in the 1870s relied on muscle power (and dynamite), as workers laboured with pick axes and wide-mouth shovels, disposing of spoil with horse-drawn tip-carts or via a gravity-fed timber chute known as a ‘Chinaman’.

Railway construction workers at the Chain Hills tunnel, near Mosgiel on the Dunedin–Clutha line, around 1874.

The railways built in New Zealand during the Vogel era of the 1870s were rudimentary by the standards of Europe or north-eastern America. In order to build railways cheaply and quickly, New Zealand adopted a narrow 3 ft 6 in (1067-mm) gauge, laid light iron rails, built small tunnels and wooden trestle bridges, and tolerated tight curves and steep gradients. While it was always intended that lines would be improved as traffic increased and finances allowed, the Vogel imprint would place severe limitations on New Zealand’s later railway development.

See enlarged detail from this image.

The memorial cairn to the 21 people killed in the Hyde railway tragedy of 4 June 1943. The memorial was dedicated on 17 February 1991. The location of the cairn is about 500 metres south of the site of the tragedy.

The 8.5-km Ōtira tunnel, which pierced the Southern Alps and linked Christchurch with Greymouth, was formally opened by Prime Minister William Massey. At the time it was the longest tunnel in the southern hemisphere, the longest in the British Empire, and the sixth-longest in the world.

Work on the transalpine (or ‘Midland’) line had begun in January 1887. This ambitious private project, launched by the New Zealand Midland Railway Company, aimed to connect the West Coast with not just Canterbury but also Nelson. But progress was painfully slow and in 1895 the project was taken over by the government’s Public Works Department (PWD), triggering legal disputes and further delays. The West Coast section reached Ōtira by 1900 and tenders for a long tunnel through the Alps to Arthurs Pass, 737 m above sea level, were called in 1907.

Contractor J.H. McLean & Sons began work the following year, but the project was plagued by engineering problems, extreme weather conditions and labour shortages, which eventually led to the company’s collapse. In 1912 the PWD took over but work slowed during the First World War. When the two ends of the tunnel were joined in 1918 the surveyors’ centre lines were found to vary by less than 30 mm, an impressive level of accuracy for the era. The line was finally opened for traffic in 1923 – 36 years after work had first begun on a transalpine link.

Due to its length and continuous steep gradient (1 in 33), it was decided to electrify the tunnel using a 1500V DC overhead system. Electric power was supplied by a small coal-fired station near Ōtira and later by hydroelectric supply. The tunnel section of the line was initially served by five English Electric Eo-class locomotives, which were replaced in 1968 by Toshiba Ea-class (later called EO-class) locos. The tunnel’s electric system was decommissioned in 1997 in favour of diesel power, with the locomotives' fumes being dealt with by a system of doors and exhaust fans.

From the 1920s to the 1960s popular Sunday excursions were run from Christchurch to Arthur’s Pass and Ōtira. Today, the tunnel is heavily used by freight trains carrying West Coast coal to Lyttelton for export, as well as by the TranzAlpine tourist train.

Image: Ōtira tunnel opening

Four children were killed and 13 adults injured when two rail carriages were blown off the tracks by severe winds on a notoriously exposed part of the Rimutaka Incline railway. This was the first major loss of life on New Zealand’s railways; only five rail accidents have claimed more lives in this country's history.

The Rimutaka Incline, completed in 1878, was one of New Zealand’s most ambitious early engineering projects. The climb up the range’s eastern flank, where the line rose 265 m in 4 km, required the use of special Fell mountain locomotives, which use horizontal inner wheels to grip a raised centre rail. 

The morning train to Wellington on 11 September 1880 comprised a single Fell engine, pushing two passenger cars and a goods van, and pulling two loaded goods wagons and a brake van. As it rounded Siberia Curve, 1200 m below the summit, winds gusting up to 200 km/hour swept the two carriages into the gully below. According to a newspaper report, passengers:

lay around for a time unconscious and those who first recovered their senses described the scene as a fearful one – killed and wounded lying around in all directions covered with blood, and the train above suspended in mid-air, threatening every moment to fall on them.

The engine remained firm, and the brakesman immediately uncoupled his van to roll back down to Cross Creek to seek help. The other wagons dangled by their couplings as the survivors crawled to the safety of a nearby cutting. The wind was so strong that the rescue train had to park in a tunnel as rescuers crawled along the track holding onto the centre rail. They recovered the bodies of three children; a fourth died later of head injuries. Thirteen adult passengers were injured, five of them seriously.

While an inquest attached no blame to anyone for the accident, large wooden windbreaks were immediately erected to protect trains from the gale-force winds that regularly battered parts of the Incline railway.

Image: artist's impression of Rimutaka incline accident (Te Ara)

Ten New Zealand soldiers were killed when they were hit by a train at Bere Ferrers in the United Kingdom.

The accident occurred as troops from the 28th Reinforcements, NZEF, were being transported from Plymouth to Sling Camp on Salisbury Plain. These men had just arrived in Britain on the troopships Ulimaroa and Norman, and were heading to the NZEF base to complete their training.

The train carrying the New Zealanders had left Plymouth Friary Station at 3 p.m. Prior to departure the men onboard were informed that rations would be served at the train’s first stop in Exeter. Orders were given for two men from each carriage to collect provisions from the guard van once the train stopped.

At 3.52 p.m. the train was forced to make an unscheduled stop at Bere Ferrers due to a blockage on the line. As the rear carriages stopped outside the station those onboard assumed they had reached Exeter. Eager to find food and ignoring the ‘two from each carriage’ instruction, many of the men jumped off, some onto the opposite track. Moments later they were struck by an oncoming train.

The London Waterloo to Plymouth express had left Exeter at 2.12 p.m. and was approaching Bere Ferrers as the troop train came to a halt. Spotting the stationary train on the other track, the driver sounded a long whistle blast before rounding the final bend into the station at 40 miles (64 km) per hour. As the engine of the express passed the rear of the troop train the crew suddenly spotted soldiers on the track. The driver immediately applied the brakes but it was too late. Nine New Zealanders were killed instantly, while another died later in hospital. One of the survivors later remarked:

We never thought of express travelling at 40 miles per hour. They don’t travel at that rate in New Zealand. It was a wonder more of us were not killed. I saw the coat-tails of the man in front of me fly up, and I picked his body up afterwards some yards down the line.

The dead soldiers – William Gillanders, William Greaves, John Jackson, Joseph Judge, Chudleigh Kirton, Baron McBryde, Richard McKenna, William Trussell, John Warden, and Sidney West – were buried at Efford Cemetery in Plymouth. An inquest held shortly after the accident concluded that the men had exited the train on the wrong side because they assumed that the door they had boarded the train though was also the exit. A verdict of accidental death was recorded.

A year after the tragedy a memorial to the victims was unveiled at Saint Andrew’s Church in Bere Ferrers. A plaque bearing the names of the dead was also erected at the railway station. In 2001 the New Zealand National Army Museum helped arrange a remembrance service in Bere Ferrers, during which a new memorial was unveiled in the centre of the village.

--

Image: Sign at Bere Ferrers Station (Waymarking)

Find out more about the soldiers killed at Bere Ferrers on the Auckland War Memorial Museum Cenotaph Database

Lyttelton Rail Tunnel (1867)

Extraordinary engineering

In 1850 settlers sweated over the steep, narrow Bridle Path from Lyttelton to the swampy site of Christchurch. Heavy goods had to be unloaded at Lyttelton and put aboard small craft that were sent across the perilous Sumner bar to Ferrymead, near the mouth of the Heathcote River. Here they were unpacked again and put into wagons, pulled from late 1863 by New Zealand’s first steam locomotives, which ran to Christchurch. Ferrymead was just a stopgap; Lyttelton was the only logical deepwater port.

People talked about a tunnel almost before the Four Ships finished discharging. Action replaced talk after William Moorhouse won the provincial superintendency in 1857. ‘Railway Billy’ convinced his council to think big and build one of the longest tunnels yet contemplated (2.6 km), and the first in the world to go through the walls of an ancient volcano – to link two townships with just 3000 inhabitants. George Stephenson’s nephew, G.R. Stephenson, prepared the estimates, but when British contractors demanded more money, Moorhouse sailed to Melbourne to sign up Holmes and Co. On 17 July 1861, in appalling weather, he turned the first sod of the ‘Canterbury railway tunnel’. Being Christchurch, it was a hierarchical knees-up. While the elite banqueted in a large marquee, 1500 sodden folk rioted over the quality of the beer provided for them.

The work was arduous. Miners prepared the tunnel faces with picks and long chisels, fired gunpowder charges and then returned to load the spoil into horse­drawn wagons. The two faces crept towards each other at a rate of about 3 m a week. It was stuffy and wet – in one very bad stretch an iron shield had to be built over the miners so that they could keep working despite the water. The breakthrough was made in 1867. Night-shift workers still had three years of finishing-off ahead of them, but by December passenger trains were running.

After electric trains entered service, tunnel trips no longer included ‘smoke-filled carriages, grime and the odd cinder in the eye’. This is no carefully tended shrine to Victorian progress; it is an important part of the country’s transport infrastructure, as the hideous off-ramps that bracket the Lyttelton portal show. The old tunnel withstood the 2010/11 earthquakes and as the coal wagons and container flats rattling through the entrance show, it still links port and plain. A complementary 2-km road tunnel opened in 1964.

Further information

This site is item number 33 on the History of New Zealand in 100 Places list.

Websites

• Historic Places Trust Register
• William Sefton Moorhouse biography – Te Ara
• Christchurch City Library history
• IPENZ Engineering Heritage

Book

• W.H. Scotter, A history of Port Lyttelton, Lyttelton Harbour Board, Christchurch, 1968

Makatote Viaduct (1908)

The main trunk unites the North Island

The South Island main trunk line linked Christchurch and Dunedin by 1878 and was extended to Invercargill the next year, but another three decades would pass before engineers and politicians could overcome the opposition of King Country Māori and the forbidding central North Island terrain to complete the northern equivalent. Until then anyone wanting to travel from Auckland to Wellington either took a steamer down the east coast or sailed from Onehunga to catch the Wellington train at New Plymouth.

Christchurch firm J. & A. Anderson won the Makatote construction tender in 1905. The site was forbidding, 792 m above sea level amid thickly forested hills. Storms, floods and shortages of cement and skilled labour made things worse. Anderson set up a fully equipped workshop and brought in 1238 tonnes of cement and 1016 tonnes of steel by wagon from the railhead. Using a cableway stretched across the gorge between timber gantries, they had the viaduct ready by July 1908. Soon trains began rolling uninterrupted between Auckland and Wellington, transforming travel in the North Island and turning the government railway into a modern main-line system. Passenger numbers soared from 3.5 million in 1895 to 13.3 million in 1913 and freight carried rose from 2 million tonnes in 1895 to almost 3.9 million tonnes in 1913.

The Makatote Viaduct is not our longest railway viaduct, but still offers some impressive statistics: it is 2262 m long and 79 m high. There are six concrete and five steel piers. Twenty-three major viaducts and 26 bridges made the North Island main trunk an impressive project by any standards. When the American Society of Civil Engineers awarded the line its 27th International Historic Civil Engineering Landmark Award in 1997, it joined the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower and the Panama Canal on a very select list. Just south of the viaduct, the Last Spike Monument marks the spot where Sir Joseph Ward drove the final spike into the line on 6 November 1908.

Further information

This site is item number 78 on the History of New Zealand in 100 Places list.

On the ground

Motorists on State Highway 4 between Pokaka and Erua can view the viaduct from a rest stop beneath the southern piers, or from the Makatote Scenic Reserve at the northern end of the viaduct.

Websites

• Historic Places Trust register
• Engineering Heritage New Zealand
• Railways – Te Ara
• Building the Main Trunk Line - NZ History

Books

• Neill Atkinson, Trainland: how railways made New Zealand, Random House, Auckland, 2007
• Geoffrey Thornton, Bridging the gap: early bridges in New Zealand 1830-1939, Reed Books, Auckland, 2001

Police officer and search volunteers at the scene of the railway disaster at Tangiwai, December 1953.

View of Tangiwai in the aftermath of the railway disaster of 24 December 1953, showing destroyed carriages on the banks of the river, and a photographer on the remains of the bridge at left.

From the 1920s the Railways Studio and Publicity Branch produced hundreds of eye-catching posters. In the 1940s and 1950s there was a high demand for railway services around public holidays, especially Christmas and Easter. In an age before most New Zealand families owned a car, the rail journey along the North Island Main Trunk Line was a popular way to get between Wellington and Auckland.

This poster from 1948 depicts a streamlined Ka locomotive - similar to the unstreamlined Ka 949, which was involved in the tragedy at Tangiwai.

At the scene of the railway disaster at Tangiwai, December 1953. A second-class railway carriage lies on its side with men standing alongside and on top of the wreck.

This memorial plaque commemorating those of the Greymouth section of New Zealand Railways who died in the First World War is displayed in the Greymouth Railway Station. Its transcript is copied below.

ROLL OF HONOUR

MEMBERS OF THE STAFF WHO MADE
THE SUPREME SACRIFICE
FOR THEIR KING & COUNTRY
DURING THE GREAT WAR 1914-1918

GREYMOUTH SECTION

BARRY G.
FORD S.R.
KENYON B.D.
KILKENNY M.H.
LALOLI J.H.
RAMSAY R.C.
RASMUSSEN C.L.M.
SANGWELL W.H.P.
TAWHAI H.T.
WALLACE G.N.
WILLIS E.J.

N Z RAILWAYS

A wooden memorial plaque commemorating those of the Invercargill section of New Zealand Railways who died in the First World War is stored in KiwiRail's offices in Invercargill. Its transcript is copied below.

ROLL OF HONOUR

MEMBERS OF THE STAFF WHO
MADE THE SUPREME SACRIFICE
FOR THEIR KING AND COUNTRY
DURING THE GREAT WAR 1914-1919

INVERCARGILL SECTION

BALLANTYNE A.S.   MELROSE R.M.
BOWLES W.B.   MENZIES S.
CAVANAGH J.   MILLAR J.S.
CLARK H.J.   MORRIS E.G.M
COCKBURN E.   McLEAN F.A.
COUPERTHWAITE P.   McMAHON E.
DARRAGH J.A.   NICHOLSON A.J.
DAVIDSON J.H.   O'DONNELL D.
DICK H.J.   ROBERTS J.P.
FOTHERINGHAM W.   ROBERTSON A.M.
GRANT W.J.V.   SCULLY P.
GUNN W.G.   SELBY W.G.
HALLEY W.   SPOWART M.W.
HANSEN J.A.   STRACHAN J.P.
HAYWARD A.R.   SUTHERLAND F.N.
HISLOP W.A.   SUTHERLAND F.V.
JOHNSTON J.E.   SUTHERLAND T.
KELLY F.G.   WALLACE J.R.
LAMBETH T.A.   WILKES R.
LAUDER G.S.   WILLIAMS A.F.S.
MACKAY J.R.   WYATT A.

N.Z.RAILWAYS.

The names on this plaque were included on a more recent plaque, which formed part of a set of two metal commemorative plaques unveiled after the Second World War. These plaques are still on display at KiwiRail's offices in Invercargill. The transcript of the Second World War commemorative plaque appears below.

ROLL OF HONOUR
SOUTHLAND DISTRICT RAILWAY EMPLOYEES
WORLD WAR II 1939 - 1945

NAVY
HABERFIELD J K T

ARMY
BAILEY D A   GORDON J P   McHARDY L A
BARTER G E   HALL H J   MARTIN J K
BRENTON L G   ISITT F R   MATHESON V G
BRETT R F G   JONES R O   NEWTON G H I
CAMPBELL S J   KIDD C W   SHIELDS J K
CUNNINGHAM J A   LEONARD J W   SUTHERLAND F J
DAVIS D G   McCORKINDALE N D   THURLOW J S W
FINN J E   McELHINNEY W J D   YOUNG S E

AIR FORCE
BAIRD N K   JOHNSTONE J H
DAWSON S J   McDOUGALL J R
FINN J G   THOMAS C F

LEST WE FORGET

This memorial plaque commemorating those of the Whangarei section of New Zealand Railways who died in the First World War is displayed at the Whangarei Museum and Heritage Park.

The Canterbury Railway Society is responsible for a memorial plaque and garden dedicated to former staff members of the Addington Railway Workshop who died in the Second World War. Both the wooden plaque and the memorial garden are located at the Ferrymead Heritage Park.