MIDLAND LINE

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28906, 28 May 1959, Page 20

MIDLAND LINE

Railway Society’s Booklet The problems of constructing the railway line between Christchurch and Greymouth and the Otira tunnel are covered in a booklet published by the Canterbury branch of the New Zealand Railway and Locomotive Society in connexion with its railway trip to Arthur’s Pass next Saturday. In the illustrated booklet, which contains six articles dealing with the Midland line, a writer recalls the days when the first train through the tunnel would literally have to break the ice, since festoons of thick icicles, some as thick as a man’s body, would be broken from the roof. “The noise thus caused in the confined space of the tunnel was frightening as the masses of ice crashed on the roof of the locomotives, he says. “Howe .'er, the concrete has sealed itself and such spectacular effects are no longer obtained.” “If there were an ‘Oscar’ award for photogenic railroading, the Midland line of New Zealand would be fighting out the final, while, in her pristine beauty, for individual looks and performance, the ‘A’ class de Glehn compound, in gorgeous technicolor of sheer' and burnished gold would have stolen the show,” writes Mr Gordon Troup in the forword. “It is a rare, if not unique occasion that brings the two together,” says Mr Troup.