Tribute To The Shunters

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30576, 20 October 1964, Page 12

Tribute To The Shunters

[Specially written for "The Press" by DOROTHY THOMPSON]

Few of us have not been wakened on the still, small hours of a frosty night, by the forlorn whistling of a panting engine, the clank of couplings, and the seemingly neverending rolling of trucks along rails. And, thankfully, we have pulled the warm bedclothes over our ears, dismissing the whole thing with the explanation that we have heard a ghost train.

Ghost train nothing! It probably was the 1.10 a.m. goods for Ashbunton, as real as can be, leaving Middleton or the 2.45 a.m. to Springfield with lime, seed, fertilizers, tractors, ploughs and anything else you can name for the farms; or the 3.30 a.m. to Timaru docks with anything up to 100 trucks of freight. Day and night, winter and summer, shunters go about their hazardous tasks to make up these trains.

More than 30 goods trains a day leave Christchurch. Eleven go north; 14 go souith; and about 10 go to Lyttelton. Work in the shunting yards goes on 24 hours a day. Floodlights on 100 ft pylons light the marshalling yards as brightly as a world fair. In addition to the marshalling yards at the station at Moorhouse avenue, supplemented by 27 roads at the Waltham yards, Middleton is an even larger and greater hub of activity, with more roads to its marshalling yards than the two former put together. The shunter’s life is dedicated. It is no exaggeration to say he must live for the job. Despite fog, snow, hail or hurricane the work must go on, whether his house is on fire, or Rome itself burns.

The shunter can afford no self-indulgences where life, limb—not to mention, commitments depend on a clear eye and a steady hand. Clearly he cannot be off-guard for a moment, where danger lurks constantly in the shadows and dark places should he take one mis-step. Social life is restricted, indeed he rarely knows the bliss of a full night’s sleep; should he enjoy an occasional night off, he invaribly goes straight to bed. Even then there is no assurance of being

left undisturbed. For he is always on call. “But one gets used to it; accepts it,” said the traffic foreman, Mr Fred Carr. He has served nearly 40 years in the yards in every capacity, with he says an average of two to three hours* sleep a night. “On hot, nor’west, summer days too” he continued, “one sleeps for two or three hours; then gets up and digs the garden.” But night shunting has its compensations “shunting accidents occur in the daytime, never at night,” at night there are no distractions.

Mr Walter Finlayson, the yard worker at Christchurch, will retire tomorrow. He joined the railways when he was 15. For 22 years he was a junior porter, porter and a shunter, a guard, a guardforeman them to his present post.

The experience he most vividly recalls occurred on the main trunk when he was the guard on the AucklandWellington express. The train was waiting in a cutting near Taihape. Suddenly, he was called out of the van by a member of Parliament and told a slip in the cutting was pressing against the train. He stepped outside and found hundreds of tons of clay

against the van and several cars full of sleeping passengers. He flagged the engine and the train broke through the slip without damage.