Literary Views And Reviews CANTERBURY’S EARLY RAILWAYS

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30610, 28 November 1964, Page 4

Literary Views And Reviews CANTERBURY’S EARLY RAILWAYS

(Reviewed by R.A.M.G) Canterbury Provincial Railways. By William A. Pierre. New Zealand Railw-ay and Locomotive Society. 190+Xpp.

Many railway books are little better than a pretext for a collection of photographs of obsolete rolling stock and branch line;, now weedgrown, in their remote heyday. This book is just the opposite; it is a work of detailed scholarship and a model of what a railway history should be. The period covered by Mr Pierre is 1850 to 1878, with emphasis on the broad gauge lines radiating from Christchurch, and their brief existence before Vogel’s colonial policy and adoption of the narrow gauge remodelled them into the beginning of a national system. Each part of the provincial system, the Ferrymead, Lyttelton, Rakaia and Rangiora lines and their associated tramways running inland to coal or agriculture, is treated in lucid detail, with maps which show proposed routes as well as the lines built.

Because of the policy of the Provincial Government, and particularly of Moorhouse as Superintendent, (opposed by the infant “Press”—“a weekly political pamphlet of doubtful stability and extreme conservatism”) the railways reflected in almost all details of finance, planning and construction the way in which the province was opened up, and the seesaw fluctuations in the readiness with which building and settlement could be financed.

In retrospect we can say there were mistakes in the design and construction of the provincial lines, and these mistakes arose almost entirely from trying to transplant contemporary British railway practice into a new and empty country. Wakefield’s colonisation principles had ensured that there were some compe-

tent engineers among the early settlers, notably W. B. Bray who called in Stevenson’s nephew as a consultant, so there was no thought of consulting the narrow gauge builders in America and it took eight years of planning and building before the broad gauge protagonists headed by r.alleston were beaten.

It may be thought the founding fathers were planning with foresight in building to sft 3in gauge on chaired track, but in fact their motive was cheapness of mainten ance, for their rolling stock was smaller in capacity than our present 3ft 6in gauge vehicles, and their assertions about the limited power of narrow gauge locomotives was a piece of technically incompetent special pleading, even for those days. Ironically, one still meets excuses for operating inefficiency today which use the track or leading gauge as an explanation. The 1860’s were an era of public works, and in a general crash-programme all inessential details and some essential ones were left out. The Lyttelton tunnel was opened for traffic four years before it was finished, the main south line stopped at Selwyn for lack of funds. Labour shortages meant that men were not available for railway construction at harvest time, and equipment shortages meant, for example, that the engines on the Ferrymead line drew their water from the Heathcote at Opawa. Even though there was a depression in the mid1860’s, traffic was such that the limited railway facilities were constantly having to be patched and expanded, and the first rough buildings and bridges replaced as they fell apart. The staff too were hardworked. E. G. Wright took on more construction men than were needed, then sacked the lazy and retained the indus-

trious with a bonus of beer. The operating staff had their first strike in 1872 when their wages were reduced; these were about ten shillings a day, which was good for that period, and the fares on the new lines were well over six times the present day cost in terms of the ratio of fare per mile to average wage per hour. Mr Gordon Troup, in an unnecessarily florid preface, writes that “Geography was hostile and men were few,” but this is misleading, for as Mr Pierre observes, railway building on the plain is easy apart from bridging rivers, and political and social problems were more solid obstacles. The wrangle over who should have a tramway, Oxford or Eyreton, and the way the Rangiora men held a meeting in the West Eyreton school and passed spurious resolutions which they then sent to “The Press” is a humorous case in point; more serious is the tale of how the Rangiora politicians lobbied until they got a line (the present one) “£15,000 more costly than the engineers’ line, one mi|e longer, rising 50 feet higher, across a bridge 3000 feet

longer and requiring additional locomotive power equal to that needed to take a train two and a half miles over level ground.” The problem of location is fascinatingly treated by Mr Peirre: the reader may discover why we have not got a station where Captain Scott stands by the Avon, and why the West Coast line has a dog-leg through Darfield. In all, one is left with a sense of admiration at the way lines were pushed through at a hundred yards a day, and mistakes corrected so that by 1878 an American built narrow gauge K class locomotive could work the Dunedin - Christchurch express. This book is so rich in detail that it will be a reference book for some time to come; it is gratifying to see local archives and University research theses being drawn on in an ordered manner that can only be achieved by an author who, like Mr Pierre, sees his topic in complete perspective. We can only hope that a companion study of the other South Island lines will appear, and that the publishers will be able to put the work on better quality paper.