When being taken to hospital was a painful, fearful experience

Press, 27 April 1984, Page 14

When being taken to hospital was a painful, fearful experience

The Rewanui railway incline on the West Coast may be closed later this year when the Liverpool State mine which it serves ceases production. The only access to the Liverpool mine is by rail, and in its early days people also lived on the hillside. This provided problems in times of accident or emergency, according to a long-term resident of Runanga, Mr John McPhee, who was one of a party of men which had to push an ambulance carriage — with seized bearings — more than 12km to get a female patient to hospital in pouring rain. Mr McPhee recalls that the first Liverpool mine was started in the Siberia seam, about 5.6 km from the Rewanui railway station in 1911. The only way to reach the mine was to travel up the railway incline about 4.Bkm from the Dunollie station, then up a rough, corduroy track. “Men were prospecting for the coal by putting drives into the hill, and any coal that was found was stacked in a gully,” he recalls. “While all this was being done, a rope road was being built to take the coal down the bins near the Rewanui station. Once the rope road was finished the coal was picked up (from the gully) and loaded into the bins.” The Mines Department had built about 30 houses and 80 single room huts for miners. Most of them had their homes in Runanga. They

would catch an early train to Rewanui on Monday mornings, carry enough food with them for a week, and live in the huts. Coal trains did not start to run down the Rewanui incline until late 1912 or early 1913. “Mining in those days was very hard, dangerous work,” Mr McPhee says. “Miners had to cut and hole their working faces two metres by one before blasting the coal out with explosives. This caused a lot of accidents. “When men were injured, they were placed on stretchers, carried out of the mine and down the corduroy track to the Rewanui station. “If there did not happen to be a coal train up the hill, the stretcher was put inside the station and the patient had to wait until a train arrived. The stretcher was then placed in a van attached to the train and taken down the incline.” Mr McPhee says that the Runanga State Miners’ Union and the Runanga Medical Society combined and “fought hard to get the Mines Department to get a vehicle to carry stretcher patients down the hill.”

PAT TAYLOR of Greymouth is reminded of some of the grim conditions miners and their families worked under on the West Coast.

Early in 1916 the Railways produced the rail ambulance (see picture). It was good only for running down the incline by gravity; it still had to be hauled up the incline behind a train. Nevertheless, everything went fairly well, and numerous accident victims were carried down the hill until a patient died while waiting in the Rewanui station for a coal train to bring the ambulance van. “I can remember a couple of experiences of having a trip down on a stretcher,” says Mr McPhee. “With such a short-wheel base in the van a patient could feel every joint in the railway. For patients with broken bones the trip was very rough.” He remembers vividly the first patient to be brought down with the ambulance. “It was a very wet week-end when one of the woman residents was taken seriously ill with a chest complaint. The resident medical practitioner at Runanga, Dr Paddy Meade, after examining the woman, ordered her to be taken to hospital in Greymouth, about 12km from Rewanui. “A mine stretcher was brought from the mine ambulance with a

tired. The woman was suffering terribly. By the time we reached the hospital ambulance we had pushed the van nearly 13km, and the woman was on the stretcher for 4% hours. The men then had to walk all the way back. “After changing ambulances, the railway ganger — who was in charge of the van’s operations — had it put on a loop line and transferred to the workshops the next day — a Monday — to have its bearings freed.” Mr McPhee says that after a patient had died at the Rewanui station, the medical society and the miners’ union sent a deputation to Wellington to try to get a motorised ambulance for the incline. There were more than 700 men working in the mines at the time. “After several years, and after dozens of men had been brought down the hill, a motorised vehicle was granted. It was built in the railways workshops at Addington and was a utility motor vehicle adapted to travel on rails.” The then Minister of Mines, the late Mr Fred Hackett, gave the keys of the new ambulance in June 1960, to Mr McPhee, who was at the time president of the medical society. “Arrangements were made for the fitters in the mines workshops to check it and keep it in first-class order, and it is still doing a good job,” says Mr McPhee.

canvas cover to keep the patient as dry as possible. “Female neighbours got the woman ready and on the stretcher, and a team of men carried her down the track about 5.6 km to the Rewanui railway station. “The stretcher was put into the rail ambulance, but when the men went to push it to the brow of the incline they could hardly move it. It had solid bearings and these must have seized after being towed up the incline behind a train and left standing in a shed for a fortnight without being moved. “The team had to keep pushing it down the hill as it would not run by gravity. When they arrived at Dunollie, 4.Bkm from Rewanui, they were told that the Coal Creek flats were flooded, and an ambulance from the Grey Hospital could not get out to pick up the patient. “Arrangements were made for the ambulance to wait at the railway crossing at the foot of the Cobden hill, and we would push the rail ambulance to meet it. “It had rained hard ever since we left the woman’s home and everyone was wet through and