OUR ALPINE CONQUEST

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 27, 1 August 1923, Page 9

OUR ALPINE CONQUEST

EMPIRE'S LONGEST TUNNEL

The Otira Tunnel, which will be officially opened on Saturday next, is the longest in the British Empire.

The Otira Tunnel is seventh on the list of the world's longest tunnels. The longest is the Simplon, Swiss Alps, 12.26 miles. The Eastern end of the Otira Tunnel is 100 feet higher than the Simplon Tunnel.

The longest tunnel in Great Britain is the Severn, which measures four miles 636 yards.

The cost of the Otira work is estimated at about £1,650,000 (tunnel £1,300,000 and electrification £350,000).

The completion of the 6j miles electrified railway tunnel through the Southern Alps, uniting by rail the East and West Coasts of the South Island, is an event of historical as well as commercial importance. RAILWAY-CONQUEST OF THE BACKBONE. In the South Island of New Zealand the backbone range lies close to the West Coast, just as the Rocky Mountains keep near to the west coast of North America. In the North Island the backbone —it is really the same range, though sundered by Oook Straits —is more in the middle of the island. This 5£ miles tunnel near .Otira represents man's first real railway-conquest of the backbone. It is true that a railway has long been uniting east and west, in the North Island, through a gap in the wall near Palmerston North, but that gap was.mad 6in a most masterful manner by Nature, who causes an eastern river (the Manawatu) to break through the mountains and find an outlet on the west coast. Man found tho wonderful Manawatu Gorge already cut for him, so he pushed a railway through this Providentially-provided low-level passage-way. In the South Island, where the Alps rise to heights of perpetual, snow, Nature made no such concession. So man started in 1908 to blast a tunnel, and in 1923 he is celebrating the completion of the work, including the electrical train service. GiRADE—LENGTH—ELECTRIFICATION. The fact that the Alps hug the West Coast of the South Island connotes a sharp fall on the west side and a longer and gentler fall on the eastern side. Therefore, it has been possible to grade the railway up, on the eastern side, to an altitude of 2435 feet. Then the tunnel enters the mountains, dipping in the ratio of 1 in 33, so as to emerge on the western side at an altitude of 1585 feet. The heavy braking required on a 1 in 33 grade, and the impossibility of using coal-fired locomotives in a Bj-mile tunnel, made electrification imperative. ' Thus New Zealand's first section of electrified railway comes into being. LURES TO THE BACK OF BEYOND. The steep West Coast is a country of gold, timber, coal, and rain. The eastern plateaux are drier, mostly treeless, grassy, and pastoral. With the Maori a's with the pakeha, settlement was primarily in the east. To the easterners the dark western forests were the Back of Beyond. But, as always, there was a lure. The Maori found it in the sacred greenstones, pounamu and tangiwai. Lumps of this stone, of varying qualities, were found in West Coast river-bedsl "To secure'the'precious greenstone the Maori braved mountain and avalanche. When the pakeha set out on a land-buying mission to the West Coast, the Maori was loth to sell the greenstone lands, but was tempted with gold. But the gold paid to the Maori bears no ratio to the gold afterwards found by the.white man. The gold; rushes stimulated overland traffic, and in their turn came robbers and murderers to prey upon successful miners. The Burgess-Sullivan-Kelly-Levy gang murdered a surveyor, George Dobson, in the Grey Valley, killing him in. mistake for a gold-buyer whom they were tracking. They murdered several other wayfarers at Maungatapu (Sacred Mountain). They were caught, and all were hanged save Sullivan, who won freedom by turning Queen's evidence. RIVER BARS AND THE OVERLAND QUEST. The gold boom subsided, and coal came to the fore. Commerce, irritated by West Coast bar harbours, began to look more and more for a trans-Alpine transport system. The name of Arthur Dudley Dobson, brother of the surveyor who was murdered in the Grey Valley, had been given to Arthur's Pass, of which he was the discoverer. Arthur's Pass, crosses the saddle lying between the head waters of the eastern river Bealey (tributary of the Waimakariri) and the western river Otira (tributary of the Teremakau). The idea gained favour of driving a railway tunnel under Arthur's Pass, thus connecting the Bealey and the Otira by a practical grade. A rival route was the Lewis Pass, which connects the Amuri plains with the Buller Valley via Cannibal Gorge. But the Arthur's Pass (or Bealey-Otira) project gained preference, and the Otira Tunnel is the result. ;i From those days when the Maori landowner and the pakeha landbuyer haggled about greenstone, while walking unknowingly upon gold the West Coast has had an eventful career. It has trodden on peaks of prosperity and in pits of depression. It has dealt in yellow metal, in coal;in timber, latterly in pastoral pursuits. But always it has com-! plained of its isolation. And now that isolation is ended, so far as it can be ended, by a direct railway operated through the largest tunnel in the British Empire. , . NEW ZEALAND'S ONLY COAST. "At its worst the isolation of the West Coast was physical rather than moral The moral ascendency of the West Coast was attested by the fact that in common parlance it is /'the Coast," as if New Zealand possessed no other coast. In spite of the-absence of a railway, the West! Coast during two generations has exported to the rest of New Zealand! many of 3 ts restless sons, who have formed colonies in eastern cities to keep alive " the Coast traditions." Not merely the South Island, but New Zealand as a whole, may look upon this great electrified tunnel—this "ironing out" of the backbone range—as a moral achievement. True, it has taken a long time some fifteen years over all, but have not the. difficulties been severe? ■■ By one of those concerned in the great adventure the remark has been made • We have been carrying out, in a country of only a million population a work not previously undertaken except where the resources and manpower of a continent were available." Also, the war caused delay. LAMENTATION ON THE LONESOME TRAIL. For the old Maori seekers after pounamu and tangiwai, the trail over the mountains. was a long one. Perhaps now they will pause on a still longer trail, and look back to see electric trains passing throutrh smokeless tunnels, hundreds of feet below the top of the lonesome pass Down the dark Otira (Maori meaning: "In the Shadow") will charge a monstrous modern machine ablaze, with electric light. And if the wraith of the primeval Maori resents this intrusion into his sacred snows, who will blame him? There is at least one who will not be lured away from the pass even by an electrified tunnel. That is the Alpine botanist For him the mountains around Arthur's Pass are a happy hunting ground From 2000 feet upward is found, in profusion of purest white, the mountain lily (ranunculus Lyalh) peculiar to Southern New Zealand. Of all known buttercups it is the finest and largest. Besides their Alpine attractions, the mountains around Arthur's Pass may yet develop a sporting value, for near here have been seen tracks of deer, which apparently can only be the chamois that long before the war, were presented to. New Zealand by the late Emperor of Austria. ECONOMIC TEST-COAL TRANSPORT. A more material consideration is: Will the railway, in competition with sea-carriage, secure a fair share of the transport of the West Coast's exports and imports? Will the great coal cargoes of the Grey Valley prefer the climb over the Southern Alps to the uncertainties of the Greymouth bar? These long-discussed questions will now be put to the test. Let us hope that an engineering achievement of the highest quality will be, in the economic sphere, not. less successful Whatever the immediate traffic result over the railway may be it is clear that this is only the beginning of the application of electrical power to New Zealand railway, traction..

NEW ZEALAND'S, FIRST ELECTRIC TRAIN