SOME CITY PLANT

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 79, 3 April 1926, Page 8

SOME CITY PLANT

GONE INTO EARLY RETIREMENT

CAPITAL CHARGES CARRY ON

■A STEAM SHOVEL AND SOME OTHER THINGS.

Some months ago the Mayor, while overhauling the financial position, suggested that there was probably a certain amount of disused plant which could be realised upon, to the benefit of the city's balance-sheet, and with no loss to the efficiency of the .municipal machinery. He did not then state which plant he had in mind, but there are several valuable machines, some of them comparatively new, which spend most of their time resting quietly at marked expense to those who pay for them. The steam ahovel has had a long spell from duty, and stands up to the weather in the Corporation yards, each week becoming <more and more rusty. Whether its purchase has been justified by the work it has done is a question for expert calculation and opinion. It removed a few hundred yards of fairly soft material in the preparation of the foundations for the Corporation garage at Te Aro reclamation, dug away the Hutt road slip, and did the greater part of the Wallace street cut excavation but beyond that its chief work has been to wait for something else to turn up. It is a luinbersome. thing to move about in the best of circumstances, for it has no steering gear in the accepted sense of the term, and requires one man to drive and two more to clutch and unclutch, from the roadway, the caterpillars on which it crawls forward; furthermore, its top hamper will only just pass underneath tramway overhead gear if two or three more men hoist the overhead wires up a foot or two with long poles. '.■' ''< It is possible that it may.be used in connection with the improving of the Ngahauranga Gorge road, and there, certainly, is any amount of digging for two or three steam navvies. AND A TRENCHER. A first cousin to the steam shovel is the trencher purchased for the'; Waterworks Department for the laying of the Orongorongo-Karori pipe line, and after trials on the Hutt. road about a" year ago and a trifle of practical work at Petone recently has -been left for weeks gracing the countryside near the Petone racecourse. It, too, has become exceedingly rusty, and its canvas cover is torn and ragged. ' This, trencher is of the drag type, somewhat .similar to a■■ straight-out navvy, [except that jt pulls to make the cut instead of pushing its' bucket into the spoil, and is quite,, a different machine from the rotary wheeßype trencher which cut out the greater length of trenches ,at Karori, and is now working at/the Thprn'don end of the Hutt road. It was considered thatthis whe_el-trencher would be inadequate for the heavy work along the Hutt road, and therefore the second dragtypc machine was purchased, at a price not so great, possibly, as the price of the steam shovel, but still considerable. ODDS AND ENDS. Another machine which has not been seen on the streets for quite a few weeks is "the green linnet," the runabout motor refuse collector, from which big things were expected. It has been safely in dock in the Corporation yards for quite a long time., The trackless tram has also not been working lately, and is presumably, also in dock, its place being taken by one of the early Corporation motor-buses, which runs over the same ground as full fleets of buses plying to Petone, Lower Hutt, Ngaio, and Khandallah. No statement has been made as to the financial soundness of this already very well bussed- run for many months. Another interesting machine which is gone into early retirement —quite unearned by the small amount of work it did—is \a tramway street sprinkler. The theory of this machine is that it runs along tramway routes with a big supply of water, and washes the street surface down from side to side, as has been done by tramway sprinklers and flushers for years past an other centres The practice is that the machine rests out in the weather, month after month, on a side track of the Newtown ?It is said that if one keeps an article for seven years, a new_uso will assuredly be found for it.