MUCH STILL TO BE DONE

Stratford Evening Post, Volume II, Issue 88, 7 November 1932, Page 3

MUCH STILL TO BE DONE

LIME WILL NOT BE HANDED OVER FOR SOME TIME

PROBABLY AT END OF FINANCIAL YEAR Although the last spike is to be driven at Heao, the Public Works Department will still have charge of the line until the end of the year, at least, as there is a lot of clearing up work to be done, and it will be many months before the line is sufficiently consolidated to permit heavy trains to run. Heao was chocen arbitrarily for the ceremony of the silver spike; the two ends actually joined in one of the tunnels a little distance south, but Heao is the more convenient centre. Quaint Roiling Stock At the present moment the only portion of the line on which the Railway Department is running a service is that between Stratford and Tahora, a stretch oi' 48 miles, just about half the total length of the whole line. The Public Works Department, runs a service from Okahukiira to Heao.

v ilh the small engine and some of the qaintly primitive rolling stock. Between Heao and Tahora there is an even more primitive "train" run by the Public Works Department for its own convenience, but the conveniences of travel are also extended to local inhabitants and others. These little engines are so small that the cab of one of them which possesses a driver of rather more bulk than usual looks quite crowded when he squeezes himself into it. The two carriages are even more antiquated than the engines. They are small, green painted affairs, which apparently date from the earliest days of railway travel in New Zealand, and bear the same relation to the de luxe ears of the expresses as a wheelbarrow does to an eight cylinder sedan motor car. But the local population gets a lot of fun out of the rolling stock, and on Labour Day, when the settlers round Tahora way were hurtled up to the big sports gathering at Tangarakau Flat, at very nearly seven miles an hour, the effect was almost thrilling. The engines have an infantile whistle, like the call of a swamp hen, and steam gushes out from all sorts of queer places on their diminutive bodies.