FIFTY YEARS AGO TO-DAY

Taranaki Daily News, 1 August 1931, Page 9

FIFTY YEARS AGO TO-DAY

THE FIRST TRAIN TO HAWERA

WAITARA WOMAN’S MEMORIES.

SALE OF SOUTH TARANAKI LANDS

To-day marks the jubilee of the opening of passenger traffic on the railway between New Plymouth and Hawera. Previous to August 1,-1881, the terminus of the line was Normanby, but though the line beyond there was not ballasted, the contractors had so far advanced the construction that A special train was run on Monday, August 1, 1881, to a special sale of Opunakc and Manaia town and rural sections held at Hawera. The train left New Plymouth at 7 o’clock, arriving at Hawera about 11.30 a.m., and reached New Plymouth on its return

.■1 jy about 8 p.m. A woman now resident at Waitara who was a girl of 11 years of age was one of the 300 who made the trip, still has vivid recollections' of the journey. The train was drawn -,-by- two small engines and the carriages were of the same type as one seen daily now in the Waitara train; possibly they are some of the identical ones. The Waitara resident describes the j'oufney as somewhat rough, the train rocking considerably, whilst the country passed through was mostly biish, much of it in the process of being converted into farms.

The incident is indelibly. impressed on the Waitara woman’s mind because it was the culminating episode in what must have been a very adventurous voyage for a girl of that age in those days. With her mother, the late Mrs. W. King, and her five sisters and brothers, the young girl had sailed from Dunedin on the s.s. Wanaka the previous Monday and had arrived at the New Plymouth roadstead on the Saturday en route to join the husband and father, who had left to settle at Normanby a few months previously. They landed in surf boats somewhere near the site of the present railway station and spent the Saturday evening and Sunday in a boarding-house in Brougham Street kept by a, Frenchman named Rut st. The building, which is alongside Smart Bros., just above Powderham Street corner, stands to-day practically as it was then. Normanby at that time was a thriving, prosperous place, the town containing three hotels, several stores, two bakeries, tobacconist and billiard room, as well as a branch of the Bank of New Zealand. Subsequently the building that housed the bank was removed to Stratford, whither the 'Waitara woman herself removed in. 1886, "just prior to the big fire that took place in Stratford.