The Petone Workshops.

Progress, Volume IV, Issue 6, 1 April 1909, Page 195

The Petone Workshops.

In the Dominion there are many Railway workshops. Of these four are in the North Island and three in the South. Of the Northern shops Petone is the most important. It is second, however, to Addington which possesses the best machinery and does the most difficult work. Petone is, for all that, well worth seeing. The first glance on arrival shows it to be a great hive of industry, and subsequent glances especially if you go in company with the watchful manager, Mr. Allan, or the chief of the Locomotive Department, Mr.. Pearson, show you that the industry is largely of the mechanical order. Man, that is to say, watches and controls while machines work. The place is a forest of machinery. Its extent astonishes the visitor because the extent of the buildings is not revealed until you have entered in, taking with you the impression that the grimy structures of iron are but few and insignificant. That impression you soon cast off. Foundry, moulding shop, blacksmith's shop, pattern shop, carpenter's shop, carriage shop, erecting shop — it seems incredible these should be all here, each roomy, each well ordered, well stocked with machinery, well manned, and turning out work full bore. The surprise is not so great as it used to be before the new station was built as part of the duplication scheme. The old station masked the shops huddled together on the station ground. The new station has fallen back nearer the sea and the buildings are in better evidence. In the yard close to the rails we note a locomotive tender in course of construction, in the bare metal stage : a tender large and of strange construction. For one of the X engines we are informed, here building for the Northern Trunk line. Two thousand two hundred gallons of water, four tons of coal — that decides the point of attack. A big X engine is in that building nearest to us, which is the Erecting Shop. We want to see it and we enter the Erecting Shop.