Second historic train recovered
For Southland train enthusiast John Titter, working to get not only one but two rare locomotives pulled from the Oreti River is nearly as exciting as his wedding and buying his farm. The chairman of the Lumsden Heritage Trust has worked for six years to recover two 1885 locomotives which had been sitting in the river bed for the past 92 years. The trust retrieved the first one last month, and this week managed to get the second train out. The team was unsure if it would recover the V-126 train because it was in a more challenging location. However, the trust decided to give it a go. Due to the difficulty of the operation, Titter kept quiet about the second retrieval in case it didn’t work. At one point they had the locomotive by the bank and a log was placed underneath it so it could be lifted, he said. The locomotive balanced on the logs like a see-saw and they knew then that the crane could handle the weight of it and get it to the bank, he said. As the crane lifted the locomotive, the whole crew went completely silent, realising what they had achieved. The second locomotive is now in Lumsden beside the first, which has already become a tourist attraction. Last week, a tourist was visiting Queenstown when he got a call from his brother telling him that he had to go and see the train pulled from the river, Titter said. The tourist told Titter that that were a lot of old locomotives in England but they had been retrieved years ago. To see something that had recently been found was unique, the tourist said. The trust will now work on preserving the locomotives and build a small interactive train heritage kiosk to explain their history. The initial plan is to keep both trains in Lumsden, but now that there are two of them, it’s possible that if someone wanted to restore one, that might be a future option. The trust cannot afford to restore them.