The miniature-gauge railway dream

The heritage park’s miniature-gauge railway is the fulfilment of a dream.

“It was always part of our plan since 1981 so it’s been nearly four decades in the making,” says Jim Staton, the project leader who also works for DOC, which has given the park a grant to plant natives and enhance the endangered mudfish’s environment in the wetland area.

The railway complex will include a ticket office and station platform, as well as a concrete bay alongside so that visiting railway enthusiasts can load their own locomotives onto the track. The track comprises three rails so it can be used for both 7¼-inch- and 5½-inch-gauge trains and was designed so that all the curves are 22m radius.

Mort set up a railway workshop to build the tracks, devising hinged jigs for welding both the curved and straight rail sections. “I had to think 10 steps ahead as you have to make allowances for the left- and right-hand curves and can’t turn them end to end or the third rail doesn’t line up,” he says.

The lengths of steel are cut with a donated reconditioned bandsaw and welded with Mort’s “brand new” 1973 welding machine, which hangs on a mobile curtain frame that came out of a picture theatre. “They used to hang the scenery on it for live shows,” Mort tells us. The small crane used for loading the tracks onto the jig, turning them, and transferring the finished ones to a waiting trailer was used in a local hardware shop to move merchandise between the floors. Mort also set up a jig for drilling the total of 6000 holes, three per stay. The track, which is fixed to treated pine sleepers, will have 200 links in its 1km circuit. It takes about 45 minutes to make one length of track from start to finish on the production line.

There will be a main engine and service engine with three wagons, each able to carry four adults, and the driver sitting in the tender. They opted for petrol-driven locomotives so the volunteer operators don’t have to have steam tickets.

The engines are being rebuilt from second-hand machines, with major modifications necessary to get them up to New Zealand model-engineering specifications for carrying passengers. The previously nylon bearing blocks for the bogies have been remade using steel