Railway Empire

by Anthony Burton

  A double-ended Fairlie locomotive built by the Vulcan Foundry in 1872, It became Locomotive No.2 on the Dunedin & Port Chalmers Railway, New Zealand

  The Garratt proved an immense success, not only in Tasmania but on narrow-gauge railways throughout the world. A series of tests in South Africa in 1921 showed it to pull heavier loads at higher speeds than its rivals, including the majestic compound Mallet. The tester noted tersely, ‘The Mallet is 46 tons heavier than the Garratt and pulls less’. Weight was very important on the light track often used in poorer countries, and, being articulated, the Garratt could spread the load over a large number of axles. The Kenya and Uganda was supplied with immense 4-8-4 + 4-8-4 engines, giving a total of 16 axles to bear the weight. Garratts could also be built for speed. Tasmania was once again the testing ground in 1912 for the early high-speed Garratts, this time for use on the 3 ft. 6 in. line. A 4-4-2 + 2-4-4 engine, with four cylinders on each bogie, achieved a speed of 55 m.p.h. which is good going on a narrow gauge track.

  If Tasmania presented problems, then a contour map of New Zealand looks like the design for a railway engineer’s nightmare. It is every bit as bad as it looks, so bad, in fact, that although at its narrowest South Island is scarcely a hundred miles across there was no rail connection between the east and west coasts until 1925, and that was only made possible by boring the 5½-mile Otira tunnel. It was not only the difficult, mountainous country that made for slow railway development – the development of settlements was equally tardy. Although James Cook had arrived in 1769, by 1835 there were still only 2000 Europeans in the entire country. Official colonization acts set up Wellington and Nelson in 1840, Otago in 1848 and Canterbury in 1850. The infant settlements, however, did show an early enthusiasm for railways.

  Construction started in South Island. In the 1850s, work began on a road to link the port of Lyttelton to the interior, and construction had hardly got under way before critics were saying that it would have been more sensible to build a railway. These first railway rumblings were heard just four years after the colony had been officially founded. Not to be outdone, the citizens of Wellington on North Island began agitating for a line to link them to the interior. But it needed more than the clamour of a handful of possible passengers to justify the expense. Freight was to supply the demand. In 1852, the settlers at Nelson in the north-west corner of South Island began exploring Dun Mountain and found promising deposits of copper ore. In 1854, W.L. Wrey came to London to raise capital for a mining venture. When he returned to New Zealand with the cash, he soon found himself being given the job of raising more money, this time for a railway from mine to port.

  The parent company, the Dun Mountain Copper Mining Company, was incorporated in London and this time it seemed a good idea for someone to go out from England to visit the works. The man given the task was Thomas Hackett who found that the miners were looking for the wrong mineral: the copper deposits were disappointing but there were good supplies of chrome. Chromium compounds were widely used in printing coloured patterns for the textile industry. The copper mine became a chrome mine and the company approved the railway which was given official blessing by the Nebou Provincial Council in 1858. Rails, iron sleepers and wagons were sent over from England, to be followed in 1860 by W.T. Doyne, already mentioned for his work in Australia, and G.C. Fitzgibbon who had worked in Canada and Ceylon. The start of work was held up by the central government whose sluggish deliberations meant that final approval was not given until 1861. Officially, this was a railway designed for use by steam locomotives; in actuality, it was an old-fashioned tramway. The easiest gradient was 1 in 76 and for nine miles it was a precipitous 1 in 20. The 3-foot double track was initially worked as a system down which loaded trucks descended under gravity and empties were hauled back up by horses. Whether in time it might have been made over to steam, as similar lines – such as the Festiniog – had been in Britain, will never be known. The little line had hardly got started when Civil War broke out in America, the supply of cotton for the mills of Lancashire dried up and the demand for chromium dyes disappeared. The mine and its railway were closed and there was still no steam locomotive in New Zealand. It had, however, shown that railways could be built in the country and when the Wellington Council began investigating the possibilities of promoting a line, they specified one ‘similar to the Dun Mountain Railway’, though they did increase the gauge to 3 ft. 6 in. and envisaged locomotives being used from the very beginning. They made a declaration that epitomized the reasoning behind railway building in South America, Canada, Africa, in fact everywhere that aspired to extend settlement out into the wild countryside: ‘Let the country but make the railroads, and the railroads will make the country.’

  The next development came at Christchurch. The port was at Lyttelton Harbour separated from the town by the Lyttelton Port Hills. The road had been built in 1852 and the provincial government had been pushed into making a promise that, at the very least, they would give serious consideration to a railway as soon as funds permitted. Local businessmen led by William Moor-house – who earned himself the nickname ‘Railway Billy’ – began arguing ever more urgently for a railway to speed up development of the settlement. In 1858, the transport commissioners bowed to the pressure and wrote to Robert Stephenson to ask if he would take on the job. By then Stephenson’s ill health had caused him to give up virtually all railway work – he was to die in 1859 – but he recommended his nephew, George Robert Stephenson, for the job. Stephenson went out to New Zealand to survey the difficult route which included a tunnel through hard rock. It was to be built to the Australian broad gauge of 5 ft. 3 ins. At this stage no one seemed to be thinking very seriously about standardization – so far three railways had proposed three gauges, 3 ft., 3 ft. 6in. and 5 ft. 3 in. Looking at this mountainous country as a whole, no one could surely expect to cover it with the wider gauge lines, but then, who would have expected a Stephenson of all people to appear as a champion of the broad gauge! The contract was given to Smith and Knight of Westminster, but when they arrived and took test borings along the line of the tunnel, they immediately asked for the price to be increased from £235,000 to £265,000. Stephenson refused, and the contract went instead to Holme and Co. of Melbourne. When one considers that railway building in Australia was very much in its infancy, this was a bold decision. The experienced British contractor had said that no profit could be made at the old price given the nature of the rock through which the tunnel had to be driven. Events were to suggest it was a wise decision.

  Progress on the tunnel was desperately slow: 50 yards a month at the very best, a paltry 10 yards at the worst. They were destined to slave away in the hills for years. No one was prepared to wait for ever, so a temporary line was opened from a riverside wharf at Ferrymead. It helped in providing a supply route to the tunnel and enabled the New Zealand railway system to open its first steam service. On 6 May 1863 the first locomotive was delivered from Slaughter, Gruning & Co. of Bristol. It was a simple 2-4-0 tank engine, the very model of good British design from its shining brass dome to its 6-foot-diameter drive wheels, but differentiated from its English cousins by the broad spark-arrester chimney, an essential feature of all wood-burning locomotives. Still, however, the men slaved away in the tunnel which was not opened until 1867.

  The Fell engine climbing the Rimutaka incline in New Zealand, 1878: the central rail that was gripped by horizontal wheels can be clearly seen.

  Meanwhile, the line was being extended north and south along the coast from Canterbury, crossing two broad rivers in the process, the Raikaie and the Rangitate, and acquiring a new and suitably grand name, the Canterbury Great Southern Railway. By 1870, the route to the north was open as far as the Selwyn River, and a certain amount of work had been done to the south of Canterbury. But this early experiment in broad gauge construction was to be short-lived: the pioneering line from Ferrymead, the first to open, was also the first to close. It was a muddled time, when no one knew quite what to do.
There was no lack of enthusiasm in New Zealand, but there was a great lack of experience. The young country was open to new ideas, but was not always able to distinguish between the innovative and the eccentric. In 1863, an American engineer, J.R. Davies, demonstrated a cost-saving railway using native timber instead of imported iron. The locomotive literally blazed down the tracks, the sparks from the engine leaving a trail of burning rails behind it. All very entertaining, but not very helpful in building up a sound railway system, and it was not until the 1870s that a really solid basis for expansion was established. What was needed were not wild, innovative ideas but a realizable vision of the future. That needed a man who could combine imagination and practicality. New Zealand found such a man in Julius Vogel.

  The underside of a Fell engine, showing the gripping system on the central rail

  Vogel had left London to join the great gold rush to Victoria and had then moved on to New Zealand where he became involved in politics, and ended up as government treasurer. What he proposed was a rail-building system far more ambitious than anything tried in any other developing country. The government should pump money into construction, and as soon as lines were open use the revenue to pay for still more building. His plan was to borrow £10 million over a period of ten years, using the public land along the new transport routes as security. There was to be nothing fancy about the programme. It could all be summed up in one simple phrase: get as far as possible as cheaply as possible. This was the old cry again. Expand the railway, open up the country and you encourage immigration: ‘… the railroads will make the country’. Given the usual reaction of politicians and authority to innovative ideas, the surprise is that he was not only listened to, but his advice was largely followed. A public works department was established, a general Railways Act was passed, authorizing the new department to raise money and, somewhat belatedly, a Gauge Bill was introduced that would settle the gauge for future railways in the country. Almost equally surprising was the fact that the local politicians freely admitted their ignorance of railway affairs and turned to the English engineers, Charles Fox and Son for practical advice. They recommended the Australian narrow gauge of 3 ft. 6 in. which they already had experience of building. The advice was accepted, even though it meant tearing up the existing track and relaying it. At least New Zealand now had a national standard, putting the country one up on its larger neighbour.

  Vogel began by promoting lines based on Dunedin on the east coast of South Island, starting with a short route up to Port Chalmers. If New Zealand’s first mineral railway had echoes of the Festiniog in North Wales, then the new line also had its similarities with that innovative route. Long before Garratt had found his solution to providing enough power to haul heavy loads on narrow-gauge tracks, Robert Fairlie had come up with his solution among the mountains of Wales. It is as well to remember that the decision to adopt the narrow gauge at all was a bold one, for these little railways had all been horsedrawn right up to the 1860s. Fairlie’s engines are extraordinary creations, looking like the result of a nasty accident when one conventional engine has reversed into another at speed. Starting at the front is a conventional boiler and engine unit, followed by the cab, after which comes a second boiler and power unit. There is plenty of power, and the two halves are each mounted on bogies to help with tight curves. In 1873, a double-Fairlie worked a train out of Dunedin, just four years after the prototype had run on the Festiniog.

  The 1927 Peckett of Bristol engine running on the Bay of Island Vintage Railway in New Zealand

  As in Australia, not everyone was happy with this reliance on British expertise, manpower and hardware. There were even more complaints when the next 159-mile route was let to John Brogden & Sons of London for a contract which was to include the provision of rolling stock. What rankled with the New Zealanders was the fact that locals were not given the chance to bid. There were reasons, and sound reasons at that. Although the government was guaranteeing the costs, money still had to be raised on the London markets – New Zealand was too young a country in terms of finance to provide that much cash on its own. It was also still generally believed by many that British expertise was unmatched. And finally, the contractor was expected to bring over a contingent of big, brawny navvies who would stay on as settlers, just as Brassey’s men had in Australia. The line was built. However it marked a shift away from British dominance.

  Work in the North Island was much slower to develop. The Maoris had no wish to sell, still less to give, their land to the settlers. They went to war and, apart from an uneasy truce in the early 1860s, the wars rumbled on in intermittent campaigns and skirmishes throughout the decade. The result was that some land was captured from the Maoris, and when the wars were over the law took most of the rest. Few Maoris could produce the paperwork to satisfy a European-style court. The way was open to settlement and railways. There was even a workforce available, the Engineer Volunteer Militia, looking for a peacetime role. Brogden again got the pick of the lines. By 1872 negotiation, a somewhat one-sided discussion with the Maoris, was over and land was acquired for expansion. Lines were built in a seemingly haphazard manner, but all pushing outward from centres of population. It began with a 44-mile route into the interior from Auckland, then one linking New Plymouth to the port of Waitara, only 11 miles long this time, but involving 1 in 40 gradients. After that the work shifted to Napier on the east coast and a major through-route to Wellington. At first work went well, but as the builders neared Wellington, they met ‘the seventy-mile bush’, an area of dense scrub and woodland, scoured by deep valleys. The difficulties met there, however, were as nothing compared with those encountered on the route from Wellington to Masterton.

  The need for a railway was obvious, to provide a link between the fertile plain and the coast, but unfortunately the Rimutaka Mountains stood in the way. Experiments in the 1860s with a tramway system quite failed to meet the need, so in 1871 John Rochfort was authorized to survey this empty country to find a suitable line for a railway. He found a gorge that offered a steep climb for many miles at a more or less steady gradient of 1 in 35, but from the top of the hills there seemed no option but a zigzag, a frightening affair in terms of engineering with severe gradients, tight corners and no fewer than nineteen tunnels. The chief engineer, John Blackett, was not at all keen on the zigzag. He proposed a more direct route down the hill on a 1 in 15 grade using what he called ‘special contrivances’. Stationary engines did not seem very practical in remote areas, so he turned instead to the system pioneered in Europe, the Fell Engine (see p. 74).

  The Fell system worked, but at a price: a train climbing the 2½-mile incline used as much fuel as it did on the whole of the rest of the 63-mile journey. Because the line was so steep, the engines had to be kept light, weighing in at less than 40 tons, and that had to include the extra weight for the two cylinders and associated gear that drove the ‘gripping wheels’ which held on to the central rail to give the added traction. There was also extra braking power provided by cast-iron shoes that could be used on the central rail. Even that was not enough braking power, so special Fell brake vans were imported which could also apply brakes to the central rail through a hand-wheel. The strain on couplings during the ascent was quite severe, so that a locomotive was not expected to haul more than 60 tons of passenger stock or 65 tons of freight. By the early twentieth century, trains of 260 tons were the norm, so that when they reached Cross Creek at the foot of the incline, a good deal of remarshalling had to go on. First came a locomotive, followed by a couple of coaches, then another locomotive and two or three more coaches, so that the final train would have perhaps four locomotives spread down its length and a whole string of brake vans bringing up the rear. It would then set off at a stately 6 m.p.h. up the hill. Coming down, the train could be managed by just two locomotives, but required a minimum of five brake vans. It was allowed to gallop along at a giddy 10 m.p.h. The line, opened in 1879, still stands as a striking testimonial to the efficacy of a railw
ay in opening up the country. In an age of motor cars and jet aircraft, the tiny Fell engines hurling tall plumes of smoke into the New Zealand air as they toil up the slope, might seem comical anachronisms. But a century ago, they were the lifelines of a developing, self-confident society.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Conclusion

  Within less than half a century of the opening of the world’s first public steam railway, all five continents had joined the railway age, and, without exception, Britain had been involved in launching the process. This was not due to either an innate British love of progress or pure altruism: the country prospered greatly from the endeavour. It was not simply a matter of giving employment to the engineers, contractors and navvies who travelled overseas to build the railways. Even more important economically were the orders that flooded in for equipment. Rails, signalling equipment, iron for bridges, material of all sorts was sent wherever construction was in progress – and, of course, rolling stock and locomotives. This book has been primarily about civil engineering, but it would be wrong to end without at least a glance at the steam locomotives that were shipped out from Britain to so many distant lands. When I visited the Rail Transport Museum in New Delhi some years ago, I was inevitably struck by the great preponderance of British machines. Out of twenty-two steam locomotives on display, no fewer than sixteen had been made by British manufacturers. And what an array of names was represented: Kitson, Thompson and Hewitson, DUBS of Glasgow, Sharp Stewart, North British, Vulcan, Robert Stephenson, Beyer Peacock, Sentinel, Nasmyth Wilson, Bagnall and Fowler – a dozen different makers. There were just three steam locos built in India itself. Outside the museum walls, the tracks out of Old Delhi Station still throb under the passage of steam giants, virtually all made in India. This of course was another aspect of Britain’s involvement in world railways: more than merely exporting men and hardware, skills, expertise and knowledge were inevitably passed on.