Steam Traction Engines – Wayne Clark

[No introduction]

Wayne Clark: Going back, in 1963 that particular engine was sitting in a paddock somewhere between [a] little township called Rangiwahia, and Mangaweka. And six guys – sounds a bit like the six companies that built the Hoover Dam in America – but six guys had the inspiration to fire the engine up, purchase the engine and carry out a fair bit of repair work and bits and pieces on it over a period of a few months, and get the engine back into steam again, and working; and then drove the engine over a period of a few days from where it sat back to the area around Marton / Feilding, where they duly formed the Steam Traction Society. Okay? So this was the inspiration of six guys – the names probably don’t mean a lot to you, but Mike Barnes, Mike Coghlan, Ian Chamberlain, John Pudsey, Ron Boyce and Ron Alexander were the six guys that carried this out.

As time’s gone on of course, the Steam Traction Society has grown from six guys and one engine to forty guys and about … what do we have down there? ‘Bout fifteen engines and probably as many again in states of disrepair or repair, whichever way you want to look at it. What you’ve got to also consider, fifty years ago the engine was only fifty years old. A lot of engines were suffering the fate of being scrapped; they’d come to the end of their working life and suffered the fate of the scrap man. And that’s reflected by the fact that in the time when you could buy a brand-new traction engine if that’s what you wanted to do, or you were in a position to do so, around about two and a half thousand engines were sold in New Zealand. Of that number around about a hundred and ninety to two hundred remain throughout the country, and it would also be fair to say that probably around about half that number are actually running; the rest are all in various states of disrepair. So in comparison to England – today there’s about three and a half thousand engines restored and running in England – so the movement over there is very popular.

So what we decided to do … a few of us started talking a couple of years ago, and we thought that the Steam Traction Society was approaching its fifty year milestone. Subsequently that would tell us if you did the maths, that the engine was approaching becoming a centenarian, and we thought, ‘What should we do to mark this occasion?’ So anyway, it got bandied around a bit as it does, and it was decided that, why don’t we, the whole group of us – why don’t we get on the engines, drive the engines back to the same spot where the old Ransomes were sitting, and park it up there, take some photos of it, have a bit of a reminisce, and then recreate that journey back to Feilding that happened fifty years ago? Ironically, the six guys were all still alive, they were only young fellas like me back then, or even younger, but they’re all still alive so they all took part in this run as well – not on the engine, but they came up in cars and followed us through, and took lots of photos and reminisced, and oh, they had a great time, as did we.

But anyway, what we have got up here is a bit of a presentation there, which … we’ll work our way through it and tell you a bit of what happened on the run. Alan and Andrew might want to pitch in and tell a few stories or whatever, so we’ll work through that. This particular photo here, obviously it’s titled up ‘The 50th Anniversary, Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies Number 24090’ which is that engine out there, and you know, the epic journey. There’s a great raft of engines there, but there it is parked amongst there – you can obviously recognise Alan and myself. And we got every engine that we could together and took a photo outside the clubs before we started our journey.

The other thing too with undertaking a journey like this, there was a hang of a lot of preparation; it’s not just a matter of chucking a fire in an engine while we drive to Rangiwahia and back – there’s a great raft of logistics to sort out. You’ve got to find water … water’s a very important part of it obviously; you’ve got to you know, find where your water stops are. Some guys carry tankers; they tow tankers behind the engines just to help them along a wee bit. The old story was when we did the recce originally there was heaps of water, and when we went on the run there wasn’t so much, it was a different time of year. Fuel stops – I mean they burn a lot of coal, wood, whatever; we burnt coal most of the time on that journey because you could get so much more efficiency or distance out of coal.

So anyway, we departed the Steam Traction Society there with an old wooden whare that Jo and I’ve got at home there, which actually isn’t that old, its about three years old now, I suppose. That’s been a joint venture between my father, Kevin, Joanne’s father, Peter – they’re the carpenters really – and a bit of my input, bit of Jo’s input, just where it all worked. I’ll lay claim to building the chassis to go underneath it – that’s the engineering side of it; that was me. So anyway, we’ve headed out of Feilding; we’ve come up Makino Road looking for water. [Chuckles] And the next photo will show just that – we’d come up quite a steep hill, and [chuckles] there’s Andrew, or myself, down there … little bit of water in there … with the pipe from the engine lifting a bit of water up to fill the tender again so we can continue on our way.

[Showing slides of trip] Moving on from there, that was our first night’s stop. We’d been on the road for about three or four hours and we came to a little place called Cheltenham, and we stopped at the pub there. At this stage there was only two of us – young John Munro and Richard Adams, they decided to come with us and we decided we’d go one day earlier and just get a little bit ahead, just to make it a little bit easier so it took a little bit of stress off the run. Eighteen kilometres doesn’t sound like a lot, but already there’d been a bit of work to get up there as I say, looking for water and what-have-you. So we [cough] stopped there the night, and the people in the pub there were very hospitable; they were just rapt. They thought it was marvellous that we’d done that.

And then the next day we got steam up again and we moved on, and we came into Kimbolton, and that’s parked up in the main street of Kimbolton. I didn’t write the mileage down on that, but that would have been probably another fourteen or fifteen k [kilometres] from Cheltenham into Kimbolton. I don’t have a photo of it, but basically opposite where we are there’s the old Kimbolton garage there, and I’ll tell you what – it’s a museum in it’s own right. Yeah, it’s a real old traditional garage there; but I mean from the front it just looks like an old service station, but man! That guy had some stuff in there – it was quite amazing.

And there you go, that’s some of the coal we were burning, coal that needs no shovel. I mean a lot of the coal you get is small so you’ve got to shovel it, but I suppose deep down inside I cheated a wee bit there – we had a great pile of coal at Feilding there [that] we’d been donated. That’s good coal from the West Coast; got a real high calorific value. It burns intensely hot and it’s good stuff, it’s like rocket fuel really. [Chuckles] So I must admit, yeah, when we got some coal supplies sorted out and I went through the pile we got some big lumps like this, ‘cause they are awesome. I mean a lump of coal like that you might as well say, is the equivalent to about a massive-heaped wheelbarrow load of wood – that’s the energy equivalent of something like that.

Yeah, we’re sort of on the road there – that’s typical of the roads that we started to travel on. A fair bit of smoke going on there too … obviously I’ve got my head down, bum up there, getting a bit more coal into the engine, or doing whatever, and Alan’s faithfully steering the engine for us. You know when you run … it’s easier to run with two people; you have the engine driver and your steersman. Ironically – I don’t know if its real true or not, but there is a bit of folklore from the old engine drivers’ code that if Alan crashes into something – because at that point I’m driving the engine; I’m the engine driver, Alan’s steering for me. If we crash into something it’s actually my fault, not Alan’s fault, my fault – I’m the engine driver. [Chuckles] Somehow, I think you know, there’d be blame on both parties, but that’s the way it is.

Just beautiful countryside, eh? Just with the engine and the galley, and … really not a care in the world if everything’s going all right, [chuckle] it’s cool. I’ve stood up there; I’m looking at something there … I’m either looking to see if my cobbers are behind me, or sometimes if you stand up you can get a better shot of something.

Anyway, we had actually run out of coal, and at this stage we were about two kilometres I suppose … two or three ks in a straight line from, from Āpiti you see, and we actually ran out of wood. We’d got plenty of water, so there you go, this is the sort of thing that happens. We knew we had stacks of coal at Āpiti but we still had about two or three ks to go. In desperation we had a bit of a recce around some paddocks and found some old rotten posts and [chuckles] general bits and pieces, and actually got more than what we thought. [Chuckles] So fortunately … yeah, I detailed Alan and Andrew to climb the fence and I just stacked the wood in the thing, you see, so [laughter] if somebody’d got a shotgun out, well [laughter] I could’ve just scarpered at five kilometres an hour. [Chuckles] So yeah, those are the sort of issues you have. And yeah … so anyway …

And there’s the sign – Āpiti. They grow spuds in Āpiti, don’t they? We didn’t see any spuds growing, but anyway … obviously we’re fairly close to Āpiti. There’s no smoke coming out of the engine; the dirty coal’s gone and we’re burning that nice rotten timber which wasn’t so smoky. And when we got to Āpiti some of the other guys got caught up with us; that’s young Johnny McClune with his little Fowler engine – you can see the trailer he’s towing has this great stack of coal on there, so they weren’t going to run out of coal, they were probably more likely to run out of water. Yeah, so they carried a lot of coal and they’d sort of all caught up with us at that stage. And there’s the galley and the engine parked outside the Āpiti pub; and they also put on a real good meal for us that night.

By that stage we’d covered, just on the back thing, twenty-nine kilometres from Cheltenham you see, so up [a]round forty, getting close to fifty ks. Yeah, so even though guys can be a bit dirty at times, it’s just nice to have a bit of a clean up; they had no real facilities to have a wash there so we steamed up an old brick pot with some steam, warmed up some water there, and we had a wash in that; so that’s what’s going on there. [Chuckles] So [at] least you could make yourself relatively clean … you had to have a bath before tea, you see – if you don’t get yourself … clean up your act you’re not allowed to have tea.

Then we’re back on the road again the following day. Now actually, when we get to the end of the still photos we’ve got a couple of videos of the hills that we travelled. [Cell phone rings] There was [were] two gorges between when we left Āpiti and before we got to Rangiwahia; there was [were] a couple of really steep gorges there. They made for real challenging work on the engine. We worked the engines hard; as we were coming down the gorge you could actually see the bridge way down the valley down here. As we’ve come up there the Safeties have started howling; well by the time we got to there that engine’d had a hammering from hell, I suppose you could say just about – worked very, very hard, and hopefully we’ll be able to get a bit of live footage on what it actually looked like. That’s quite a good shot of John and Richard on old Marshall engine coming up behind and following us along.

Then, [chuckles] this is where it all happens again, you see, like the water supplies. Now when we did the recce, I said, “Oh yeah, we’ll be able to suck water out of that creek because when we leave this spot where the engine is parked, that’s the [coughing] steepest hill of the lot – we’ve got a real hard pull ahead of us there.” So what do we do? We lift the water up, we need desperately to water; there’s no way we’re going to get up that hill without running out of water. So we cut some notches in the bank and we went down; and we had to carry that big bucket of water … ha! Up that hill, and of course we only got half a pail each time, because you can see, it’s a big pail, or big pot; so by the time we did several journeys down the bank and up there … yeah, we were getting pretty knackered actually. But anyway, [chuckles] but I didn’t have any migraines on that trip either, but maybe I was listening to what Dad was saying and being prepared. But yeah, that was just the sort of thing you have to do.

Then we got up to the top and we found some troughs; and the locals were more than happy to let us go in there and flog some water out of their troughs. The kids came out so we gave some kids a bit of a ride around, and they all had a look at the engines. It was something that they’d never ever seen … like it was, you know, you just don’t see that sort of thing on the road any more, and I think you know, the locals and the kids alike were really blown away by the sudden influx of a group of guys doing something like this. Anyway, we took on some water and we scarpered from there.

And there it is. This is starting to get a little bit historical now because Rangiwahia was really the destination; that would be the nearest bit of civilisation I suppose, to where the engine was actually found. And I quite like that photo because there’s Rangiwahia; you can see the fly wheel of the engine, the gear train, and – I mean these are just little photos that make it really quite good.

The Barge family – they turned up with their little Garrett engine, and so there again they’ve got some water on board but no fuel. [Chuckle] So we were sharing all the stuff amongst ourselves, ‘cause once we all got together and grouped we were fine. It worked out really well; it’s just that, as I say, we left a day earlier. What we should’ve probably done is throw a half a dozen or ten sacks of coal in the galley, and it would’ve been fine.

The Rangiwahia Garage; we stopped there for a couple of nights … one night … but the garage is basically derelict, and that’s what it is. Dave Larsen and family – they bought their McLaren engine up, and that’s their little commode behind it there. [Chuckles]

Now this is where it gets really historic. Here we go, fifty years on; and Alan and I came down the hill, the area where the pump shed was where the engine was found fifty years ago. It was quite appropriate to put a mokopuna mover up there because you can tell that it was actually a recent photo, because [chuckle] you know, there it is – I mean, that car’s not fifty years old. [Chuckles] I thought, ‘Well as poised as it is we’ll chuck a photo of a mokopuna mover in there, and do it in black and white.’ So anyway, we came down there and we positioned the engine – yeah, oh, this is starting to get quite emotional by this stage because you know, it had been fifty years, and the engine was actually back in its original spot where it was found by these six guys. So we were starting to think, ‘Wow! We’ve actually done it, we’ve got here. And we still have the journey ahead of us to go home.’ And we had a bit of a muck around there positioning ourselves by the pump shed; there’s myself; the guy next to the large wheel on the left hand side, Mike Barnes – his family’ve got another two or three engines now, so they’re still very heavily involved in the engine movement. And John Pudsey, the guy with the black shirt on, he at the time – fifty years ago – he was the only person of the six members that [who] actually had an engine driver’s ticket, even though Mike Barnes worked for the railways. Even so he was a fitter; he didn’t at that stage actually carry an engine driver’s ticket. But John Pudsey was, of the six guys, he was at that stage the sole engine driver.

Now we put that photo in there; that engine believe it or not – there’s the pump shed – it’s probably not exactly the right angle, but that’s what the engine looked like when they found it; that’s the same engine. As you can see, you know, there’s been a bit of repair work there, and around the smoke box there. But yeah, I mean at that stage no rubber tyres on it obviously; yeah, that was basically what it looked like. At that stage it’d had a fifty-year working life. Yeah – there it says ‘Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies 6 nominal hp [horsepower] Traction Engine Number 24090, 1912 at Rangiwahia in 1963, as found by the group of six enthusiasts who took part in it’s epic journey steaming eight days from Rangiwahia to Marton and into preservation and beyond.’ So yeah, that was awesome.

So anyway, we moved on from there; we took a few more photos. Now the pump shed; we had to put this photo in there because the pump shed has assumingly been there for fifty years, and I guess it’s a little bit like grandpa’s axe where it’s been repaired a few times, and looks like it’s had a new power pole put in at some stage in its life. We’re not too sure about the door on the pump shed … we’re not quite sure whether that was there fifty years ago. [Laughter] We sort of come [came] to the conclusion that if you know … if you jump up in the air or you head into the atmosphere you’ll get yourself to Woodville, and if you bury yourself you’ll end up heading towards Levin and Shannon. Anyway, we thought that was quite amusing really.

Yeah, that’s speaks for itself really; I’m quite proud really of that effort to have the engine there, after at this stage owning the engine for about twenty years; and to’ve actually gone and done something like that with the help of Alan and Andrew here, and everybody else that sort of took part of [in] it.

So after we all sat around and reminisced a bit, and joked and laughed and poked the borax at each other, we got back on the engine again and headed back out of the spot where it was. We headed around … in 1963 they never came out through the river and up and across to where the two guys are coming out of the paddock now. That’s the same spot they came out but they’d actually come out across the river. But of course getting across the river now – there’s all fences and all that sort of, so what we did is we came back around the road and then I got off the engine and I got these two guys, John Pudsey and Mike Barnes, to drive the engine out of the paddock. So there they are there, fifty years on; they’ve got rubber tyres on now and the engine is probably in a lot better condition than it was when they first pulled it out of there.

The road going up the hill there; I think the next photo is there again an original photo. That shed in the background is not there, but the angle of the hill is exactly the same. [Reads] ‘The rugged back country foothills of the Ruahine Ranges where the Ransomes was found is visible in this picture which was taken shortly after starting the journey in the morning, on the narrow, winding Karewarewa Road before reaching Rangiwahia.’ This particular point is roughly between Rangiwahia and Mangaweka itself. There they are there, [the] same guys having a moment of glory on the old engine. Ed Jull and young Nathaniel – they joined the fiasco; [chuckle] they [coughing] come [came] along and they spent some time, or the last two or three days actually, of the run; they came with us and that was really their introduction. It’s a very different thing to be driving an engine on the road or on hill work and things like that as opposed to just driving around town like we are now, on an Art Deco weekend; it’s a very different sort of thing to do.

Another shot of the Mangaweka Road there, making lots of smoke and … Now that engine belongs to Steve McClune and his family; now that engine is actually very historic to this area as well because it was owned by Robert Holt & Sons a number of years ago and it spent a lot of time running between Puketitiri and Napier. And as legend has it, that engine, because of the nature of the roads and the terrain and stuff like that way back then, and it’s period of working life, actually spent a lot of time each time it came back from Puketitiri – like a lot of engines that were used in the country – at the blacksmith or machine shop, having repairs before it went back on its next journey to Puketitiri. So yeah, that’s a bit historic to Hawke’s Bay, that engine.

There’s another photo there of somewhere between Rangiwahia … we were heading back to Kimbolton at that stage … that’s the sort of road that we were on. Now Glenmore Station – that was one of the places they stopped on the way home from Rangiwahia, and the next photo is of the old wool shed that they actually stopped in on the way; they stayed there, oh, might’ve been two or three days before they had another go at continuing on. There’s the engine, and the same shed fifty years ago, so yeah, there it is – Glenmore Station fifty years ago, and we were there last year just doing that recreation. It was marvellous [chuckle] – we had a great time. And then of course, some of the things we had to put up with … that’s the sort of thing we had to put up with – the view [chuckles] looking over towards the mountain group there in the Central Plateau.

Now [chuckle] – I can’t really blame anybody for this, as much as I tried; when we stopped for a cup of tea there, the safety chain that you can see hanging there got caught up – there was like a big pile of stuff on the side of the road there, the rotten thing. And when I went to go back so we could sort of swing and head off to continue on, the safety chain caught the back of the engine there and bent all the draw bar. Yeah, it was quite frustrating actually, and I’m generally a non-swearing sort of person, but once we got going in the engine [and] no one could hear me there was a bit of bad language really, just … I was quite annoyed about it actually, [chuckle] but yeah; I guess that’s the way it goes sometimes. At that stage we were back at Cheltenham; by this time we’d been on the road … what was it? Four or five days – fifth day and we were heading back to Feilding. We stopped there and had lunch, and then we continued on our way back to Feilding to the Steam Traction Society. There we are back at the Steam Traction Society, so there’s Alan and myself, and yeah, the end of the epic journey. We actually covered around about a hundred and fifty-six kilometres. It was amazing, bearing in mind that the hundred and [coughing] fifty-six kilometres was done at around about four to five kilometres an hour, sometimes even less than that. So that was our trip over, really.

That’s taken in 1912 when the engine was new at Eggletons’; they were the first people to own the engine in New Zealand when it was new. And the next photo gives you an idea how many engines there are in the Steam Traction Society of Feilding, so it’s gone from that one engine of ours to what you see there. I mean, doesn’t matter what sort of club you’re into, they all start … takes [?] of you to get together, make it work and then …

[Sound of a steam engine as video shown]

So you hear the engine really working now; just start to really slow down. The engine’s got a full head of steam; if you lose the pressure you’re in a bit of trouble, you’ve got to be onto it. This is what happens when the hills are too steep. There was a piece on this hill that sort of went up and then it became quite steep. The engine’s still in top gear; it only has two speeds, one and a half, and three miles per hour, but we were actually still in top gear at this stage. So we’ve got a full head of steam there, so [as] high as we could go as far as pressure is concerned; the safeties are lifting. And you don’t have to thrash the engine; you don’t have to speed it up because the engine develops its full power at zero revs, [revolutions] so you don’t have to speed the thing up or anything like that, you’ve just got to stay at that speed and keep it going. And I wasn’t the only one that stalled on that hill. [Sound of steam engine slowing] So I’ve still got the regulator wide open, the engine’s stalled; so what we’re going to do now is block the engine so it doesn’t roll back. And we’ve got to change it into low gear and then let the steam out of the engine so we can move the crank shaft and get it into gear, change into low gear, put the crank shaft in a good position and then get ourselves going again. And we’re sort of going [at] half the speed now; then me [my] hat fell off and I ran it over. [Laughter] Every day was a bit of adventure and there it was, great.

Question: Do you have to stop to change gears?

Wayne: Yeah, you do, because what happens is, especially when you stall, your regulator’s still wide open, so you’ve still got your full head of steam but it’s in the actual engine itself; and so you’ve got to block the engine and you’ve got to take it out of gear, slide it into the lower gear and then start off from there. You can change gear if you’re going along, if you took off slowly on a straight bit of road, and for whatever reason you wanted to change into a higher gear you can actually change. But on a hill after a stall you’ve got to de-pressurise the cylinder and put it into the next lower gear.

Question: Did you have to get permission off [from] the police or traffic?

Wayne: No, not really, but what we did do is we let the land transport side of it – we did let them know that we were doing it, more out of courtesy. If we were doing it on a main road somewhere or on a state highway or something like that, yes – you’d have to also let them know. We also had people following in cars, with signs to let people know that this was going on ahead on the road.

Question: Did you encounter much traffic? [Two people speaking at once]

Wayne: No, not where we went because that particular run was way out in the countryside. We passed a few milk tankers and things like that and then the odd person – [there’re] people living out there. But no, it was really good, we didn’t really have much hassle with any traffic at all.

Question: Wayne, I can see you don’t get a ticket for speeding; do you get one for going too slow?

Wayne: [Laughter] Yeah well … I guess on a motorway or something like that or on a state highway, you might well get a reprimand. The funny thing is, at certain times of the day the traffic would actually hold me up – on the harbour bridge or in Queen Street in Auckland or somewhere like that.

Question: Which is the most difficult, going up or going down?

Wayne: Actually to be perfectly honest with you, going downhill is the worst of the lot. Going up hill, no problem; just keep your steam up to full pressure and make sure that you’ve got a good set of chocks to stop the engine if you have to go into a lower gear. But going down hill – you’re more likely to get into trouble going downhill; [cough] that is definitely the case there.

Question: What about tickets? You made the point before that the bloke doing the firing was actually in charge of tracking the engine, rather than the chap doing the steering …

Wayne: As long as you’ve got one person on the engine, either the guy steering the engine or the person being the actual driver, as long as one of you is a qualified engine driver, that’s all you need.

Question: What sort of test do they put you through for this?

Wayne: Well when I did mine – I had to do mine under the old Marine Department regime, ‘cause I did mine nearly twenty years ago. But that’s all gone now, it’s all done by the New Zealand Qualification Authority; it’s all done under that now. And when I did it, you had to prove that you’d actually spent, believe it or not, a thousand and forty hours; [a] thousand hours which actually is the equivalent of six months working, which is, you know, impossible when you’ve got something like that, I mean, it’s … when I did mine, I guess to be perfectly honest with you I had spent three years with the engine … drove it without having a ticket. I actually had a lot of support from other people that were involved with the Steam Traction Society, but I actually made a self-declaration of six hundred hours, and I had to get that signed by somebody like a Justice of the Peace; in fact I got the guy from VTNZ [Vehicle Testing New Zealand] to do it and they were more than happy. [The] Marine Department said, “We were going to give you your ticket anyway, ‘cause you know what you’re doing and [we’ll] just get it sorted out.’

Question: So you physically did a test?

Wayne: I did, yeah, I had to sit down and spend a couple of hours, and you know, it was quite involved actually. They’ve made it a little bit easier now.

Question: The manufacturer would be producing ten of those a week? Manufacturing, building …

Wayne: Engines?

[cont’d]: Yeah, if you had 24090 which is your number …

Wayne: Oh yeah, but it wasn’t only just engines – there was [were] portable engines, a threshing mill and all that sort of stuff as well with the engine numbers. Yeah.

Alan: Farm machinery.

Question: What about tyres? [Cough] ‘Cause how common were they on a traction engine?

Wayne: Well tyres were non-existent – we put rubber on them. Those tyres that are on my engine out there, the back ones, they’ve come off a motor scraper; like a Euclid or whatever people used to call them. And we’ve just cut the side walls off and ended up with the actual tread and put them on to the actual wheels – for two reasons, one, it does make it a little bit nicer to ride on because there’s no springs on it – [??] drive with the steel blimmin’ wheels on the road; plus it does actually look after the road a little bit better.

Alan: A warrant of fitness, Wayne, explain about a warrant.

Wayne: Traction engines don’t have a warrant of fitness as such; they do have to carry a registration. The registration [is] $19 a year, which is quite good, but they have to carry a current certificate which is done by the Marine Department. One thing offsets another – there’s no warrant of fitness; the registration costs virtually nothing, $19 a year; but each year for the annual survey, you might as well say it’s about $400 to have the Marine Department come and check that out.

Question: Were traction engines ever oil-fired?

Wayne: Not as a rule. The odd engines were converted to run on oil; none of them came out as an oil-fired unit. Locomotives were oil-fired, it was a lot easy [easier] – you take a big KA locomotive – they would burn five to six, seven, eight tons of coal every two hundred kilometres or whatever. It was a lot of work for a fireman to feed a big locomotive that size, and the oil-fired made it a whole lot easier for them. But you’ve got to be very careful with a smaller boiler like that – if you try to convert or try to run oil in that you can’t have the flame or the oil impinging against the inside of the firebox; it generates too much heat and can cause a lot of problems. Yeah.

There are some photos on here – I mean if you want to have a look in due course. [A] couple of years ago when the engine was – actually it’s centennial year – we put the engine and a couple of old trucks that were also in their centennial year outside the house here. Because of the nature of the engine it’s been in a few calendars; there’s a 2011 calendar that was done for the Waipawa 150th Celebration – they put a really nice photo of the engine in there. 2008 we actually went on a run up to Puketitiri on the engine; I regret to say that we never made it on the engine, ‘cause the engine had a big breakdown on the way up there, but anyway … that was after. They got quite a good photo of the engine on Apley Road.

Question: You’ve taken it down [to] the South Island as well?

Wayne: I have had it down; in 2005 I took it to three events [coughing] down in [the] South Island, one to Edendale, then to Gore … you’ve got to say it right, ‘cause you’ve got to roll that ‘r’ … and then to a week-long rally at [coughing] Kirwee which is just out of Christchurch, and that was [sneeze] well worth the effort.

Question: Did you drive the whole way?

Wayne: No, no, we had it transported down to Gore. So that’s really probably pretty much what we’ve got to say about what we’ve done, but James Bowman here has a ten-minute CD [DVD] of the Tokomaru Steam Engine Museum which’d be worth having a quick look if you’re interested.

Is [Are] there are any more questions any of you would like to ask?

Question: Have you still got that truck?

Wayne:  No, I haven’t got the old Thornycroft truck now … sometimes you’ve got to be sensible and scale down on your collection a wee bit. Yeah.  [If] you look at the engine like that – realistically, even though Joe and I own it, at the end of the day we’re just custodians of stuff like that; I mean, well really we’re just responsible to keep things like that going for future generations.

Question: What’s it’s next engagement?

Wayne: The engine … well, I’ll be honest with you, this is going to be the last run for the engine for a little while perhaps. Oh, if all goes well I’d like to have it going again by the end of the year ready for Art Deco weekend. But in twenty years it has had a lot of use, and the engine is actually due for some repairs oil-wise – it needs some new stay tubes and bits and pieces in it and a few other bits and pieces, and that all costs money, you know. I’ll be honest with you, I could probably end up spending you know, $10,000 on the engine in the next twelve months if I have to; but hopefully I won’t have to. But yeah, now we’ve done this run to Feilding, and it’s nice to be able to bring it up today and do this … yeah, I do need to pull the engine off the road and look at some heavy repair work on it. We’ll see really how that goes and work from there.

Question: How much [of a] problem is it getting tradesmen to work on those?

Wayne: Actually, I’ll be honest with you, it’s easier now; it’s almost easier now to get work done if you’ve got some tricky machine work or whatever, it seems to almost be easier nowadays, like, if I’ve got to do some welding repairs, there’s a little bit of wastage in certain areas; I can do it myself but I’m not allowed because I’m not a certified welder to do work on pressure vessels, but there’s enough certified people around that [who] specialise in doing work on pressure vessels and they’ve got the right tickets and the right gear, and it’s just as easy to get them to do it and get it prepared. Everything you do on the boiler side if it has got to have a procedure, or it’s got to be done properly so that the Marine Department, or SGS as they call themselves now, they’ve got to have all the right procedure. And fair enough, because there’s a tremendous amount of energy stored up in the engine if something goes wrong.

Question: What sort of pressure do your releasing valves ..?

Wayne: The safety valves are set at a hundred and fifty pounds per square inch, which is high enough, by crikey – if it ruptures or something goes wrong. [Chuckle] Over the years I’ve had a few things do that; like an inspection door, we’ve blown the odd gasket on an inspection door. Alan and I were driving back from Chris Pask’s one day on one of Chris’s engine[s] which is the same size as that one out there. And in the smoke box there’s a big inspection door, and I said to Chris, “Oh”, you know, “have you tightened that up?” “Yeah, I’ve checked it, I’ve done it.” ‘Cause actually, when you put a new gasket or a new bit of sealex in there you’ve got to tighten it up as the pressure comes up. And I said, “Oh, I’d better have a look.” And he got a bit huffy ‘cause he thought, ‘Oh, you don’t trust me”, you see. [Chuckles] So anyway, “Oh well, whatever” … Alan and I hopped on the engine and we headed out of the winery down Omāhu Road and we headed for home. We were just coming round the roundabout by John Bates Wheel Alignment there, and at that precise moment the safety started to lift, so it was up to a full head of steam and it blew the gasket in the front of the smoke box big time, and well – you wouldn’t believe it! And I just pulled over to the side of the road; you couldn’t even see the engine for steam, [chuckles] and there was steam pouring out the front and there was steam pouring out of the firebox. Alan leaps off and starts firing a bit of dirt up on there to put the fire out, and I think I said to Alan at the time, “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it – the fire would’ve been well blown out by now.” And all we did was just turn the feed pump on and sort of stood back. I was quite wet and half broiled as a result, and of course most people driving past sort of know who I am, you know, guys in our industry;  and they were laughing, and waving out and carrying on. And as I turned round and sort of like, five minutes went by, I saw Pask coming out of his driveway with a tractor and a … [Laughter]  So yeah, some of the things like that you look back on – you have to have a good laugh about it really. There was very little said, it was a very silent trip back to the winery, actually. [Laughter] So I went home, and [a] couple of days later went back and put a new gasket in it, and this time there was nothing said as we went through the raising of pressure; and [we] bought it up to pressure and subsequently continued on our way.

So yeah. I hope it’s been all right, and I hope you guys’ve enjoyed it; and I’m starting to feel a little bit better now. [Chuckles]

James Bowden: Well Wayne, we want to thank you very much for …

Wayne: Oh, that’s all right, James, yeah.

James: As a steam enthusiast myself I could just listen to this forever. When’re you doing the next one?

Wayne: Oh, I could prattle on all day; I’ve been so looking forward to coming and doing this one, actually.

Every now and then I go up to Keirunga [Gardens], but one year we went up there – there’s a friend of mine from Wellington actually; we were going up to Keirunga. At that time of year we were almost in a fire ban and you’re really risking your … pushing your luck driving the engine, especially something like that with lots of trees and dry grass. Sure enough, I looked behind and there was a couple of bits of hot spots on the ground; I said to Pagey, I said, “Get off and put those fires out, will you?” [Chuckles] And I kept slowly sort of ticking up the road, and here’s Pagey right up behind me and he was stamping on bits of hot stuff on the road, and … yeah, we managed to get away. ‘Cause I’m also in the brigade in Havelock [laughter] … been in the fire brigade here in Havelock for nearly thirty years now. I used to do it as a young fellow, and I would’ve never lived it down, man! If I’d had to call the brigade out [laughter] to put a fire out from the engine.

James: Well, thanks very much – can we have a nice round of applause?

[Applause]

Wayne: Thanks for that. Just sort of going back with Alan and Andrew and Joanne here, we had a great time on that trip and I think it’ll be something that we won’t forget for a long time – in fact it would be nice to go away and do a run like that again at some stage.

James: What about the braking system, [if it was] harder coming downhill?

This is where … when you saw the bent draw bar, you might’ve seen a braking cylinder without the lever on it, and some of those other photos showed it; but it is a serious issue actually. The engine doesn’t have any brakes – even going home from here we’re going downhill, and it’s something you’ve got to be watching all the time; you use the engine itself … just pull the reversing lever back or use the steam to hold the engine back. But if something breaks on the engine it can be a serious issue. And over the years engines were lost, there’s no doubt about it – a lot of engines lost through that very reason. I wouldn’t have done that run over to Rangiwahia if I didn’t have some sort of braking on the engine, or braking outside the engine. The galley that we’ve got has … well, I’ve fixed up all the brakes on that, and even though it’s a manual brake it’s a hydraulic brake, and it works quite well. And it may not have held the engine back entirely, but when we were going down some of those long hills on those gorges before we then climbed the hills, every downhill run was done in low gear and we went really, really slow. And we used the brake on the trailer and we just kept on; so if something had broken or gone wrong we would’ve had a better chance of stopping the engine. You’ve just got to be watching what’s going on.

James: Sounds a bit nerve wracking, but …

Wayne: Yeah, but don’t let it put you off. [Laughter]