Newspaper Article 2001 – Pulling the cord on passengers

Pulling the cord on passengers

The passing of the Bay Express tomorrow will end 110 years of rail passenger services between Napier and Wellington. The service will stop because West Coast Railway, which purchased Tranz Rail’s long-distance passenger service, did not want the loss-making Bay Express after efforts to put together a Government and local government-funded subsidy package failed. PETER GASTON looks at the history of the line.

New Zealand’s version of the great train holdup, a huge Hastings fire, protests and disasters have combined to give the Napier-Wellington a colourful history.

Construction of the link between Napier and Port Ahuriri, part of the line through to Palmerston North, was possibly New Zealand’s first work-for-the-dole scheme.

The section was undertaken to keep the large number of unemployed occupied before the main project started.

Ten thousand railway sleepers were floated down the Tukituki river for the project.

The first Napier-Wellington train, taking 11hr 5 mins ran on May 11, 1891.

Six years later, the Napier-Wellington service was diverted through Wairarapa, over the Rimutaka Incline to Upper Hutt and Wellington, with a travel time of 12hr 23 min.

Railcars began running between Napier and Wellington when the line to Wairoa opened in 1939. By 1949 the express to Wellington had accelerated to the stage where the average trip took about seven hours.

An 88-seater railcar service started in March 1955. The railcars were superseded by the Endeavour in 1972 and more recently the Bay Express.

The great train holdup at Takapau in 1879, a year after the Takapau-Kopua section of the line was opened, involved a barricade of railway sleepers, a fence across the track and an angry Maori chief brandishing a tomahawk.

A man’s life – not gold – was wanted.

The saga began when a tactless guard laid hands on the chief Tohua and ran him out on to a carriage platform after the chief refused to stop smoking his pipe in a non-smoking carriage.

Later the angry chief had a pile of sleepers laid across the line and a wire fence erected across the track.

The land over which the railway ran belong to the chief’s tribe and although negotiations for its purchase had been completed with the Government, no payment had been made. Tohua considered he was merely exercising his rights as an owner.

He had no intention of preventing the train going through. All he wanted to do was hold the train up long enough for him to drag out the guard who insulted him and tomahawk him.

By the time word of the planned holdup reached the local authorities the train had already left. A message was hurriedly tapped out over the railway telegraph system warning the guard to keep away from the danger area until the trouble passed.

A few years later, while construction work progressed south, it was reported a firm of railway contractors had “levanted owing a large sum of money in wages”.

The angry workmen trooped into Dannevirke to protest. As the people they sought had fled, the focus of their protest changed and they took possession of the local hotel in true, though unarmed, Ned Kelly style.

“Control of the situation was soon regained, however, by police reinforcements hurriedly despatched from Napier”.

Another instance of direct action had more permanent results. In 1881 Maori patriots took exception to a new flag station called Karamu, just outside Hastings.

For a few days after the opening of the station the offending name board remained in place. Then it was removed and by the complainants and replaced with one bearing the name Tomoana. One hundred and twenty years later it remains Tomoana.

The insistence that a train, carrying His Majesty’s Mail, be allowed through contributed to the disastrous fire in Hastings in May 1907.

Hastings firemen had laid their hoses across the tracks as they fought a fire which had begun in Maddison and Co’s store.

After a 55-minute fight firemen appeared to have the blaze under control. But then railway officials refused to delay a south-bound train because it was carrying mail and had the right of way. Before the 35-truck train cleared the crossing, the blaze was fiercer than ever.

The train took 12 minutes to pass but the delay resulted in buildings occupied by Williams and Kettles, Maddison and Co, the Bank of New Zealand, the front of the upstairs of Paterson, Mossman and Co and J J Faulkner, Dentist, being destroyed and the Imperial Café gutted.

Hundreds of refugees were carried out of Napier and Hastings by special trains after the 1931 Hawke’s Bay Earthquake.

It took railway staff three days to open the tracks for the first train load of survivors after the quake.

Arguably the most serious accident on the line occurred at Opapa, just south of Hastings, on September 22, 1925, when the train from Wellington derailed spectacularly.

Two passengers were killed and the driver badly scalded after the boiler split open.

Seventy years later, on November 12, 1995 the Bay Express derailed at Opapa, with the loss of a life.

The cause of both accidents was attributed to excessive speed.