NEW ZEALAND RALWAY STEAM 1




In 1937 when I was half way through serving my apprenticeship the NZ railways commenced advertising for additional staff in all departments including the locomotive branch. This occurred at a low point in my work morale so I filed an application under my work address, posted it off and forgot it. Several weeks later on a Friday afternoon I was jolted back to reality by the works manager homing in on me waving a sheet of paper and demanding to know my state of dissatisfaction with my job. The piece of paper was my advice from New Zealand Railways notifying me of my appointment to the Taihape locomotive depot. I was to report at my earliest to the locomotive foreman’s office at Palmerston North to confirm the appointment. I hurried the 300 metres over to the railway office and found the foreman expecting me. He confirmed that I was the person about whom my employer had just phoned requesting that the railways not take me on. He asked me if I wanted to proceed with the appointment, I affirmed that I did and he advised me to appear for work at Taihape. I returned to the works, gave my notice, which was ill received and in due course took myself off to my new job.

In the locomotive branch one started under the title of cleaner. Progress up the ladder was to acting fireman, fireman, acting driver, second grade driver and first grade driver. From the top of this scale other posts were filled, namely road foreman, assistant locomotive foreman and finally locomotive foreman of one of the locomotive depots throughout the country.

I was given overalls, an engine-man's cap and handbooks on signals and signalling, operating rules and regulations and a working timetable for the whole country. Issued with a clothes locker in the crew room and a tools and materials locker in the engine shed. The year 1937 marked the beginning of a general trading and work upturn and jobs were becoming easier to come by, but applicants for jobs in engine depots in towns like Taihape were slow to come forward and the depot was relatively under staffed. Locomotive cleaning had long been abandoned and the resulting dirt and grease encrusted engines were the norm. Steam cleaning was done on the running gear when maintenance fitters worked on those areas. The cabs were kept clean by the operating crews. My first lessons were in personal safety. Do not have metal studs or plates on boot soles. Do not step across inspection pits nor step on rails when crossing tracks. In engine sheds and yards the rails are always slippery. Do not step onto moving locomotives or wagons without first securing a good handhold. I assisted the cleaner in charge of locomotives in steam with lighting up and steam raising, clearing char from smoke boxes, and ash and clinker from the ash-pans of incoming engines and replacing broken fire-grate bars. Was also commandeered by the maintenance fitters to hold this, hold that and be general gofor.

There was no formal training instruction of any kind, one studied one's books, looked, listened and asked questions. At the end of the first month I was put through an oral test on knowledge of loco boilers and their care while in steam in the depot. I was immediately promoted to boiler charge hand on rotating eight-hour shifts. The usual expired time before assignment to this duty was three months but the place was short handed and management assumed responsibility. I was on shift on New Years eve 1937-38 and the off-going boiler attendant clued me up on fitting wire hooks on brake blocks to hang them on the engine whistle cords to produce the mandatory midnight cacophony. Having prepared for the event, I became fully occupied with servicing incoming locomotives off the extra holiday express trains and the duties associated with stabling locomotives. Came 12.05am 1st January and not a squeak from a whistle. I didn't feel inclined to set up my own celebration five minutes into 1938, thus, the year quietly simmered in. The Taihape Chronicle had a piece to say about it and for a few days I maintained a low profile around the town.

ENGINEERING APPRENTICE DAYS 3




The day arrived for the roller to be steamed up and driven over a course of about three miles skirting the busy parts of the city to end up in the railway yards. Thus the foreman and I spent the morning raising steam, seeing that the feed-water injector worked properly and jiggling the machine out of its state of rest in the ground indentations into which the rolls had settled. After lunch all was ready. He to be the inexperienced driver and I to cycle ahead to be the traffic lookout at street intersections. All of the streets that we traversed had relatively narrow high-crowned tar-sealed ways with grass verges both sides. This latter feature proved a benefit in rescuing our charge from collision with the footpath edgings during the fearfully zigzag course that we inadvertently followed.

The engine throttle was a simple stop valve at the boiler. The driver’s seat was almost over the rear roll that was steered either by a hand wheel with its shaft across the machine or by a neat little three cylinder radial engine whose rotation was determined by a fore and aft hand lever beside the driver’s seat. Movement of the hand wheel or the lever forward or backward steered the machine to the right or left. The water tank was formed over the leading roll with a raised edge deck to carry the coke and coal. The boiler fire-door was at the side so that the machine had to be stopped and the driver dismounted to replenish the fire.

The engine was driven a few laps of the yard for familiarization then out onto a busy street at very slow speed for the short rumble to the main leg of the journey. The high crown on the road and the steering that demanded fore and aft lever movements and the lack of a centre indicator for the steering engine control caused frequent angle parking diversions into the grass verges. Thus there were plenty of opportunities to replenish the fire and boiler water. All was finally delivered to the railway loading bank and our duty was done.

In those times apprentices were required to attend technical classes associated with their trades three evenings a week. The subjects in my area were applied mathematics, technical drawing and engineering workshop practice all of which I enjoyed. The school was well set up with engineering, plumbing, woodwork and electrical workshops.

The years 1935-1937 were lean times in the engineering business and workshops of moderate size had shrunk to relatively small concerns. Businesses that operated foundry departments that dropped back to two or three staff lost that part of the business to their tradesmen going out on their own and setting up in opposition. The same thing also occurred with the then fledgling and promising light industrial refrigeration industry. Another growing business at that time was the reconditioning of car, truck and tractor motors. The established engineering firms saw this as an opportunity and equipped with generally low production machinery. Again highly motivated young employees gained financial backing from automotive parts wholesalers and taking advantage of more highly developed machinery coming onto the market set up shop and took over this work.

So it was in this atmosphere of not gaining employment in the engineering works of my first choice and seeing the premises used more or less as a dumping ground for the plant of its closing branches in other towns and the threat of closure of the current workshop that I considered looking for employment elsewhere.

ENGINEERING APPRENTICE DAYS 2




Time in the workshop was spent in learning machining components in lathes and gear and chain sprocket cutting in the milling machine. Also did my share of striking for the blacksmith at the forge and anvil. He was a master at heating and manipulating the work with tongs and form tools while I with mighty hammer obeyed his commands, "when I nod my head, you hit it".

A timber mill and box factory in the town powered its large steam engine with a pair of horizontal multitubular boilers fired by Dutch ovens burning wood slabs, sawdust and shavings. One of the boilers had reached its economic life. Some of the lower tubes were taken out and another apprentice and I were sent to chip scale from inside the bottom surface. This confirmed the state of the boiler and it was condemned. The factory staff dismantled and removed the boiler and loaded it onto an old horse drawn lorry adapted for towing by motor truck. The procession was headed for the city dump, but as it passed our works the manager just happened to meet it and pointed out advantages in terminating a relatively long journey by dumping the load in our works yard. The driver saw the logic and no sooner said than done! The late owners were a little miffed that their throw-away had suddenly come to represent some value. A few weeks later I was to learn to appreciate the economics to be gained from a bit of canny recycling.

Along with its two steam rollers the city council owned an internal combustion engined road roller. I think that it bore the name "Barford" but not sure. However it had the typical front roll and large rear rolls but on a smaller scale than its steam stable mates. The quite large horizontal single cylinder sniff and bang engine lay where one would see the boiler in a steamer. The speed was governed by a hit and miss device that broke the regular action of the mixture inlet valve, hence a mighty firing stroke followed by several revolutions of the massive flywheel then another bang. Everything that could work loose was indeed loose. The canopy structure and the engine cooling radiator convulsed with each power cycle of the engine. The front roller consisted of two castings whose surfaces had worn through thus creating holes. It became our job to reface them and this was done by rolling up two steel cylinders from metal cut from the above mentioned dumped boiler. The blacksmith with oxy-acetylene torch cut the plates from the boiler shell, rolled them to size and finely trimmed them for heat expansion and cooling shrinkage to measurements made with his time proven measuring wheel. The meeting edges were then electric welded ready for the final operation that took place out in the works yard. The roll halves were placed on their ends on steel packing strips and the new rings stacked end to end on top of each-other and packed up from the ground on fire bricks. Wood fires were stoked inside and around the outsides. When red hot the rings were lifted one at a time by workers with tongs and dropped over the rolls to rest on the packing strips to cool and shrink on for ever. A skilful job well done!

A job came up to recommission an Aveling tandem steam roller that had lain stored in a trucking company yard in the city. The works foreman and I worked about a week preparing it for steam-up and drive it to the railway yards for transport to new owners at Auckland. We opened up the vertical boiler for inspection and renewed hand hole door packings, water gauge glasses and test cock gland packings. The engine mounted beside the boiler was a compact unit with chain drive to the leading roll. The machine was guided by the rear steering roll. The valve operating mechanism on the engine was my first encounter with the Marshall linkage. I was so intrigued with its configuration and action that I reproduced it many years later in the power unit of a small two passenger steam car to be described in future postings.