TANGARAKAU STEAM 8




Many individual skills were brought into play on railway construction and coal mining projects and the associated communities. Men were identified for their judgement and expertise in rock drilling and placing explosives, tree felling, handling timber jacks, working with axes, adzes and hot metal forging. Rigging lifting tackle, locating coal seams and anticipating weakness in tunnel bores were other highly regarded skills. The village at Tangarakau maintained a resident policeman, a doctor, an Anglican curate, a small hospital and maternity home, a hair-dresser and tobacconist, two general stores, two dairies, a butcher’s shop, a post-office and a dance hall and picture theatre. One family from its premises conducted a fruit and vegetable shop, billiard saloon, household coal sales and delivery, general carrying and rubbish collection and disposal. In wet slushy conditions the means of transport was by horse and dray and when the roads were firm a model T Ford truck was used. The proprietor of this multi-functional business dispensed much goodwill and addressed every woman as “Mother”.

There was an excellent school headed by Mr Fairbrother. MA. (And don’t forget it). My most outstanding memories are my first lessons in French language and grammar, learning to play the flute and read music and exploring the riches to be found in reading. The school maintained an excellent library.

Some forty years later I journeyed through from Stratford to Taumarunui and stopped off in the area for a day. Gone was the abandoned orchard, the railway houses at Tahora now reduced to three, the one that we had lived in destroyed by fire. Our old school building moved to the opposite side of the road to serve as a contractor’s workshop. New classrooms and amenities had replaced the old one and its country toilets. The railway yards, station and goods shed with its close-by creek all there standing still in time. I followed the Tangarakau road to its junction with the Moki Saddle and Ohura road, past the clearing where the rail bending rollers had been, travelled the road that had once been the temporary rail bed, now widened with a good base of metal. I remembered the busy little 0-4-0 steamers puffing their urgent rhythms. Looked up at the well-established main line and the two tunnels and arrived at the Tangarakau railway yard, all quiet now except for the few daily trains rumbling through. The bush was cleared a little further back on the scarred hills. The dwellings, school, shops, hall, coal screening plant, engineering shops, loco sheds, construction railway yards all gone. I crossed the Raekohua stream bridge that carried the roadway to my old home, just an open field now. The main part of the old school building was now a farm store-shed with a more recent homestead close by. I crossed the timber truss bridge that lay alongside the railway bridge over the Tangarakau River and wondered over the site where the powerhouse had stood. The concrete floors of the coal bunkers, boiler and engine rooms still there as were the boiler and chimney foundations and the two concrete foundations on which the two Worthington boiler feed-water pumps had hissed and clicked. There too were the concrete beds and flywheel pits of the four engines that generated electricity and supplied compressed air. I saw that the area over which one of the engines discharged its exhaust was still stained with oil although nature was healing the scar. Sheep and fat cattle grazed over my old playground, I listened for the sounds of the past and was rewarded with a fitting sound of the present, a skylark trilling from aloft its song of life. On the way from Tangarakau to Ohura I drove over the Moki Saddle road, now a good metal surface that no longer climbs over the crest of the ridge but passes through a high arched tunnel. I stopped at the bottom of the saddle hill road where it enters the Tangarakau gorge and meets the river opposite the site where the coal mine workings had been. The backdrop of bush-clad hills was the same, but the vision of the entranceway to the mine, the powerhouse and the train marshalling yards all held in memory only. The bush had taken it back and the melodic calls of the resident tuis confirmed its tranquil isolation.