First class trip along Otago Central

A Dunedin-bound special train stops at Omakau on Easter Tuesday 1961 to pick up passengers,...
A Dunedin-bound special train stops at Omakau on Easter Tuesday 1961 to pick up passengers, mainly high school children returning to boarding schools. Photo: Supplied

Jim Sullivan reviews Rails to Cromwell, by W J Cowan. Published by Molyneux Press. 

Railway history is really thinly-disguised social history and in Rails to Cromwell Bill Cowan has kept technical details to a manageable level while producing a treasury of stories about how people lived along the line.

Quite rightly, he points the reader who wants the minutiae of the politics and construction of the Otago Central railway to Over the Garden Wall, by Jim Dangerfield and George Emerson, while for this book he assembles a far-ranging collection of personal stories and a superb gallery of photographs to produce an outstanding contribution to the wider history of Central.

His earlier book, Rails to Roxburgh, was well-received but his journey through Central Otago far surpasses it. Some stories are memories of railway children and wives but most are recollections by the men who worked on the line; tales that tell you why being a railway man was almost their whole life and why the Otago Central line was the best they ever worked on.

Sometimes it was dangerous, sometimes bone-numbingly cold or brow-sweatingly hot, but never boring. Some memories are fun: Ranfurly headmaster Jack Rutherford recalls that the local track gang were known as "The Sunshine Gang"; "a drop of rain and they were inside!".

Some are poignant. One-time Hyde station agent and later Dunedin city councillor Maurice Prendergast remembers holding the hand of his dying grandfather, fatally injured in the Hyde train disaster of 1943. Mixing the words of many contributors is no easy task but the package is a satisfying one. One improvement would have been a line or two giving more on the source of the extracts.

Paul Powell's description of Central Otago is sheer poetry as prose: "It is the shifting intensity and the subtlety of light, the unexpected contrasts of colours that put spirit and flesh on them and gives the landscape a fragility that saves it from brutality." Is this Paul Powell the Dunedin dentist who gave us the 1967 classic account of mountaineering, Men Aspiring, and later lamented the Think Big projects with Who Killed the Clutha? Or is it a namesake?

The second part of the book is 190 pages of landscape-format illustrations, giving a mile-by-mile photographic gallery of the railway in action from Wingatui to Cromwell. The illustrations are an outstanding one-stop shop for providing an understanding of the trains and how they operated and the dramatic landscapes through which they chugged or glided. Many are by the doyen of Otago railway photographers, George Emerson, and son Richard Emerson has done much to make them available as high-standard reproductions.

Also, Wolfgang Gerber, of McK Design, has scanned photographs from 100 years and dozens of sources to produce a universally high standard of pictorial history. Add to this the valuable layout input from Graeme McKinstry and the impeccable print job by Southern Colour Print and you have a book that does Dunedin craftspeople proud.

Fifteen thousand riders do the Otago Central Rail Trail each year, and while Rails to Cromwell is far too bulky for the hip pocket, those who happen to read it before they peddle off will understand the track on which they are travelling at an emotional level far beyond that achieved by tourists who never take the trouble to read about where they are heading.

Jim Sullivan is a Patearoa writer. 

 

 

 

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