As a former Otago Excursion Train Trust volunteer with 30 years’ experience as operating staff with Taieri Gorge Railway, I wish to express my utter disdain at the proposal for the Hindon- Middlemarch section being lifted/turned to a cycleway.
It almost seems like an "only in Dunedin" thing to change the premier heritage attraction, one that was the cruise ship catalyst to Dunedin, with the worldwide direct ship-to-shore train trip renowned, and daily brought tourists who spent $5 million into the local economy per annum from the late 1980s onward.
A busy day could get closer to 1000 people taking the trip.
How many will cycles bring?
Trains brought travel to the masses.
The North Taieri-Hindon section is just a "warm up" compared to the spectacular part beyond proposed for lifting, and nowadays that has been let go as far as gorse and broom goes, after the weedspray programme was abolished well before Covid.
A passenger railway is a narrow profit margin because you are owning and maintaining your own right of way. Therefore, it takes someone who knows what they are doing to be at the helm, not self-agenda, nor ego types spending buckets on totally unnecessary things, doing things the wrong way, making all sorts of pointless red tape, slowing the timetable while wilfully ignoring fundamentals that staff with decades of knowledge/background advised otherwise.
Things run downhill very fast when important things are left on a railway, while the cost where it’s needed burgeons the longer the things that need investment are left to worsen.
The bigger picture remains that scenic heritage railways around the world bring visitors.
One of the biggest, most popular hallmarks of the railway has been the wooden open-balcony cars, and they’ve been axed from use — the total opposite of the grain.
I’m currently in the United Kingdom, where heritage and tourist lines bring in £60 million (NZ$121 million) to the tourist economy per year.
When one or two had a bit of financial strife in the Covid period, they were assisted by government funding.
As our own wishes to protect tourist assets, they might well help too in the major investment now needed.
Assured, a proposal to lift one of the top scenic lines over here or in the United States or Australia would be totally unthinkable and spark major condemnation. In fact, on the world stage, Taieri Gorge Railway in its entirety is longer than any such line in the UK, and by far is the longest private line in New Zealand.
The railway should be managed well, by having people in charge that have full know-how of how railways are properly run.
We worked out that, collectively, the laid-off staff had over 300 years’ combined experience, many of which harked back to NZ Rail days.
Many people dug into their pockets and did lots of unpaid work to get that place running.
My late mother alone put her parents’ inheritance into the 1990 Save the Train appeal.
They sure didn’t do that for things to come to the way they are, nor what is proposed.
— Paul Jeffery is a former Taieri Gorge Railway staff member.
