The Oamaru Steam and Rail Society general manager is on track to realise his dream of rebuilding the 36-tonne rail passenger vehicle, The Phoenix.
Mr Andrew received the Paul Dillicar Award for Innovation at the Federation of Rail Organisations of New Zealand awards this year, for eight years of work on bringing a B10 model back to life and for his approach to project Phoenix.
The railcar, officially numbered DM16 in its New Zealand Railways days, arrived in Oamaru atop a truck trailer in January this year.
Mr Andrew said his original goal was to have the railcar running by Christmas, although the society now hopes to launch it in the new year.
"I should have it running by March. I’ve got to get the generator out here from China by Christmas, to do the main drive and to get the actual figures of how many kilowatts it will take to drive it," he said.
The society was founded in 1985 and was formed by volunteers to preserve and operate locomotives and a portion of the former New Zealand Railways yard in Oamaru’s Historic Precinct.
The restoration society and the Phoenix project had drawn international interest. The BBC was planning to film in Oamaru next February, Mr Andrew said.
The Phoenix once plied the rails of Wellington, where for about 60 years it ferried commuters up and down Wellington’s electrified rail system.
While the project had been mostly self-funded, Mr Andrew was happy to receive $2000 towards his project to convert the DM unit into a railcar as part of his innovation award.
The railway expert said he had been working on the overhead wiring for the railcar which will run on 1500 volts.
Part of the restoration was to change the whole railcar around and put a smaller generator unit in, Mr Andrew said.
"If I fired that thing up there, all the neighbours down there would be complaining they’d have no power.
"It’d be like two or three Gillies Foundrys starting up their furnaces down there. It would create a huge flicker in the power."
Mr Andrew had been busy installing a new air compressor, redoing all the gauges in the cab of the railcar, checking brake pressures and how much power is being used.
"It’s just something designed to run up and down our line within Oamaru.
"I don’t want a big high voltage, if I can get it along the line, say 20 miles an hour or 25 miles an hour at the most, I’ll be happy with that."
He said he was "chuffed" with the help he had received from other rail members on The Phoenix.
"I’ve got a few men helping me at the moment, to work on patches of rust on the railcar. We’ve rebuilt one end and started to paint another and the other end needs to be sanded and painted too. Then we’ll work on the sides," he said.
Mr Andrew also has another project steaming away — to bring back the passenger train into the Historic Precinct that used to run before Covid.
