Little River Railway Station Trust

18/07/2026

The Hunslet

At the southern end of the platform is our Hunslet DSA shunting locomotive, still, unfortunately being vandalised as we await approval to install a security system. Dedicated railway enthusiasts will doubtless be familiar with the Hunslet, but for those who are more part timers, here’s a bit of background.

The Hunslet Engine Company chuffed its way into existence back in 1864 in – well, where else but Hunslet, a suburb of Leeds in England. It began as a small enterprise which set its sights on turning out modest quantities of short haul and shunting locomotives, as well as purpose-built traction engines for collieries and quarries. And for more than a hundred years they continued to produce steam-powered locos.

But as the popularity of rail grew, so did competition, with operations such as Kerr, Stuart and Company producing similar machines. Steam remained king, and while the diesel concept had been around since 1892, the power to weight ratio of the engines made them impractical for anything much smaller than a large ship. And steam had the advantage that it produces maximum torque at zero RPM – something a ICE engine could never do. But by the mid 1920’s diesels were starting to overcome their problems, and both companies were eying them up as an option. In 1927 Hunslet set up a separate diesel traction division, but then the Great Depression came along and dampened railway industries as much as it stifled others. In 1930, Kerr Stuart was forced into receivership. Few companies had an appetite for new ventures in the prevailing economic environment, enabling Hunslet to pick up the failed company’s diesel assets cheaply. Using a Kerr Stuart design, Hunslet produced its first diesel-powered, industrial locomotive in 1930 – a four-wheeled machine with a two cylinder, 30 horsepower McLaren-Benz engine.

Things moved on, diesel took over, and by the early 1950’s New Zealand Railways was beginning to retire its steam locos, with the intention of becoming fully dieselised or electrified. But it would take time. The first 20 machines in the diesel-powered DSA Class came from the Drewry/Vulcan foundry, arriving between 1953 and 1955.

Fifteen Hunslets (DSA 250 to DSA 264 were delivered between 1954 and 1958, while 10 machines arrived from W.G. Bagnall between 1956 and 1957. These Hunslets all found homes in the South Island.

And finally, in 1967, a batch of 315 horsepower Mitsubishi DSA Caterpillar-powered machines were delivered.

Hunslets were originally fitted out with National M4AA6 diesels, developing 250 horsepower. From 1968, they were upgraded to Caterpillar D343T engines, which could pump out 315 horsepower, making them competitive with the new Mitsubishis. At 30.5 tons, the Hunslet is no lightweight. Ours came from a private collector in Dunedin. It was brought up on a transporter fitted with rails, and was then craned into its present location, on the tracks.

These shunting machines are a thing of the past and today yard operations are carried out by diesel-electric – DSC, DH and TR Class locomotives, with Stadler now contracted to supply 24 zero-emission hybrid battery-diesel machines. Almost all of these shunters have remote control capability.

13/06/2026

Guard's Van 3

Railways are driven mostly by the same economic impetus that drives the rest of the world, and it was inevitable that one day someone would look at all the capital tied up in these brake vans, these increasingly complicated hunks of steel which did nothing but stop the train, and house a bloke who did nothing but look after its rear end.
It had been a bleak, autumn New York morning in 1873 when young George Westinghouse strolled down to the patent office to register the compressed air braking system that he’d invented almost five years earlier. George had recently been witness to an incident where two trains collided. Drivers of each locomotive had seen the other, but, given the antiquated and clumsy braking system available to them, had been unable to stop in time.
There has to be a better way, thought young George. And there was. A compressor in the locomotive supplies compressed air to each wagon or carriage, which then operates the brakes, and is controlled solely by the engineer. What happens, I hear you asking, should the system fail. Well, George was no mug, and the system he designed was failsafe. There had been earlier compressed air designs, but each had relied on direct air pressure to apply the brakes. The Westinghouse design relied on reduction of air pressure to brake the train. A failure in any part of the system resulting in reduced air pressure meant that the brakes would automatically be applied.
The Westinghouse Air Brake Company, or WABCO, was set up to market George’s invention. But there was still a niggling little problem with the design: while the system worked well under normal use, in an emergency the brakes on the last cars were applied slightly later than those on the first, creating a piling up effect. In 1887 Westinghouse came up with the quick action triple valve, which pretty much solved the problem, and the same basic system is still used on trains today
So while Westinghouse resolved the long-standing issue of how to stop a train quickly and effectively, one problem remained: how does the driver know what’s going on at the rear of the train? The answer was an ETD, or end of train device. Like people, an end of train device can be either dumb or smart. A dumb ETD could be as simple as a red flag, which wouldn’t tell the driver much, but would alert signalmen that the end of the train had indeed passed. Smart ETD’s automatically activate the rear lights, and provide the driver with information, such as pressure in the brake lines. Even smarter ETD’s now have GPS.
And so the death knell of the guard’s van began to ring out. In 1981 New Zealand Railways, in an expression of faith in the future of the guard’s van, commissioned a further fifty FM wagons, all built by Daewoo in South Korea. Such was the lavishness of Railways thinking at the time that consideration had even been given to using stainless steel on the bodies. Eventually sanity prevailed, and the stainless idea was canned.
Then, in 1982, the winds of corporate change began to howl around the Beehive. The New Zealand Railways Department was corporatized, and immediately commissioned a report from American consultants, Booz Allen Hamilton. In April 1983 the report came back: the additional weight, the loss of revenue-earning space on trains and the cost of wages meant that guards vans should be scrapped and replaced with ETD’s (or, as their report calls them, Train End Monitors [TEM’s]). Coincidentally, the report also recommended reducing locomotive crews from two to one.
The editor of Railway Gazette International could have told the board of Railways that for nothing. His recent editorial had expressed outrage that “one man could ride around the country at the time when secondary passenger services were being eliminated in New Zealand on a scale virtually unparalleled in the western world.”
Now, with their report to bolster their confidence, the board moved swiftly, or as swiftly as quasi government boards do, and the last freight train with a guard’s van pulled out of its station on 30th May 1987, meaning that the recently purchased Daewoo vans were put out to pasture after only five years in service.
However, all was not lost. We still had a few long distance passenger services then, notably the Blue Fern, the Northerner, the Overlander, the Bay Express and the Lynx Express, the TranzCoastal and the TranzAlpine. Railways began modifying some of the FM wagons for use as luggage vans. Later modifications resulted in open-decked carriages, particularly popular on scenic routes, such as the TranzAlpine, where travellers could enjoy the thrill of open-air rail travel, with the chill mountain air coursing through their hair. Others had wheelchair lifts added, while some have ended their designated lives as AK Class carriages, or more diversely as a research test car, a radio test vehicle, or a ballast cleaning support vehicle.
Perhaps it’s all more efficient, but is it as much fun? Certainly solitary train drivers would argue “no”, during those long, lonely hours, with the idle chatter of neither a guard nor an offsider to brighten the journey.

12/06/2026

Guard's Van 2

We, in New Zealand, stick with British terminology, but in North America a guard’s van is known as a caboose. You’d expect the plural of caboose to be cabeese, but no. It’s cabooses. And, as we all know, the expression originates from the Dutch word, “kabuis”, or, according to an alternative school of thought, the Low German word, “kabuse”. The word means “cabin”, and it more specifically referred to a small cabin on a ship’s deck, equipped with a cast iron stove, where meals were prepared. Early guard’s vans were basic – open, adapted freight wagons with added brakes. As an afterthought, a small cabin was added for the guard’s comfort. As Messrs Barney and Nikandros have pointed out, braking efficiency was determined by the amount of wheel in contact with the rail, and the weight which that wheel exerted upon the rail. So while early vans were mostly four-wheeled, it became more common to have six- or eight-wheeled configurations. Ballast, such as concrete, iron, or water would also be added to the van, to increase its weight.

While being a guard on early trains was an important job, it could also be pretty rough. The wagons themselves were rigid, heavily weighted, and prone to move violently. In short, they were built for neither speed nor comfort, but solely to exert downward pressure on the rails. On the other hand, a certain amount of skill was required in the braking operation – braking too quickly could result in jerking, as the slack was taken up in the couplers, which could in turn result in one of them breaking. Even worse, from the guard’s point of view, was the fact that, as trains developed and became bigger and heavier, brakes were fitted to each piece of rolling stock. Now the brakeman not only had to apply the brake in the brake van but, upon hearing the signal, would have to leap up onto the walkway on top of each wagon and progressively apply the brakes.

Over time, guard’s vans came to be fitted out quite luxuriously. The one at Little River, for example, has a coal-fired stove, and cozy accommodation where a guard could comfortably pass those long and lonely hours between stops. It also has a dog box attached, where sheep or cattle dogs, or someone’s pet beagle could be housed.

But as things developed, there came to be yet more to the simple guard’s van than a large and heavy wagon that sat at the rear of a train to act as an anchor. Amongst the early carriage or wagon building endeavours in New Zealand was the F series guards’/plough van. These provided not only additional braking, but also assisted in spreading ballast. Because ballast can subside on a track after it’s been laid, it will need to be topped up. This was done by “hopper” wagons, which contained ballast that was released as the train moved over the track at a steady speed. The success of the operation depended on the skill of the operator, as he dropped ballast onto the track. Too much meant a lot of hand work to remove excess ballast, but the plough function meant that excess ballast was graded along the track, reducing the need for hand work.

In Aotearoa we have our fair share of hills, and of course, the steeper the incline, the more difficult the braking process. The fell system on the Rimutaka Incline, for example, called for a specially designed setup. Seven brake vans were built, two in Britain, and five at the workshops in Petone, and each had brake blocks that gripped, not the wheels, but the centre rail of the fell railway. Operating these brakes was a specialist job, and the operator proudly bore the title of “Incline Guard”. Ascending trains would have up to five brake vans, all at the rear of the train. When descending the Incline, three vans would be placed behind the fell locomotive, a fourth would be in the middle of the train, with one at the rear.

{To be continued...}

The images below are of an early brakeman, and of a train ascending the Rimutaka Incline.

11/06/2026

Guard's Van

Visitors to Little River often ask about the rolling stock at the rear of the station. So, for those of us who are not intimately acquainted with railway phenomena, we’ll start a series detailing the point and purpose of each. Let’s start here.

The secret under the tarpaulin at the end of the platform at Little River is an F guard’s van. It’s under a tarpaulin because, while the Trust fully intends to bring it back to its former glory, it is yet to gain access to its newly-renovated goods shed. But as we have a guard’s van, let’s now go back in time to see how guard’s vans originated. Because the origin of guard’s vans is a question that has vexed everyone at some stage during their lives, particularly as you no longer see them attached to the end of a train. So what was the point of them, and why did trains need guards?

The first trains on commercial railways were rather short and unassuming assemblies of three or four wagons drawn by a locomotive. The reason for the shortness was twofold: firstly, early locomotives were not particularly powerful, so they couldn’t pull much. For example, Stephenson’s Invicta, which he built immediately after Rocket, generated a measly 3kw, or about 4 horsepower (compared to the 13,302kw, or nearly 18,000 horsepower produced by Novocherkassk 4E5K, currently Russia’s most powerful electric-powered locomotive). And secondly, the wagons were unbraked. That meant that bringing the train to a stop relied solely on the braking power of the locomotive.
As Messrs David Barney, David Haley and George Nikandros point out in their extraordinarily interesting article, Calculating Train Braking Distance, braking distance depends on the following factors (and I quote):

1. The speed of the train when the brakes are applied.
2. The deceleration rate available with a full-service brake application, which varies according to the coefficient of friction between the wheel and rail.
3. The delay from when the brakes are commanded by the train driver to when they actually become effective (brake time delay).
4. The state of the wear of the brake pads and the air pressure available in the brake cylinders.
5. The geography of the track, in particular the track gradient the train travels over from when the brakes are commanded to where the front of the train stops.
6. The mass distribution of the train.

All well and good, you’ll be thinking, if you’re still awake, but those early trains didn’t have air brakes. And you’d be correct in thinking that. In fact they had a rather cumbersome system involving a large screw, which through a series of linkages caused a brake block to apply itself to the wheel which, as pressure progressively mounted, turned less and less easily. Not very efficient, you’re probably now thinking. And that is very likely what William Huskisson was thinking on 15th September 1830, as he was mowed down in Eccles by Stephenson’s Rocket, cementing his place in history as the world’s first railway fatality. Although, to be fair to Stephenson, he circumvented the whole braking issue by equipping the Rocket with no brakes.

The fact of the matter is, the more difficult it is to stop a train, the more likely you are to hit something. Like William Huskisson. The braking issue was aggravated by the fact that wagons or carriages on early trains were linked by a rather cumbersome system called a buffers and chain coupler. The history of couplers is a whole different story, and it could take up hundreds of interesting pages. But let’s just make it simple and say that the buffers and chain coupler required tensioning with a turnbuckle until the buffers were compressed against each other, and the whole shebang was as unreliable as it was difficult and time-consuming to operate. The couplers frequently broke, and it was mandatory for early train drivers to look to the rear when they set off on any journey, waiting for a signal from the guard to reassure them that the train was in fact following the locomotive. The guard, of course, being at the rear of the train, would have little idea when braking was required, so he relied on a signal from the driver, which was usually three short blasts of the whistle.

Hence the importance of a guard’s van, or as they were initially called, “break vans” (because they came to the fore when the train broke in half), and then “brake vans”, because that’s what they did. And braking was particularly handy if a train happened to break in half on an incline, because the back half of the train would run back down the slope, while the drive would continue on, blissfully unaware that half his train was missing. And then, assuming the back half reached a point of equilibrium, and eventually stopped, it would sit there, posing a substantial hazard to the next train that came along. It therefore became the task of the guard to ensure that lights were placed correctly. A signalman would need to see the red tail light at the rear of a train, as it passed. Then he would know that the train had not been broken, and he could open the line.

{To be continued...}

09/06/2026

The support and interest from so many people has been encouraging, many of whom have probably been unaware of the Little River Railway Station Trust, or what we aim to do.
The images of the damaged rolling stock will give you some indication of what we've managed so far. Our ambition has been to restore each piece to its original condition, and to do that we have the original goods shed, behind the station, which has now been transformed into a full workshop. However, to get them in there, we need to extend the track and install a set of points. The design for this has been completed, we've bought the track, and we're just waiting for Council approval before we can begin to raise funds.
Attached are some images from the magnificent display achieved by the people at Lumsden - the kind of thing we'd like to duplicate over time. Clockwise, from top left, the interior of a carriage; a derrick; interior of the steam locomotive; front view of the steam locomotive; interior of a passenger car.
The Trust always welcomes new members, so please don't be shy about contacting us if you'd like to participate, or just provide support.

05/06/2026

Some examples of the damage done by mindless individuals. When they were successful only in cracking the windows on the passenger car, they kicked the door in. All the windows on the locomotive have now been destroyed and, again, the door kicked in.
The new door for the passenger car (pictured in the workshop) is currently being made up by local craftsman, John G.

05/06/2026

We been in a bit of a self-imposed recess for the past year and a half, while we sort through the logistics of getting our rolling stock into the shed, so that each piece can be restored to its original, pristine condition. It’s been slow work, but we are making progress.
Number one priority is to have security cameras installed. Unfortunately, there are always those whose hobby is destroying other people’s property, and some of our wagons, and more particularly the passenger car, have suffered damage that would amount to thousands of dollars. Fortunately, members of the Community Workshop have the requisite skills to repair much of the destruction.
Joe and James from Zaptech have designed a security system that will also issue a warning to intruders outside the hours that you would expect visitors, and we are just waiting for Council approval to install.

Send a message to learn more

09/01/2025

Behind the old railway station in Little River, backed up to the locomotive, is our passenger car, and again, if you came into this world more than sixty years ago, you’ll remember these. They were the backbone of passenger rail transport throughout the country for decades. Designed by New Zealand Railways, the frame on ours was built in 1916 at the Newmarket (Auckland) workshop, and the body was added in 1924, then re-built in 1969. It served its active life in the South Island, and until its arrival in Little River, it had been working on the Taieri Line. The original cladding was kauri, and the ornate interior fittings were the workmanship of a bygone era. We’d particularly like to get this carriage back to its original condition and, as always, welcome people with skills to assist. The image is of Aa1030, restored by Steam Incorporated.

05/01/2025

Most people will have noticed the array of rolling stock at the rear of the railway station/craft station and perhaps wondered what it is. The wagons, carriage and locomotive have been acquired by the Little River Railway Station Trust, with the long-term goal of restoring them. Now that we have a workshop, that goal has moved that much closer.
At the head is a DSA Class shunting locomotive, manufactured in England by the Hunslet Engine Company. Fifteen Hunslet shunters were imported by New Zealand Railways, and all found homes in the South Island. If you’re of a technical mind, the locos were originally fitted with a National M4AA6 diesel engine, developing 250 horsepower, but all were eventually upgraded to Caterpillar D343T engines, turning out a more respectable 315 horsepower.
At 30.5 tons, the Hunslet is no lightweight, and as ours came from Dunedin, you may wonder how we got it here. The loco was brought up on a transporter fitted with rails, and it was then craned into its present location, on the tracks. Unfortunately, it has suffered some vandalism since its arrival.

31/12/2024

Nevertheless, timber was getting out. The Waimakariri bridge was built, and in 1869, after delays caused by a lack of capital, construction work on the Rakaia road/rail bridge began. At 1,370 metres long and 5.26 metres wide, it simply soaked up timber being milled in Little River. The design was a disaster, and once bunds at both ends washed out, the bridge would be lengthened to 1836 metres (see image). Totara and matai were also finding their way into Christchurch, with all of it still being floated and hauled to its destination.
As the 1860’s progressed, a number of things began to conspire against the future of the wooden tramway. Firstly, money. Grosvenor Miles, a prosperous merchant and partner of White had been bled dry, or at least as dry as he intended to allow himself to be bled. Secondly, Christchurch residents were increasingly unhappy with the above-ground rails, which, as you might imagine, created a significant hazard, particularly where they ran down Lincoln Road. And thirdly, the real railway with real trains was now a real possibility.
In 1873 residents were given permission to remove sections of wooden rails adjacent to their properties, and promptly set about doing so. And as these sections of the line disappeared, the prospect of a wooden tramway to Little River withered on the vine, and finally evaporated.
Timber and produce would continue to be barged, hauled, horsed or walked into and out of the district, and the good folk of Wairewa would have to wait another thirteen years before the real railway, with real steel tracks, arrived in town.