In today’s video, we take a look at what was meant to be a short video, but honestly this railway was such a fascinating failure I had to keep going
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Picture & Information References:
https://the-lothians.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-saga-of-southlands-wooden-railway.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluff_Branch#Operation
https://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Gov13_09Rail-t1-body-d4.html
https://nzhistory.govt.nz/page/opening-railway-invercargill-bluff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Branch#Today
source
I love New Zealand and all, but my god are the names of so many places hard to pronounce
It's weird that this is the second video on this subject. Seems the first video wasn't enough on the idea.
Crampton style locomotives are notorious for having poor traction. The weight of the boiler is largely carried on the unpowered front truck; the driving wheels just carry the cab and firebox. I wonder how well a proper 0-6-0 would have done? The railway demonstrated clearly that wooden rails are not suitable for a permanent way but with a decent locomotive they might have had a chance.
Wonderful video Train of thought 2:12
Calling a railway in one of the southernmost inhabitable places on earth the "Great Northern Railway" is certainly a fascinating move
2:10 perfect pronunciation👍👍👍
USA 1st used rails out of wood with iron straps
but the straps would curl up in heat & would go into the passenger cars
theres even rails mounted onto stones!
Ballarat & Geelong pronunciation was spot on mate you sound like a local.
The whole geology of the place makes me think an Ewing-style monorail system would have worked. Pushing forth with the idea of using two linea of rails and a heavy locomotive looks foolish in hindsight, the guy who said that a horse powered tramway is the best way forward knew his stuff…
there used to be a wooden railed horse-drawn tramway that brought jarrah timber down from the darling ranges to the canning river in perth, western australia. it ran along bickley road. besides the jarrah being used locally, it was required in the building code in melbourne (as bearers between red gum stumps and local hardwood floor joists) and was used to build block roads in london and possibly other uk cities.
Wooden rails are cool, but I got distracted by the music, which I think is "Forest Maze" from Super Mario RPG.
As old-new Top Gear wold say, ambitious but rubbish.
I'm wondering how much different it would be if they had the technology of today. Electric traction and wood preparation techniques may make a short light railway viable.
Taking your wooden railway to the next level. And a little too far.
Why was Great Northern Railway such a common name anyway? There was one in Britain, one in Ireland, one in the US, one in Canada, one in Australia, and apparently also one in New Zealand.
You get what you pay for.
First image and I’m sold.
NZ MENTIONED, WTF IS GOOD DECISION MAKING
All seriousness tho, great video, as a native NZ'er, I didn't know it had this much history. All I knew about the line was that it was built and it failed, so thanks for expanding my own horizons.
I'm glad to hear that a loco and a short piece of track were saved. You made me smile when you mentioned it was quicker to walk 😀
The United States tried a similar idea with strap-iron rails.
In the mid-18th century, somebody decided to try and increase the lifespan of wooden rails by introducing the concept of strapping a thin layer of iron over the wooden tracks. Being served by horses, this proved to be quite the benefit. It was not so beneficial when the iron horse began to show up.
A little context might be needed. When the railroads began their big expansion in the 19th century, the United States was rather notorious for being… shall we say, careless with the way they handled things. Track was laid out quickly and often unevenly, and derailments were very common. Funny thing was that trains ran so slowly, it often was seen by passengers as little more than an inconvenience, even if they had to physically get off the train and assist putting it back on to the tracks. (Some even saw it as "part of the experience".) As far as the companies were concerned, they needed to lay out the tracks as fast as they could before a competitor did it first, so the fact safety wasn't a big concern by passengers meant that the railroads would take full advantage of that.
So with that in mind, a lot of railroads decided to go cheap wherever they could. Some decided to use strap iron rails as a means to save money and time. This was all well and good, provided maintenance was thorough.
But there was a major drawback that soon became apparent. As train wheels ran over these straps of iron, the action would often cause the strip to roll-form. The faster and heavier a set of wheels ran over the iron, the more pronounced this effect. This results in the ends of each strap curling. Eventually, these ends of the straps (known as snake heads) would get just slightly too high, and an approaching wheel would kick it up through the wooden carriage/freight car, often leading to derailments, serious injury, and even death.
Eventually, it was found that any money saved by using strap iron was only short term. Even if you ignore the accidents, maintenance alone on these tracks meant that you would lose money when compared to using fully iron rails in the long run. Between this and improvements in casting iron, strap iron rails soon became obsolete.
Beware the Island’s railways
Do we ever confront the fact that in admiration of railways we never look back and say "yes the conquering of land for valuable commodities was destructive to people and land and we must reconcile with that past for the present and future"?
American logging pole roads would like a word with the kiwis.
I have a cabin in Northern Minnesota. there are a few documentations of log railways in the area, and I believe my cabin is by one. if you follow the trail, it goes straight from a former freight area in moose lake minnesota, out to the nemadji forest. I don't believe it was made out of steel track, but rather wood. I have no proof of any of this as the remnants have been lost to time. it could have easily just been a pull track for steam tractors to drag logs out
I can't be the only one who sees the brilliant irony of the wooden railway being brought down by a Mrs STEEL 😂
I thought the sleepers were usually the only parts of the railways that were wood. These insane ideas just keep surprising me.
Shoutout to the kiwis for making a real life Thomas Wooden Railway a reality
Another New Zealander here, and while I've heard of this bizarre wooden railway before (or at least, the Lady Barkly locomotive), I never knew it had such a detailed history.
As for the pronunciation of Maori names, I don't blame ToT for struggling with them. Elsewhere in the country, there are names just as hard (if not, even harder) to pronounce as (Lake) Wakatipu and Makarewa. Cases in point; Taumarunui, Rotorua, Tauranga and Ngaruawahia.
In Germany we say "Who buys cheap buys twice"…
The rails would also have been quite flammable, I assume 😅
Quite a few of the early geared locomotives ran on wooden rails, but these were never meant to be long-term investments.
as a kiwi and Invercargill local you got the names of locations pretty good and be happy you never had to pronounce a town in hawkes bay simply named Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauo
Lady Barkley actually ended her life at a sawmill in Central Southland. The Cramptons were sold and exported back to Australia, but the ship sank off the West Coast, taking the locos to the sea floor with it.
Yessss, I just found out about this a few weeks ago and I love it, it's such an awesome but poorly thought out system, especially the NZ incarnation.
The unmentioned third way to find out if someone’s a witch: building train tracks out of em
All pronunciations good except perhaps Wakatipu (and I don't know the proper local Maori pronunciation). But one name you didn't put a disclaimer on was Menzies (1:40). My understanding is that the traditional Scottish pronunciation is something like Mingus (as in Charlie); it's all to do with Scottish English tending to use the same glyph as z for the letter yogh, which spells sounds we write with g and/or y. See, the spelling of the English language is perfectly rational, if you just go back to the 14th and 15th centuries (and yes, Scots at that time called that language Inglis).
Northern Railway: yes, it's about as far south as you can go in Mainland NZ (Bluff feels right at the end of everything, and rather wonderful), but it's Northern because it's heading north. I'm in Auckland, and the big road up and down the island is State Highway 1, and it's a motorway here. Going out of town to the north, it's the Northern Motorway; heading south, it's the Southern M. Didn't actually strike me as all that odd when I first came here. Perhaps directional naming doesn't work with railways in Britain because everything is referenced to London???
Wooden Railways. I love the jokes and the story here.
I Like Railways And Steam Engines
Strangely enough the rail grade from Invercargill to bluff is considered to be the smoothest section of the entire South Island Mainline.
Strangely only used for timber tramways!
The real GNR was in the UK
There was another wooden railway in tierra del fuego , Argentina. It was built by prisoners in a local jail iirc. It i is now rerailed in steel and is a tourist train.
It is supposedly the most southerly railway on earth and is called the train at the end of the earth or similar.
“Sometimes the cheaper option will end up more expensive than you anticipated.”
Talk about irony!
Parts of that story have a curiously modern ring to them! Certain recent English railway projects come to mind! The story about the lady in a hurry is also attributed to other railways, including the Listowel & Ballybunnion…….
Super. I have seen a couple of wooden railways. One had an old Mack truck with eight wood track wheels, and it looked like a flatcar with a truck cab. The Mack pulled an eight wheel trailer, and both could be loaded with timber. Another had a vertical boiler "Shay" type steam locomotive, with half round wheels that looked like an automobile rim without a tire, which ran on logs that were used for the rails, and had two four wheel flat "train" cars to transport the logs. At least one was a wooden railway that was built with finished 2 × 8 lumber that was stacked up and nailed down to the ties and each other, with the joints staggered to make the rail, and don't forget strap rail, a metal strip secured to a wooden rail supported by ties. 💙 T.E.N.
Gosh, I'd never heard of this before! Here in the north east of England, we had hundreds of miles of horse-worked wooden railways shifting millions of tons of coal for more than two centuries. But in 1805 a travelling steam engine was tested, and it was realised then that rails would need to be made of iron if such contraptions were to succeed. And that was that… or so I thought until this video popped up in my recommendations! Strange and interesting, thank you!
I have a question about an locomotive called a Union Pacific 2-8-8-0 1304 steam locomotive.
There is only ONE way you can build a railroad that has wood instead of steel for the rails, and that is to use wheels that are softer than the wooden rails. The only way to do this is to use pneumatic rubber wheels on the train.
“Not today, I’m In a hurry” BROOOO
You got a thing for nzs od bits don't you
I mean logging railroads in the US have done this before