That wasn't so great - Ruatangata to Whanganui is a long way. At some stage the driver picked up another train, took off from where the last video ended in the middle of nowhere. I didn't recognise the place where he stopped either and don't think it was Whanganui exactly.
Stopped at the yard in Whanganui East (the site of the former East Town Railway Workshops, now a logging yard). Falls within Whanganui station limits as far as signalling and interlocking is concerned.
In the video they arrived at East Town Yard, a former marshalling yard built in 1959 on the outskirts of Whanganui East to take the pressure off the downtown Whanganui Yards. This spacious yard also had stabling roads for rolling stock heading to and from the nearby East Town Workshops (closed 1986). Whanganui is located at the end of a 5km branch that breaks away from the Marton-New Plymouth Line at Aramoho Junction. East Town yard was downsized slightly around 1987, then underwent a big tracklifting excersize in 1998. Around 2002 another siding was stripped out. But logging has been the savour of this location as a yard! A siding was relaid by the NZ taxpayer in 2014. Then they started renewing some of the motor-points at each end and concrete sleepers were laid at selected spots. Although forestry is a fickle industry, this location is forecast to remain a busy log load-out siding through the 2030's.
The countryside is so green compared to Australia, the track size looks to be 2.6 ft. The drivers are not speaking English so perhaps some form of Maori ? I only saw one high tension three phase power transmission line, lots of sheep as well. This is a side of Kiwi land I have not encountered.
Hard to tell on a video but I knew it wasn't standard gauge. I have since looked at other Kiwi train driver view videos , the amount of work that would have been done to bring rail to NZ is simply amazing. The amount of mountains and river crossings to be put in place would have been very heavy on labour and seems to have been done mostly in the 19th century, as Australia was. I don't think NZ had the same problem as Australia did with the separate states using different gauges.
