Waikokopuwhere????

Am_Fet writes:

I was at a loose end Thursday night as far as reading material was concerned, but luckily managed to find a neat wee booklet that I had previously flogged from the "TranzRail Library" (when such a thing existed). Its called "Private Railways in Hawke's Bay" by A.C Bellamy, and although its only a thin wee slip of a thing ( a mighty 24 pages) its still a great read.



As much as I enjoyed reading about the works at Tomoana and Whakatu, the Fertiliser works at Awatoto and the Napier Harbour Board line, the real surprise was this:

"During the construction of the Wairoa to Waikokopu Railway by the Public Works Department in 1923, a siding was laid into the freezing works a short distance east of Wairoa. From this time until the linking up of this line in 1938 with the railway being built northward from Napier, meat from these works was railed to Waikokopu and shipped from that port. During this period the siding was worked by the Public Works Department, and from early photographs it appears the meat was loaded into insulated boxes on "M" wagons."

And then for good measure, they included this photo:



The description and photo was enough to pique my interest, so a quick search on GE quickly found this:



So with its big horseshoe curves and station, it would seem that Waikokopu is one of those rare "prototype for anything" stations. But where was the port? So at great risk of ridicule, I found and scanned in the only plan I could find in a crowded office surrounded by engineers....



The thing here is that this plan is "Tracks Suggested By the Railways Department" (their way of saying to the PWD "By the way, your station planning skills are crap...") but a close look does show the original alignment of the PWD trackage. The wharf is a simple loop with hardly any loading space at all. I would love to find some of the earlier plans mentioned in the index, but they had all been hared off somewhere ages ago (pity) so I couldn't verify the position of the 3-way turnout in the photo.

Still, what a great station to model. Modest, but with a bit of interest. As one of the crowd that had gathered to see what the mad foamer was up to commented, "It looks like its custom made for one of those Pommy model railway layouts..."