'Not in our backyard': Old trains dumped in North Island town

A central North Island town has become a dumping ground for some of Auckland's unwanted waste - its old commuter train carriages.

The once-busy rail yards in Taumarunui are quiet, but they are far from empty, playing host to dozens of the decaying wagons.

Locals hate it, but KiwiRail is remaining coy about its plans for the "disposal process" of the 29 it owns.

About a decade ago, new commuter trains were introduced in Auckland, and something needed to be done with the old passenger carriages.

So many were taken 280 kilometres to Taumarunui, where they are crumbling and covered in graffiti, sitting next to the main road through the town.

KiwiRail did not say why the town was chosen to play host to the carriages, although there are many rail tracks and sidings at the old rail yards.

Whatever the reason, residents of the King Country town - population about 5000 - hate seeing them.

"They should send them back to Auckland," Karen Lord said. "It's just an eyesore."

"It's a bit of an eyesore when you go past all the time. It's sad that they ended up in Taumarunui," Delphina Chase said.

"They're a bit of an eyesore. They weren't so bad when they first came down here," Kelly Brown said.

The carriages arrived in 2016 and for a while some were covered to protect them, while round-the-clock security guarded against vandalism.

Many have been taken elsewhere or sold - but for the remaining few dozen the security has stopped, there were no covers, and the elements and vandals were corroding them further.

Ruki Rangi said it was a waste of money having them lie fallow, particularly when they could be used for housing.

"It's sort of like as country folk - we like to still think of ourselves as country folk - that we're taking the city rubbish. Why don't they just put it in their own railway yards?

"They have been here for a while. It's just been the same thing. People are thinking, 'Why don't you use them for something else?'

"It seems like they [KiwiRail] think it's a rhetorical question, but it's not."

Brown agreed.

"There's lots of those rail yards in Auckland who have got lots of space. Maybe they can put some of the [carriages] there.

"I think Taumarunui is one of those towns - lots of Aucklanders can't even pronounce it - so it doesn't mean much if some of their old trains are just dumped [here]. 'Dump them in one of those hick country towns. They won't care'."

Despite the eyesore on the tracks now, the railway holds a special place in Taumarunui's history, as Ivan Stevens explained.

"There's the famous song, of course, that everybody knows," he said of the Peter Cape folk song, Taumarunui (On the Main Trunk Line).

"It's a railway town. It was here before the railway, but it was the railway that developed the town, with the timber industry."
 
Stevens was part of the Taumarunui Rail Action Centre, which was preserving heritage items and restoring a huge model railway layout based on the town's steam heyday of the 1930s and 40s.

Originally built by railway workers, it was stored at the town's railway station until the centre took it over to its headquarters in an old goods shed at the rail yard.

Inside, as well as the 26 metre by 6 metre layout, there were other items of railway heritage, including the crane used to fish carriages out of the water during the 1953 Tangiwai disaster, when 151 people died.

It also has one of the old Auckland carriages, but Stevens said the condition the others were left in was not acceptable.

"I think KiwiRail should be made to move them or clean them up, or do something to them.

"They're completely distracting from the rest of the town. We've got a beautification programme and we've done a lot of work on the main street to improve things, and we've got these horrible carriages sitting there."

Ruapehu District mayor Weston Kirton said highlighting the centre's work was part of a grand plan to push the town's rail heritage, and one day play host to an old steam engine.

First, he wants the deteriorating carriages gone.

"We're the victims of the unsightly appearance of these carriages and we've got some concerns about the activities in and around these units, and we have evidence of people using them for drug deals.

"We just want them gone, really, because it sends the wrong signal to our town."

The district council was doing its best to convince KiwiRail, and the Glenbrook Vintage Railway, which owned a few carriages, to move them.

"The idea was preserve them so they were capable of being sent elsewhere, and being sold somewhere else, and that was always the thinking."

But it never happened.

Now Kirton thinks most will have to be scrapped because of their poor condition. Although some could be suitable for tiny houses, he said.

Whatever their future, Taumarunui residents were shaking their heads at what has happened.

"I lived in Auckland for quite a few years so I used to travel on those trains all the time, but I didn't expect them to be in my home town when I came home," Chase said

"A lot of the youth are out there tagging them and it just makes it worse," Emma Seator said.

"I think the sooner they go the better. They've moved some, but not enough."

[h] Future of the trains

In a statement, a KiwiRail spokesperson said Auckland Transport owned the carriages when they arrived in Taumarunui, but the rail operator had since bought 29.

"We have initiated a disposal process for the 29 carriages we now own, which will likely be done in stages," the spokesperson said.

"Any details regarding the disposal and/or value of the assets is commercially sensitive information."

It did not answer questions about why they were taken to Taumarunui in the first place and why the security patrols stopped.

Glenbrook Vintage Railway general manager Tim Kerwin said it owned 13 carriages parked in Taumarunui.

"Originally, we had 19, but five were sold and shipped away. Another we generously donated to the local museum set up in the old goods shed in Taumarunui via Weston Kirton," he said.

"We are currently working on plans to shift them to our base at Glenbrook. There are just a number of engineering and operational matters to work through to get them moving - but they will move."

Kerwin said the railway had a strong relationship with Taumarunui, which included running almost monthly services to the town, and others nearby, during the Covid pandemic to promote local businesses for domestic tourism.

"When no other trains stopped at Taumarunui - ours always did."

The railway also worked with local man Peter Davison's Spiral Tours venture, running trains from Taumarunui that experienced the Raurimu Spiral.

"Outside of this, we run semi-regular heritage trains into the King Country, offering locals a chance to experience rail.

"It is highly likely that in the future these carriages will service Taumarunui on one of our heritage trains coming to the King Country."