I went digging through my photos and found a bunch of old gems, both of the fert works in New Plymouth, the port and the ones below showing some of tonnages we used to move out of Palmer Road, to supplement the ones in my Sunday Waffles post.
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52 shunt pulling away from Te Roti junction on the Kapuni branch with a long rake of empty urea containers bound for Petrochem at Palmer Road.
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Standing on Palmer Road looking east as the shunt approaches. The siding on the right is the loop for the LPG siding (behind the fence extreme right).
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At the end of the branch, the shunt will run around the containers in the Kapuni yard and take them back to Palmer road to push them into the sidings. This move was necessary when the "loop" in the Petrochem siding was full and there was no room to work the sidings with the loco on the west end of the rake. The P+O containers behind the loco have been pushed out of the Lactose siding by their little Price.
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The little Price built chain driven shunter of the Lactose company pushes a UK wagon out of their siding and onto the shunt.
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The Price had no buffer in the back end as their siding was a single dead end track, and they would pull the empty wagon into their siding and load it, then push it out and get the next one. This loco is now at Paihiatua.
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Some days the Petrochem tonnage was so great two DC's were needed to get it all back to Stratford.
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And another shot of those fine looking ZG's at Palmer Road.
I have got a bunch more photos of the port, and of the various locos that have worked at the fert siding in New Plymouth over the years sitting in the draw, which I hope to scan soon..... best to strike while the irons hot, on a roll and all that :-)

AH
Steve mc
8/16/2012 04:06:04 pm

wow some biggies on the branch back in the day.. thanks for sharing these with us andrew :)

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William R
8/16/2012 10:25:43 pm

Tasty.

what year were the Palmer Road ones snapped? I note 4127 still has a snail on the side which seemed to get rare quite fast.

Keep up the good work!

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AH
8/17/2012 06:41:10 am

As best I can figure, the photos were taken late '94 or early 95' not long before I moved to Auckland to join the circus...

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8/17/2012 07:10:29 am

Still can't get over how flash those new ZGs look(ed).

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Ev
8/18/2012 07:44:02 am

The photos again go to show how "space age" in appearance the ZG's were when they first came out.

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