Waitara to Lepperton Railway Trip

Recently I was in Taranaki for the Garden Festival, and I noticed that one of the 'events' was to take a trip along the Waitara to Lepperton Railway line, run by the Waitara Railway Preservation Society. To be fair, I am not sure I would have got around to taking this trip, except it was... raining... so not ideal for garden viewing. But as it turned out, this was a dose of nostalgia plus for me, and I am so very glad I took the trip.
To put things in context, my Dad, James Kevin Riordan, was a railway guard based at Waitara during my childhood.

One of the events I recalled from childhood, when I was just four, was taking a walk down to the Waitara railway yards from our house, and seeing a wagon backed up against the engine shed. I remember asking Dad why it was there- I must have been familiar enough with the yards to know a wagon wouldn't usually be there. And Dad told me it was so they couldn't steal the train. I thought he was being a bit silly with that answer. But years later I discovered that the train had indeed been taken on a joy ride the previous night, and my father was one of those involved with 'chasing' it.

The railway line to Lepperton forms one of my special memories. When I was of school age, Dad would occasionally ring home in the school holidays if the train was only going as far as Lepperton, and we could hitch a ride in the guard's van. The guard's van door might even be open, and it seemed awfully daring to go near it. I was fascinated to watch as wagons were coupled and uncoupled and as Dad used the lever to switch over the lines that the train was moving on. 

My father, sadly, passed away of a heart attack when I was just eight, but these precious memories are still there.
So, with all that personal history behind me, I boarded the train at Waitara on 3 November 2023 for the trip to Lepperton. It was staffed by enthusiastic members of the Waitara Railway Preservation Society, and I was duly issued a ticket for the trip.

There was a great viewing wagon on the rear, but it was rather too rainy to enjoy it on this trip!

At Lepperton was an exciting part of the journey for me. The Railway Preservation Society had bought the line etc but couldn't travel on the KiwiRail part of the tracks. Where the historic line from Waitara met the Lepperton tracks, a farmer had kindly sold them an adjacent strip of land and they had built a 'deviation'. But to go back to Waitara, it wasn't really safe for the engine to be at the rear, as we had several road intersections to cross, so the engine was allowed to be driven along a section of KiwiRail track, then changed over onto the deviation to be at the front to take the train home to Waitara again.

These kind of movements were exactly the kinds of jobs my father was in charge of as a guard. When I saw the guard rejoin this engine to the carriages, it took me right back to childhood. 

There was no sign left of the Lepperton yards, and no sign of the tall signalling tower. I had actually asked if these were still in existence at the previous year's garden festival and was assured by locals that they did, but no...

We took the journey back to Waitara, over the Waiongana Stream, past the Brixton sidings where the Society has yards to repair buildings and rolling stock etc, and under the overbridge where Big Jim's Hill road passes by.

We passed above my old primary school, St Joseph's Waitara. I am pretty certain this house has been moved here more recently, as I seem to remember looking straight up the hill across paddocks to see the train occasionally passing by while I was at school.

Then finally, just a short distance from the Waitara Railway Station, we passed by the house that my parents built for us, and that we moved into in 1960. It used to have a quarter acre section below it that we played in, and where my father had planted fruit trees of many kinds. (Now there are a couple of townhouses on the lower part of the section.) It made me realise, that every day when Dad left Waitara in the guard's van, whether his journey was to Lepperton or New Plymouth, he saw our family home and was reminded of his young family.

This was a great train trip- highly recommend it- and for me personally, it was a very nostalgic one.
Margaret Riordan
12 November 2023.