CHEAP RAILWAYS.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 52, 20 January 1872, Page 4

CHEAP RAILWAYS.

Sir David Monro has furnished the “ Nelson Examiner” with a description of a locomotive wooden railway now at work in the Marlborough province. It is the property of Mr Brownlee, whose saw mill is situated not far from the highest point of the navigation of the Pelorus estuary, where it turns up the Kaituna Valley. The logs which he saws are felled in the Kaituna Valley stretching away to the eastward from his mills. To get these logs out of the forest, he has for some years found it necessary to make wooden tramways. For some time he worked with horses; but latterly for horse labor he has substituted the locomotive; and as I understood him to say, at a considerable diminution of the cost of haulage. His wooden railway consists of rails of rirnu 7x3-§, let in to cross sleepers of substantial matai, the sleepers at a distance of four feet from one another, the rails firmly secured by wedges of wood. There is not much ballasting; but some work has been done in the way of levelling and draining. Where the ground is hollow, and it is necessary to raise the permanent wad, this is accomplished by means of substantial blocks of timber, resting at right angles one above the other, and carrying longitudinal bearers into which the sleepers are notched. The work has been well and carefully executed, and looks substantial, and calculated to last for years. That it has been found remunerative, may be inferred from the fact that it is being pushed on and extended ; at the present time Mr Brownlee is putting a substantial railway bridge over the Kaituna River, alongside the bridge which was executed by the Provincial Government of Marlborough some years ago, and considered at the time a great triumph of provincial engineering. The gauge of the railway is four feet. I was informed by Mr Brownlee that the railway stood him for workmanship about £3 per chain, exclusive of the wooden rails. The cost of these he estimated at £1 per chain, making the total cost per mile £220. With a railway of this sort, loads of logs weighing as much as five tons, are hauled up to the mill by the iron horse at a rate approximating to ten miles to the hour —and there is no reason why, if it were desired, other things as well as logs might not be so carried. The total length laid down by Mr Brownlee is about four miles. The mill which it supplies turns out about 50,000 ieet of timber weekly, and employs from twenty-five to thirty hands. There is one defect in Mr Brownlee’s railway, which, if it did not admit of being remedied, would be a very serious one. The locomotive weighs seven tons, it runs on four wheels, and its pressure appears to be too great for the remu rails, which ai’e being rapidly crushed and splintered by it, requiring frequent renewals. In Mr Prosser’s experiments with wooden rails in England many years ago, eight tons, as far as I can recollect, was the maximum weight which a rail of beech wood was said to be capable of carrying, and beech I take to be considerably harder and tougher than remu. The wheels of Mr Brownlee’s locomotive have also got a bevel upon them, which has a tendency to throw all weight upon a small portion of the rail, instead of distributing it over the whole width of the bearing surface. The difficulty in question may be got over, I should think, in various ways:—l, by reducing the weighs of the locomotive; 2, by altering the shape of the tires of the wheels ; and, 3, by increasing the size of the scantlings of which the rails are made. I say nothing of other descriptions of timber, but possibly the evergreen beeches of this country, and in certain districts the rata, would yield a wood more suitable for rails than the rimu. Another suggestion we owe to Mr Crawford, the Resident Magistrate of Wellington : to surround the tire of the wheel with a belt of galvanised indiarubber. The insufficiency of the rails to support the pressure was the only defect that was apparent to me, although no doubt a professional engineer might have detected others. But in the meantime this wooden railway is doing excellent service ; nor does there seem to be any reason why its services should not be made available for other purposes than the transport of logs to a saw-mill.