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To the rugby on the ‘Rocky Island Line’
An AB-headed excursion train at Hamilton station in 1949. Test match specials often looked like this – nothing special. J.A.T. Terry Photo
Rugby, as well as the railways, helped define New Zealand. ‘Rugby specials’, whether they were taking fans to test-match city or Ranfurly Shield challenges, were a constant presence on the New Zealand rail network at a time when excursion trains were almost as common as the expresses and limiteds.
The popularity of the Ranfurly Shield—and the trains that carried supporters—was profound. A shield match in Christchurch in the early 1930s attracted three special trains from Invercargill, which equated to 1500 passengers. Four trains from the West Coast ferried 2000 more.
In the very early days special trains took fans to rugby matches, before the Ranfurly Shield had even been established as the apex of inter-provincial supremacy, and before test match rugby became a regular winter celebration. In 1893 New Zealand Railways, Wellington Section, announced details of a special train set to travel from the central city to Petone, where ‘football matches’ were scheduled to be played.
Further on during the golden age, when the railways was such a bounteous employer and rugby prevailed as the working man’s religion, it was not surprising that the department established its own representative rugby team. They even had their own symbol of supremacy—the Football Challenge Cup. In 1927 teams representing the locomotive staff of Canterbury and Otago provinces slugged it out in lousy weather for the right to hold the cup aloft.
W.H.H. Grapes, reporting in the New Zealand Railways Magazine, revealed the success of the Otago team and went on to postulate on the significance of such matches in terms of unity within the railways environment.
The railways, as well as rugby, continued to help define New Zealand. Many prominent rugby players and administrators worked for the railways during the years when trains ruled the transport landscape. William ‘Massa’ Johnston, masseur for the 1934 All Blacks who beat Australia 2–1 in a test series in Australia, was also a leading referee, after playing for his country in 1905 and 1907. Just as significant was his feat of working for the railways for 30 years as a cleaner, fireman and driver. He may well have worked on a test-match special, which would have been entirely appropriate: an AB working on an AB engine.
Was it any wonder that rugby specials took on a semi-sacred significance during the golden era? The trains were glory-bound, particularly when the All Blacks developed the habit of winning most of their games.
The test-match special was special. Travellers looked forward to getting to the game as much as they enjoyed the game itself. The camaraderie and expectation was as much about the All Black’s chances, as it was about the chances of finding friends for life on the rollicking, inevitably boozy trains headed for test-match city.
The true spirit of the test-match special was best exemplified when rugby followers were obliged to catch the train in the depths of night. Taumarunui used to be a departure point for trains heading for Auckland and Eden Park. No one knew for sure when exactly the train left, but test-match specials were never about punctuality and exact adherence to details. That was women’s stuff. The Taumarunui train used to come into Te Kuiti at about four in the morning. Or five.
Blokes had gathered at the station as early as three, never really sure when the bugger would arrive. Rugby was a winter sport, and three in the morning in towns like Te Kuiti was a challenge. Fog floated down. Failing that, the breeze chilled your bones. Unless it was raining of course, which it often was. In later years of the golden era, at least the pie cart, pulsing just beyond the station, was a sanctuary. Pie and chips for breakfast would put a lining on the stomach. Those who failed to avail themselves of such padding often consigned themselves to various states of alcoholic oblivion.
K 909 waits in the Taumarunui yard in 1950. The K engines were once compared to front-row forwards in rugby: big, bustling, no-nonsense. It was appropriate that they should pull the test match specials. J.A.T. Terry Photo
Even in urban centres test-match specials departed in the middle of the night. It wasn’t just farmers and small-town merchants who found themselves clustering on frost-flecked stations as the steam-hauled special thundered out of the dark. In 1956, a pivotal year for rugby in New Zealand, writer Gordon Slatter and his mates travelled from Christchurch to Dunedin to see the first test of the epochal series between the All Blacks and the Springboks.
These were deeply conservative times. Egalitarianism was rampant. Tall poppies were plucked. Even the All Blacks were expected to reflect the ‘average is excellent’ tag. Fast wingers were suspect, as were tall half-backs and intellectual locks. Wingers were best if they were earnest plodders who pinned their ears back and went for the corner. Half-backs were expected to be short, nuggetty and heroic. And if you had a PhD in something, you couldn’t hope to be whistled up into the forward pack.
Ron Jarden playing for Wellington in 1950. Sometimes he was too nifty for his own good: a fast ‘tall poppy’ at a time when we were all supposed to be average hewers. ATL-114/161/11-G
On the homeward journey of the test-match special from Dunedin all anyone could talk about was Ron Jarden, the All Black winger. As the train gathered speed around the moonlit fringes of Otago Harbour, it was Ron Jarden this and Ron Jarden that. Jarden was one of those really quick sprinters who inflamed the emotions of a certain type of Kiwi. Apparently he couldn’t tackle, and he wouldn’t go for the corner. The thing was, in the first test at Carisbrook, Jarden had won the game and the All Blacks went one-up in the series. Jarden scored seven of the All Blacks’ 10 points, including an audacious intercept try from halfway that wrapped up the game. You needed to be a suspect sprinter to have scored that try.
The guard wandered through as the debate heated up. Jarden was all right after all. He may have been a sprinter, but he could kick goals and he did make a tackle or two. But still there were those, after a bottle or two too many, as the return train went through the ‘marus’—Oamaru and Timaru—who reckoned Jarden’s try was pure luck.
By now the test-match special was a party on wheels. Away from the strictures of the wife and six o’clock closing, a day of days was celebrated. The guitars chunked, empty bottles continued to roll and clunk and the guard turned a blind eye. New Zealand had enjoyed a superb day. The All Blacks had beaten the champion Boks, and the railways had made much of it possible. The war was over, the golden weather of the post-war years glowed, even though the temperature outside was minus something. Inside, the toasty warmth of the steam-heated carriages drove demons away.
Everyone drank a toast to everyone else, but no one thought of drinking a toast to the train. Trains were just part of 1950s reality. Even the vanquished Springboks would be travelling up the same tracks in their specially designated Vulcan railcar. They had a match to play against combined South Canterbury, Mid-Canterbury and North Otago in Timaru, just as soon as they’d licked their wounds and drowned their sorrows after their first test loss.
The Springboks’ railcar was quite a talking point, even in the mid-1950s when train travel was taken for granted. In fact two railcars—a Standard model in the North Island and a Vulcan in the South Island, had been allocated to augment their air travel. From Whangarei in the north and as far south as Dunedin the Springbok railcars became a fascinating if temporary part of the cluttered New Zealand rail environment. They travelled as far west in the North Island as New Plymouth, and as far east as Gisborne. In the South Island, as well as taking the main trunk route, they ventured west on the Midland Line as far as Westport. In all, more than 3380km of territory was traversed by the railcars and the occasional railways bus. The tourists saw local rail wonders such as the Raurimu Spiral on the North Island main trunk, the Mohaka Viaduct, the country’s tallest, during the railcar leg between Napier and Gisborne, and the longest tunnel in the Commonwealth through the Rimutakas on the journey between Wellington and Masterton. Between Timaru and Christchurch, New Zealand’s longest bridge across the 1.6km-wide Rakaia River would have raised a few eyebrows.
As the test-match special slowed to cross the same bridge, on-board celebrations continued to rage. The mood of the passengers was even more raucous than on the journey down to Dunedin. More beer was drunk and the singing drowned out any sounds the train could make. For those feeling the worse for wear there was no escape, not like the rugby fan who stepped off a test-match special later that season as it stopped momentarily in the Whangamarino wetlands, on the way home from the deciding test match in Auckland. The queue to the toilets was altogether too challenging and he thought he’d answer the call of nature when the train made an unscheduled stop.
The stillness of the ballast-strewn ground after the lurch and sway of the carriage disorientated his booze-inflamed senses and he found himself listing and tumbling into a swampy recess. By the time he’d extracted himself the train had picked up surprising speed, a bit like Peter Jones when he scored his ‘buggering’ try in the day’s test match—the final game of 1956—and the shivering fan was left alone to contemplate a lonely, darkening backwater and not too many lights off in the distance.
The memory of Peter Jones’ match-clincher kept his spirits up as he clumped down the tracks. That and the feeling the triumphant All Blacks were not too far removed in egalitarian New Zealand from himself and the other baying fans on the terraces. He and his mates were not too surprised to see Bill Gray, the All Black strongman in mid-field, waiting for a train at Auckland Station to take him back to the Bay of Plenty. Bill Gray, a hero in the 1956 series, was joining the exodus from test-match city just like any other ordinary joker.
Meanwhile, beyond the Rakaia Bridge, Gordon Slatter and his companion on the home-bound special from Dunedin found the day catching up with them.
The rugby specials were a male domain. The ladies were not so much scratched out, they were simply otherwise detained. Someone had to look after the kids and keep the home fires burning. Gender roles were sharply delineated back then. Men brought home the bacon, women cooked it. Men fought in wars, women grieved. Women had babies, men followed the rugby. It was just the way things were. Men followed the rugby—literally. Rugby specials served that purpose. Even the men who enabled men in general to follow the rugby—engine drivers—were swept up in the passionate following of rugby.
J.M. Grainger, in his book On and Off the Rails, wrote about a crew who piloted a train to a race meeting in a small country town and found themselves with time to kill before the return train was set to depart. They visited the local billiards saloon, and had a meal and a beer or two at the hotel. Meanwhile, the steam engine waiting back at the station should have had its fire maintained to enable a quick getaway once the races were over. All would have been well if the crew had returned to the train after the billiards, nosh and beer. However, the game of rugby got in the way and the crew could not resist.
When they finally scrambled back to their engine the fire had gone out. The train was due to depart, and in desperation they seconded several railway tarpaulins for fuel. Luckily this provided an adequate, if smoky, foundation for the fire to be reignited. Luckily too, the racegoers were late getting back to the station and the train was able to leave under its own steam.
It had been a decidedly ‘rugby, racing and beer’ day in times when the three-pronged symbol of a male-dominated society prevailed. Not that society always approved of such a trifecta, particularly when good-natured bonhomie lapsed into mayhem. Drunken shambles on rugby excursions and sports trains in general was sometimes a problem.
All due decorum on this race day train in the early 1900s, but sometimes all hell broke loose on rugby excursions and sports trains. ATL-PA1-Q-100-22-3
As far back as 1904 a train carrying Dunedin’s Alhambra and Union rugby club sides to and from Christchurch arrived home bejewelled with broken glass, discarded food, general rubbish and vomit. In 1937 a test-match train transporting Taranaki supporters to Auckland carried on the tradition. Carriage windows were broken, toilets blocked and further evidence of excessive alcohol consumption did little for the reputation of the railways and rugby followers.
In more recent times, I travelled on a train not designated a rugby special, although it might well have been. The mid-morning mixed train, number 437, took some mates and me from Te Kuiti to Taumarunui, ostensibly to watch a Saturday match between King Country and Thames Valley. The lone carriage held about 10 passengers, all of whom were heading for the big game. A knot of older fans began uncorking quart bottles even as the train began its stuttering climb up the Waitete embankment. My mates and I were still schoolboys and at that time—the early 1960s—most schoolboys were not in the habit of drinking on trains heading for the rugby. The older fans got stuck in though, every beer accompanied by a leer in our direction. The toilet door, for no apparent reason, was wedged shut. Perhaps it was locked by railway staff who reckoned no one travelled on the mixed trains any more and those who did wouldn’t need to use the ablution block at the head of the carriage.
The older fans did and it was no surprise to us when they took to urinating off the balcony of the old wooden carriage, as the long train snaked over Waitete Viaduct and through the Porootarao Tunnel, as it disappeared deeper into the heart of the King Country.
It was a good day, in the sense that King Country beat Thames Valley. I’m not too sure what happened to the schedules relating to the departure of the return train—or the kick-off time at Rugby Park, Taumarunui. Both seemed a bit skew-whiff. The train left earlier than anticipated, and the kick-off was at 3.00pm, not 2.30, as scheduled. We were forced to leave the park early, at a time when King Country were comfortably enough placed, at 13–6, not learning until later that the home side upped the ante in the final quarter to take the game 21–6, but we were happy enough.
It had been a great way to get to the rugby, and we made a sound decision to forfeit watching half an hour of a game that was in the bag. Don’t know about the older fans, who had been adamant, in a beery sort of way, that they had return tickets—and would be honouring them.
Being stranded in Taumarunui did not appeal, although the older fans probably continued drinking at the after-match function and the local clubs until closing time, before being consigned to a lonely vigil on Taumarunui station until the northbound express arrived in the early hours of the morning. Even then, because they weren’t booked on the express they may have had to wait even longer for the limited, which they weren’t booked on either. It may have been a case of sleeping fitfully on the hard station seats until the following day’s mixed train set out. They would have had any number of spare seats on that. (Several weeks later we learned the mixed train didn’t run on Sundays. Perhaps the older fans are still in Taumarunui).
At least Gordon Slatter, off the test-match special between Christchurch and Dunedin in 1956, made it home to a warm bed at the scheduled time—give or take an hour or two.