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There can be little doubt that the rapid expansion of Canterbury from the late1860s was largely driven by the access of the rail tunnel to Lyttelton – but it was a gargantuan task. BY HUGH DE LACY.
That it took 14 years for the concept to become reality was less a reflection on the colony’s determination to expand than it was on the enormity of the project. The need for a tunnel through the Port Hills was obvious to the settlers from the first four ships when, in 1850, they struggled with their belongings up over the rim of the volcano’s crater and surveyed the vast expanse of the Canterbury Plains below them. It was immediately clear that immigrants would be deterred, and exports diverted to other ports, if the only access to Lyttelton remained by coastal shipping round the headland and over the Sumner bar. The England that the settlers had left behind was in a fever of railroad building, and the Canterbury settlers were convinced, almost from the start, that a railway tunnel was the key to the colony’s success. So within three years the Canterbury Provincial Council began considering possible routes but, with wool exports still in their infancy, there seemed no way to finance such a formidable project. It took a single-minded politician ready to wager his career on the scheme to get it under way. William Moorhouse was a lawyer who arrived at Lyttelton aboard the Cornwall in 1851. He quickly became involved in Canterbury politics, as robust a forum then as it is today, and succeeded James Fitzgerald as Superintendent in the elections of 1857. The following year he stamped his name on the Lyttelton rail tunnel by calling on the Provincial Council to “determine the best method of securing safe and expeditious transport of our marketable productions to the place of export”. Wool had by then become the base of the settlement’s economic viability, and there was no alternative to a railway for transporting the clip to the ship. Surprisingly, Fitzgerald, the colony’s founding Superintendent, opposed the idea of a train tunnel, but by then he was back in England as the Canterbury Company’s agent, and Moorhouse was able to get the backing of both the council and the Premier, Edward Stafford, to raise a $600,000 loan to finance the project. By then too the Provincial Engineer, Edward Dobson, had been working on plans for the tunnel for four years. Dobson was an architect as well as engineer who had bought land through the Canterbury Association and arrived at Lyttelton in 1850 on the Cressy, one of the first four ships. He went on to serve as Canterbury Provincial Surveyor for 14 years from 1854, then became Christchurch City Engineer, and did a stint on railway projects in Australia before settling back in Christchurch. On the basis of Dobson’s exploratory work, a Provincial Commission was set up which consulted Robert Stephenson, the son of British rail pioneer George Stephenson, who in 1829 had set the bulk transport industry alight with his 60kph Rocket locomotive on the Liverpool-Manchester line. However Robert Stephenson was in poor health, so he passed the commission over to his cousin, George Robert Stephenson, and it was he who recommended the eventual route through the volcano’s wall. Even before the money was raised, Moorhouse and Stephenson had engaged an English contractor, Smith and Knight of London, for the job. The company was supposed to take five years from 1859 but pulled out soon after it got through the overburden and hit the hard volcanic rock. To get the project started again, Moorhouse went to Australia in early 1861, returning a public hero later that year with not only the necessary money but a new contractor, Holmes and Company of Melbourne. Moorhouse was greeted on the Ferrymead quay by a huge crowd singing “Hail the Conquering Hero Comes”. This was too much for Fitzgerld, who quickly returned from England and set up the Christchurch Press newspaper specifically to oppose the project. With the Union Bank of Australia putting up the money, however, there was no stopping Moorhouse, and Holmes and Co was granted a $480,000 contract for the 2.4 kilometre tunnel and 10 kilometres of line from Lyttelton to Ferrymead. The tunnel itself, including stone portals at either end, cost $380,000. Work started at both ends of the tunnel in late 1861 and was supposed to be completed in five years, but the drive through the wall of the volcano – the first time such a project had been undertaken anywhere – proved harder than expected. It wasn’t until 1867 that the drilling team from the Lyttelton side broke through precisely where Dobson said it would. By this time the locals were getting restive, especially since the railway had been operating between Christchurch and Ferrymead since late 1863. To dampen the public’s frustration, the line was laid through the tunnel immediately after the breakthrough, and operated during the day, with the work crews labouring over the widening and drainage at night. The line’s 1.6002 metre (5ft 3in) gauge was determined by the size of the surplus locomotive Holmes and Co acquired for the ballasting work from the Melbourne-to-Essendon Railway. The gauge was narrowed to the New Zealand mountain railway standard of 1.0668 metres (3ft 6in) in 1877. The line was electrified with an overhead contact system in 1928 by English Electric, and used six 1200 horsepower locomotives to provide 24 passenger and 12 freight trains each week-day. Electrification was phased out in 1970, largely because the road tunnel had opened by then, and the freight service continues to this day using diesel locomotives. There can be little doubt that the rapid expansion of the Canterbury colony from the late 1860s onward was largely driven by the access the rail tunnel gave to the port. Moorhouse gave the project its political momentum, but it would have got nowhere had the people of the embryonic settlement of Canterbury been the least bit daunted by the scope of the project. • Lyttelton Tunnel story sources: 1. Illustrated Encyclopaedia of NZ, 1986; Contractor Vol.31 No.4 May 2007 |
For a colony that was only two years old, Canterbury was taking a quantum leap into the future when it decided in 1853 to bang a 2.4 kilometre rail tunnel through the wall of the extinct volcano that separated Christchurch from its port of Lyttelton.