Over the last 20 years the Walsh Memorial Library has been developing its collection of oral histories. The library has over 400 hours of recordings archived. Interviews with former MOTAT volunteers and staff members give accounts of stories about the collection. The following are excerpts about locomotive F180 Meg Merrilies from one such interview in July 2017 with Jim Savage.
Meg’s history:
“. . . it was built in 1874 by the Yorkshire Engine Company in Sheffield. The story as it goes is that . . . when it got to Wellington, they offloaded it onto the wharf and for some reason it sat there for a while. And you know stormy Wellington got wet and so forth . . . they said when Meg was uncrated all the parts that had all been packed in wood wool . . . well it had got all wet and it had stuck to all the chrome work, and it was pretty messy apparently.
“1935 or around that time – 1930s, early30s they decided to write it off and it was sent to Hutt workshops to be scrapped and it sat there in Rotton Row for a while. And then East Town workshops wanted a new shop shunter or wanted something for a shunter . . . and it ran there 'til in the 1960s. So, its spent 90-something years working for the railways which was a bit of a record.
“Then the Centenary of Railways . . . they took it to Taumarunui and it was on display . . . the Railway Enthusiasts Society asked the Railways could they bring it to Auckland and run some excursion trips with it.
Meg was supposed to go back to Whanganui but a visiting Minister made the decision that rather than supplying MOTAT with a different loco as they had originally intended, they may as well use the one that was already in Auckland. That decision caused a bit of a stir with the boilermakers back in Whanganui . . .
“As it was, the boilermakers and fitters down at Whanganui weren’t too happy. They’d just - unbeknownst to the Railways . . . rebuilt the firebox in it and the Railways wrote it off because the firebox was had it . . . I was going to Whanganui to the hundredth anniversary of East Town workshops . . . and I said to this friend there ‘Where’s the boilermakers shop?’ And he said ‘Oh it’s down over there . . . Why?’ I said ‘Well I want to go and ask them about Meg’s boiler.’ He said ‘I don't know whether I’d do that if I was you. You won’t get a very good reception.’. . . so I went down there and I asked this old guy that was there . . . I said ‘I'm from MOTAT’ His actual words were ‘Look, here’s one of the bastards that stole our loco.’
Meg’s restoration:
“…we took it all apart, checked it all out, said the boiler should be reparable, looked at everything else,… When we got it done . . . the first boilermaker it went to they did all of what we wanted but badly. It had some defects in the welds . . . and it went to another company and work was done on it there and we were told it was all finished. . . . we looked at it and thought it didn’t really look really good. . . . we got the guy to come and ultrasonically test it again. And he still had his original notes from when he’d done it. . . . he said ‘They haven't fixed one thing. Not a one. Everything’s still exactly as it was.’
“Yeah well they (the rivets on the boiler) looked good from the outside but we filled it up with water . . . and the water was pouring out almost as quick as we put it in. So I had to get the boiler inspector to come along and he had a look and he says ‘You’ve got two choices, you can weld it up or you can try caulking it.’ . . . Neither Paul nor I had ever done anything like that. . . . the boiler inspector gave us an idea of what we needed . . . the water was pouring out and he said ‘Go on with a hammer and a chisel by hand’ . . . we sealed it all up full of water. And there was a few little seeps and the boiler inspector said ‘Let the water out . . . leave it for a week and then fill it up and try it again.’ . . . Never leaked since. So we learnt all about caulking seams in boilers which was good because I had to do a lot on that water tank.
“. . . the first guys that were restoring the handrail on the cab they took it off and threw it in the scrap bin. And I said ‘What are you doing that for?’ ‘Oh it’s all worn. We’re going to make a new one . . .’ So I took it out and put it away and then when we started doing the job I put that back on. . . . the grooves that are worn in it where people put their hand upon the thing, it’s taken 140 years of people’s hands doing that to get to us. That’s part of its history, its patina. You don’t throw it away.
“We've been over the paint on it, when we first looked – stripped it down and looked at doing it up on the underframe, underneath, I rubbed it down in a place that was pretty obvious it had never been you know chipped or anything before. And I got right down to what I'm pretty sure was the original paint.
“. . . it had some horrible colours. It was brown. It was an awful yellow colour – a light yellow. It was white. It must have been hard to keep clean. Pitch black – wheel black. Then it had been green and everybody keeps telling me that’s what colour it should be – which it wasn’t.
“I don't know whether it was 12 years of hard work or 12 years of working my brain and trying to figure out how we're going to fix things that had been done wrong . . . I think that’s about one of the achievements of my engineering career that – considering we didn’t really have the gear that they had. Been quite a learning curve.”
The MOTAT library is open Monday to Friday 10am to 4pm (except public holidays). Contact via phone 098453690 or email library@motat.org.nz.
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