George Gray's New Zealand MV memories

Of particular interest are the New Zealand things.. The generator at Waikaremoana probably supplied my home in Hastings when I was a child. I am not sure when our national grid was completed.
I don't ever recall seeing the Metrovic logo, but do recall seeing AEI at the Wairakei power station, the geothermal plant in the middle of the North Island.
We were shown around by an English engineer who came out with the project and stayed on.. always a risk for pommie firms sending their folks to the ends of the earth! Wairakei had (has?) a large lathe put in to enable sets to be balanced at rebuild, Apparently they were so good it was never needed!
The intention was to avoid a long hard drag back to Auckland or Wellington, but strangely large jobs had been dragged from Auckland just to take advantage of this lathe!
The high-pressure sets were being pulled out and taken to a new station a distance away, as the geothermal steam pressure had dropped. This left the intermediate and low-pressure sets, with huge condensers many stories high.
If my memory serves correctly something like thirty tons of steam a second at less than 1 p.s.i. went through! Impressive!
Karapiro, page 224, has spawned a lovely lake, well used for rowing and other recreation.
Arapuni was a disaster, apparently a London-based engineering firm walked off the job leaving New Zealanders ti finish it! The mountainside moved a measurable amount, and the power station had to be closed and drained while a channel was waterproofed! It's all in a book about our electricity industry.

The product I remember personally is the Auckland trolleybus on page 233.
The picture could be a works photo. There doesn't seem to be any trolley wire or post installation in the picture.
I am not sure but that could be a coat of arms on the side. When I know these buses in the 1970s they had Auckland Regional Authority along the waistline stripe. Previously they had stated Auckland Transport Board. When new?
They were always lettuce green with cream stripe as far as I am aware.
Towards the end the green buses were a real patchwork quilt, as the workshops kept prepainted panels to rivet on after minor accidents for a quick turnaround.
Uniforms were green too, if you watch The Zoo, from Auckland zoo on Sky TV, you will see the staff have the same uniforms today.. probably left overs from the buses!
The seats were pairs of bucket-style leather seats. I remember mum, who had a bad back anyway, insisting on taking the window seat. As she was moving into it the bus accelerated viciously, so mum's back was thumped by the ridge between the pair of seats.. not nice.
Many of these buses had driver comments pencilled on the panel behind the destination blind, above the driver's seat. Things like
goes like hell, but you try stopping her.. or
brakes pull left, careful!
I always read these while waiting to pay my fare. Handy info for a teenage straphanger.. who couldn't reach the strap!
The steering columns in these buses were not strutted in any way, only being attached at floor level where there was a massive casting. The dashboard was typical of English vehicles of the day, a small affair on the column with just a couple of dials, speed and Amps I guess. The result of this was as the front axle crashed over the bumps in our former tram-roads, the cracks in the concrete are still apparent through the tarseal in some places, the whole steering column shook violently, and the driver had to hang on lest he lose his grip on the wheel!
If you want to learn more about these vehicles see Wikipedia about our Museum of Transport and Technology = MOTAT.. see this link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOTAT_collections#Trolleybuses

The bodies were apparently Metrocammell.. it would be interesting to learn the relationship between the various Metros!

The Wikipedia gives these buses as 1953 vintage, but mentions the Herne Bay route, which was Route 1, converted in 1949. I guess the kits started arriving here in 49, and were completed in 53. And the book is up to 1949 too.
This bus is numbered 19, and they were 5 to 59 so it could be a New Zealand picture.

If you look very carefully the the bus picture, you can see the side destinantion blind says ONEHUNGA, which is where I live today!
(Say Oh-nee-hung-a)
This was Route 10 from memory, along Manukau Road, following the route of the world's only coast to coast tramway... Auckland is built between two great harbours, the Waitemata on the east coast, and the Manukau on the West.
They also used to go from Queen Street Auckland to Queen Street Onehunga, though the latter has been renamed Onehunga Mall, which is still disliked.

As a teenager I was fascinated by bus-driving technique, pre-selector gears on the Daimler diesels, not nice in gear at the traffic lights standing above the under-floor engine, when the revs hunted from near stall to near take off. I believe this was a characteristic of CAV injector systems.
The trolleys were much nicer. The left pedal was the accelerator, and there was a mechanism for limiting the rate at which the driver could push the pedal down. I believe it was hydraulic, and the drivers used to push with all their might, and some cursed simultaneously, but they could not out-gun the mechanism!
Then occasionally the power went off and those with workable batteries could clear an intersection, those without were like stranded whales.
And they were heavy. I seem to recall a tare weight of 12 tons or so being painted on the side, and I calculated 17 tons or more fully loaded.
The railway overbridge in Avondale had a Maximum Axle Load 6 Tons sign.
So an empty bus was okay, ... if the weight was evenly distributed, which is unlikely. I recall looking out the window while crossing this bridge and watching the ends of the deck planks flexing upwards! The bridge was tarsealed but of course the seal cracked between the planks. The road was often closed for replanking! When the trolleys came off, Leyland offered us the National, a horrid piece, and Seddon a bus that was 2-tons overweight, with a promise to reduce the weight. We declined both, and bought Mercedes, the first time we had German. Now it is all Mercedes or MAN.
Now we have power reforms and our once public-owned integrated system broken up into a multitude of companies, who switch tariffs and contracts at different times of day. I wonder how the ageing switchgear likes all this?
Now I have an idea how it works too.

Again thanks for the book, I hope you find my comments interesting. Please publish them on the blog if you like.

Regards
George Gray
Auckland
New Zealand