Opapa (or Te Aute) railway station is a preserved station, probably dating from 1896, on the

Palmerston North–Gisborne Line The Palmerston North–Gisborne Line (PNGL) is a secondary main line railway in the North Island of New Zealand. It branches from the North Island Main Trunk at Palmerston North and runs east through the Manawatū Gorge to Woodville, where i ...

Hastings District Hastings is a town in the United Kingdom, most famous for the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Hastings may also refer to: Places Australia * Hastings, Tasmania, a locality * Hastings, Victoria, Australia ** Electoral district of Hastings, Victoria, ...

Hawke's Bay Hawke's Bay ( mi, Te Matau-a-Māui) is a local government region on the east coast of New Zealand's North Island. The region's name derives from Hawke Bay, which was named by Captain James Cook in honour of Admiral Edward Hawke. The region i ...

, south of

Hastings Hastings () is a large seaside town and borough in East Sussex on the south coast of England, east to the county town of Lewes and south east of London. The town gives its name to the Battle of Hastings, which took place to the north-west ...

in New Zealand's

North Island The North Island, also officially named Te Ika-a-Māui, is one of the two main islands of New Zealand, separated from the larger but much less populous South Island by the Cook Strait. The island's area is , making it the world's 14th-larges ...

. Although it closed in 1981''Names & Opening & Closing Dates of Railway Stations in New Zealand'' by Juliet Scoble (2012) and is now in a meshblock with a 2018 population of only 222, Te Aute is unusual in 3 respects: * It is now one of less than 40 wooden stations remaining on their original sites * In 1898 it was one of only 18 stations with a refreshment room * An

official name A legal name is the name that identifies a person for legal, administrative and other official purposes. A person's legal birth name generally is the name of the person that was given for the purpose of registration of the birth and which then ap ...

change restored its original name of Te Aute, after being known as Opapa from 14 September 1913 to 12 June 1997. Nearby the railway climbs a steep bank and there is a radio mast, an old shop and a lake.

History

Name

There has been some confusion around the name of Te Aute. On 8 December 1912 the name of the next station, Pukehou, was changed to Te Aute ( Te Aute College is near Pukehou) and Te Aute was changed to Te Nahu. Then, on 14 September 1913 the name was changed to Opapa and Pukehou reverted to its original name. It was reported in 1915 that the new name was still not popular, as it had been defaced 9 times. From the 1930s the address 'Te Aute, Opapa' was sometimes used.

Construction and alterations

Te Aute station was first built between 1874 and 1876. It was part of the Paki Paki to Waipukurau contract, tendered on 15 July 1874 for £19,532 by Charles McKirdy, of

Wellington Wellington ( mi, Te Whanganui-a-Tara or ) is the capital city of New Zealand. It is located at the south-western tip of the North Island, between Cook Strait and the Remutaka Range. Wellington is the second-largest city in New Zealand by ...

, who built the

Rimutaka Incline The Rimutaka Incline was a , gauge railway line on an average grade of 1-in-15 using the Fell system between Summit and Cross Creek stations on the Wairarapa side of the original Wairarapa Line in the Wairarapa district of New Zealand. The ...

and several other lines. A local contractor tendered £29,173. There were allegations of mismanagement and disputes about the contracts. However, in 1876, the Minister for Public Works,

Edward Richardson Edward Richardson (7 November 1831 – 26 February 1915) was a New Zealand civil and mechanical engineer, and Member of Parliament. Born in England, he emigrated to Australia and continued there as a railway engineer. Having become a partne ...

, attributed delays only to unexpectedly heavy land claims and floods. S Tracey and Allen, of Napier, tendered £7,989 for track for the Paki Paki-

Waipawa Waipawa is the second-largest town in Central Hawke's Bay in the east of the North Island of New Zealand. It has a population of At the 2013 census, it had a population of 1,965, a change of 2.2 percent from the 2006 census. The town is locate ...

length in September 1875. Te Aute station was tendered on 12 April 1875, the platform on 17 May and the goods shed on 25 August. Joseph Sowrey got the £195 contract to build the station on 30 August and completed it by 29 October, the £485, x goods shed by 14 February 1876 and a water tank by 26 May 1876. McLeod & Co built a 5th class stationmaster's house and loading platform by 26 October 1875. There was a Post Office at the station from 1885 to 1949, with a telephone from 1914. On 10 October 1895 a fire started in the refreshment rooms and burnt down the station, but just 6 days later authority was given for a new station. By 1896 Te Aute had a 5th class station, platform, cart approach, loading bank, cattle and sheep yards, fixed signals, stationmaster's house, urinals and a

passing loop A passing loop (UK usage) or passing siding (North America) (also called a crossing loop, crossing place, refuge loop or, colloquially, a hole) is a place on a single line railway or tramway, often located at or near a station, where trains or ...

for 36 wagons. In 1912 an automatic tablet exchanger was added. Railway houses were built in 1926, 1934, 1938 and 1948. In the 1931 earthquake the station was described as badly wrecked. Electric lighting came in 1940.

Refreshment rooms

Refreshment rooms were added in 1878. In 1882 the station was described as, "utterly miserable and inadequate both in regards office and waiting accommodation, the

telegraph Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to the recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas p ...

wants accommodation, and the refreshment building unsuitable, does not belong to Department, and the owners ask too much for it". Some buildings were moved from Hastings in 1883, but not a refreshment room. In 1885 the refreshment room licensee raised the roof and made improvements. From 22 March 1887 trains stopped for at least 5 minutes at Te Aute. Complaints were made in 1896 that trains didn't stop long enough for refreshments. In 1889 £175 was spent to add a ladies room. In November 1895 £45 was approved for erecting railway-owned refreshment rooms to replace the burnt ones. From then on they were let by 3-yearly tenders, until at least 1912. A 2010 guide said the rooms were open from 1897 to 1945. The refreshment rooms were at the north end of the platform, separate from the main building. Aerial photos indicate that the rooms were demolished between 1965 and 1972.

Services

Initially Te Aute was a temporary terminus, from Spit. It isn't clear when the extension from Paki Paki opened. It may have been 11, or 12 February, though Parliament was told opening was on 16 February 1876. Whichever, it seems the passenger trains still ran only to Paki Paki, at least until late March 1876 and Te Aute continued to be served by a mail coach, the horses being changed at Te Aute. The train/coach journey from Napier to Wellington then took 2½ days. Te Aute remained the terminus until Monday 28 August 1876, when the line was extended to Waipawa. Te Aute then had 3 trains a day in each direction, reduced to 2 in 1881 and back to 3 in 1883. From the opening of the link to Wellington in 1891, Te Aute had 4 trains a day in each direction, which continued in 1896. Opapa featured in annual returns from 1895 to 1918, when it lost its officered station status. For example, in 1917 Opapa issued 3,077 tickets and loaded 69,137 sheep.

Closure and restoration

The station closed to passengers in about 1966 and the goods yard was lifted in 1981. Tablet control ended in 1991. In 1994 a few people started restoring the station and, in 1996, formed Friends of Opapa Railway Station Incorporated Society. The Society re-piled the station in 1998 and replaced fascias, gutters, wall boards and toilets in 1999, but was dissolved in 2004. Opapa Railway Heritage Trust had replaced it in 2015.

Te Aute bank

Te Aute has a 1 in 46

gradient In vector calculus, the gradient of a scalar-valued differentiable function of several variables is the vector field (or vector-valued function) \nabla f whose value at a point p is the "direction and rate of fastest increase". If the gr ...

to the south of it,

Pukehou Pukehou is a farming locality in southern Hawke's Bay, in the eastern North Island of New Zealand. Pukehou is located on State Highway 2, about halfway between Hastings and Waipukurau. The locality's name (originally ''Pukehouhou'') is Māori, ...

being higher than Te Aute. To give trains a faster run at the bank, the

curve In mathematics, a curve (also called a curved line in older texts) is an object similar to a line, but that does not have to be straight. Intuitively, a curve may be thought of as the trace left by a moving point. This is the definition that ...

at its foot was eased from to in 1938.

Incidents

A Wellington to Napier express, hauled by A Class 600, derailed on Opapa bank on 22 September 1925 in a shallow cutting. It was found to have been exceeding the speed limit on a bend. The Commission of Inquiry recommended that gas lighting be replaced by electric on express trains, as the Pintsch gas had set fire to 5 of the derailed coaches. The conversion of lighting was said to be speeding up, but conversion from Pintsch to coal gas was made as late as 1932. Three people died due to the crash. The driver was imprisoned for 2 years for manslaughter. A freight train had come off the line at the same spot on 21 February 1920, derailing 10 wagons and killing about 200 sheep. On 25 October 1996 a

gangway Broadly speaking, a gangway is a passageway through which to enter or leave. Gangway may refer specifically refer to: Passageways * Gangway (nautical), a passage between the quarterdeck and the forecastle of a ship, and by extension, a passage th ...

fell off from between the coaches of a

Steam Incorporated Steam Incorporated, often abbreviated to Steam Inc., is a railway heritage and preservation society based at the Paekākāriki railway station, Paekākāriki at the southern end of the Kapiti Coast, approximately 50 minutes north of Wellington on ...

excursion, whilst descending the bank.

Top Opapa/Te Aute Grade Siding

Top Te Aute Grade Siding opened about June 1877 and was closed by 1993. It too had a name change on 14 September 1913 to Top Te Opapa Grade Siding. The siding was at the top of the 1 in 46 gradient, south of Te Aute. An interlocking tablet was installed in 1923.

Te Aute Store

About to the south, beside SH2, Te Aute Store was in business from 1858 to 1982. It was registered as a Category I 'Historic Place' with the

New Zealand Historic Places Trust Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga (initially the National Historic Places Trust and then, from 1963 to 2014, the New Zealand Historic Places Trust) ( mi, Pouhere Taonga) is a Crown entity with a membership of around 20,000 people that advocate ...

on 28 June 1990, who suggest it may have been the longest continuing single business in a wooden building in the country. However, that assessment doesn't mention that a store next to Te Aute Hotel burnt down in 1883. The Hotel burnt down in 1880 and 1936, when the current hotel was rebuilt.

Opapa Broadcasting Station

Also to the south, a high

radio transmitter In electronics and telecommunications, a radio transmitter or just transmitter is an electronic device which produces radio waves with an antenna. The transmitter itself generates a radio frequency alternating current, which is applied to the ...

and

Art Deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unite ...

broadcasting station were built in 1938. 2YH began broadcasting on 17 November 1938 and became 2YZ in 1948. The manager's house has gone, but the aerials and hall remain.

References

{{Reflist

External links

1887 photoaround 1900 photo of Te Rotookiwa and railway

Photo of two railcars at Opapa

2013 video of freight train passing through station

2014 photo of station and platform

2016 photos of trains at the station

Google Street View of station in July 2020
Railway stations closed in 1981 Rail transport in the Hawke's Bay Region Buildings and structures in the Hawke's Bay Region Railway stations opened in 1876 Hastings District Defunct railway stations in New Zealand