Ormondville Rail Preservation Group Inc.

The Bay Express: Worst Case Scenario!!

Perhaps the Whalleys of The Crown Studio, Palmerston North, were not just living up to their surname when they mistook this train hauling workers' huts through Manawatu Gorge, as being the Napier Express?

Perhaps instead they knew that about 100 years later, the 'Napier Express' was under threat of becoming merely the bedraggled assortment of railway workers' huts that Ormondville Rail Preservation Group has been scrounging from all over, hooked on behind the little steam train that a number of our members are busily restoring in Napier!!!

The lower postcard, with the date 1 July 1905 handwritten on the front, shows the original un colourised photo. Was it originally a passenger train or not? There are many old postcards of the Manawatu Gorge dating to the early 1900s, and many have been colourised.