Preservation
Class leader EC 7 along with EO 3 was donated to the Tramway Historical Society upon withdrawal. Stored in the Linwood locomotive depot, the locomotive was transported to Ferrymead by road in 1972, where it nearly ran away during the unloading operation. The two electric locomotives were stored by the tramway section until 1977 when the THS handed the two locomotives over to the Ferrymead Railway-based Electric Traction Group. Both locomotives were shifted onto the railway tracks using electrical leads off the 600V DC tramway overhead and several tracksets, which were moved with the locomotives to the railway. In 1978, part of the Ferrymead line at Moorhouse station was fitted with overhead catenary and in 1980, some test runs were done with EC 7 at 600V using the tramway power supply. This led to the acquisition of three mercury-arc rectifiers to power the railway, as well as the trams and trolley-buses.
With construction of a substation able to supply the railway, tramway and trolley-buses was subsequently commenced and in November 1988, it was officially opened with trains hauled by EC 7 on the electrified section of the Railway. EC 7 is periodically operated at the Park, usually double-heading with EO 3. This is due to the lack of electrification on the Moorhouse station loop, which does not allow one locomotive to head the train on its own.
Read more about this topic: NZR EC Class
Famous quotes containing the word preservation:
“The bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self.... And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)
“Is not our role to stand for the one thing which means our own salvation here but with which it will also be possible to save the world, and with which Europe will be able to save itself, namely the preservation of the white man and his state?”
—Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966)