Operation
Most were initially based at Wanganui's East Town depot, but two each went to Wellington and Westport and one to Whangarei. By World War I, they were equally distributed between Westport and Whangarei.
In their early years, WB locomotives ran all kinds of trains from their main base in Wanganui - the prestigious New Plymouth Mail passenger express, goods trains to Napier and through the Wairarapa, and local mixed trains of passengers and freight from Wanganui to Hawera and Palmerston North. Within a few years, more powerful locomotives displaced the WB class from many of these services and they were sent to join their class-mates in Westport and Whangarei.
On the isolated Westport section, the dominant traffic was coal from the various inland mines served by rail, and the WBs worked these services for a number of decades until they were displaced in the 1950s by the WW class. During their years of operation, the WB class was seen as ideal for operations on the lines that fanned out from Westport, and four were overhauled and given new boilers in the mid-1920s to prolong their lives.
Read more about this topic: NZR WB Class
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)
“Waiting for the race to become official, he began to feel as if he had as much effect on the final outcome of the operation as a single piece of a jumbo jigsaw puzzle has to its predetermined final design. Only the addition of the missing fragments of the puzzle would reveal if the picture was as he guessed it would be.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)