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
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