NZR WF Class - Into Service

Into Service

The WF class was designed primarily for suburban duties, although the class saw a wider sphere of operations; during their early years several ran main-line trains in Taranaki for a time before being replaced by larger engines. Four were later dispatched to Nelson, while seven others (numbers 389/90/93/98/432/34/68) were sent at various times to the Picton Section between 1915 and 1936. By the time of the final Picton transfer in 1936 there were six engines - the seventh, WF 398, had been returned to the North Island three years previously in 1933.

The majority of the class however settled down to suburban and branch line duties. From 1935 onwards, two engines of this class, WF's 398 and 400, were converted to one-man operation by lowering the coal bunker and fitting one continuous back window to the cab, and allocated to work the Greytown Branch. One locomotive would be kept at Cross Creek during the week while the other was stationed at Greytown, and would swap around when the Greytown engine needed to come to Cross Creek for servicing. Both locomotives were withdrawn on closure of the Greytown Branch; WF 400 in December 1955, while WF 398 remained in service for several months primarily to run the demolition trains and during which time it moved the Greytown station building to Woodside Junction to become the new goods shed there.

In 1909, trials were conducted with WF 436 to see if a solution could be found to reducing the amount of smoke produced by engines passing through the Lyttelton Tunnel. 436 was briefly converted to oil-firing for this purpose, but although the tests were satisfactory, oil was at that time three times more expensive than coal, and so WF 436 was reconverted to coal firing. Eventually, the problem was solved by the electrification of the line between Christchurch and Lyttelton in 1929 when the EC class entered service.