Locomotives of New Zealand

The first locomotive in New Zealand was built by Slaughter & Co in Bristol,[1] arrived at Ferrymead[2] in May 1863[3] to work on Canterbury Provincial Railways' 5 ft 3 in gauge.

[4] Lady Barkly, in use on Invercargill's jetty in August 1863 during construction of the Bluff branch, was another early example of a steam locomotive operating in New Zealand.

[8] Similarly, a steam crane was converted during construction of the Port Chalmers railway,[9] though it could only haul about 10 tons.

[10] The first locomotive entirely built in the country was a 10 hp (7.5 kW) engine for the Foxton Tramway contractor, Ashworth Crawshaw,[11] by R. S. Sparrow & Co in Dunedin,[12] also in 1872.

Diesel-electric and electric locomotive classifications originally consisted of an upper-case D or E respectively followed by a second and sometimes a third (sub-class) letter.

The second and third letters are sometimes represented as smaller-sized upper case (for example, as seen on many locomotive cab-side number plates).

Following the introduction of the computer-based Traffic Monitoring System (TMS) and consequent renumbering, classes were identified by the two upper-case letters with the first letter remaining D or E respectively and sub-classes being indicated by a third upper-case letter, such as DAA (DA modified for hump shunting), DAR (DA with rebuilt superstructure), DFT (DF with turbo-conversion), DXR (rebuilt DX) and so on.

Experimental railcars included the following: Livery: New Zealand steam locomotives after the late 1920s were mainly completely black with red buffer beams at each end.

All three were later re-powered by A & G Price at their Thames workshops; Bagnall 3079 with a 315 hp (235 kW) Caterpillar D343T diesel engine and Twin Disc torque converter, while the two Portland locomotives, numbered WPC 10 (3132) and WPC 11 (3144) received 204 hp (152 kW) Gardner 8L3 diesel engines which were used in the DS and Drewry DSA class locomotives.