A little disappointing today, we drove to Granity where we had arranged to be picked up by Outwest Tours in their speciality Unimog for a tour of the Stockton Mine, a normally 5 hour tour. The Unimog duly arrived and we were dressed in hard hats and hi-vis vests and initially headed to the Ngaukawa coal transfer station.
Rosetta our tour guide for today was concerned about a hot smell from one of the wheel rims and called her brother-in-law out for his opinion, the consensus was that there was a problem and after talking to her boss the tour was cancelled.
We were given plenty of interesting information on the coal transfer station
Ngaukawa Coal Transfer Depot
and the workings of the mine by Rosetta who had worked for 4 years driving trucks up there. She was a (scuse the pun) a mine of information. Anyway the decision was made to cancel. Two of the mine employees offered to take us to the top of the hill in two 4wd vehicles as a consolation so in groups of three off we went.
The coal is trucked to the top of the aerial ropeway by trucks and dumped into hoppers where it gets washed and reduced to 3 cm bits before being dumped into bins on the aerial ropeway for the journey to the bottom.
Down This Side to the Transfer Station
Looking Back from Station 5 to the Truck Dumping Point
Each bin has a capacity of 1.5 tonnes and the ropeway (about 2.5km long) runs 24/7, a lot of coal being moved to the railhead at the bottom where up to 5 trains each with thirty wagons take the coal over the Arthurs Pass to Lyttelton.
So although a little disappointed about the cancellation it was still made interesting by Rosetta and the two mine employees and turned out to be an interesting day after all.
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