Flyer to return as component of southern rail tour

The Kingston Flyer will have its to start with travellers in 8 yrs right now.

The Flyer, named for a passenger prepare that ran from 1878 till 1957, operated off and on as a heritage educate attraction among 2003 and 2013, travelling between Kingston and Fairlight.

In 2011, right after a 3-12 months hiatus, it was revived by the late David Bryce, who invested $1.3 million restoring the engines and carriages right before relaunching the operation.

But it ran for only two summers, and was mothballed until eventually a team of Auckland-centered traders purchased the educate and involved land and buildings in 2017.

Today it will have 360 travellers for the duration of a specific leg of the inaugural Great Southern Educate Tour.

Pounamu Tourism Team taking care of director Paul Jackson explained the group had been doing work intently with the Flyer’s engineer, Neville Simpson, to set collectively the tour for the tour functions.

Mr Simpson had put in a “enormous amount of money” of operate on the rolling stock, locomotives, and carriages, as perfectly as clearing the tracks and changing sleepers to enable it to occur, he explained.

“[The tour] is seriously going to be a vacation of a lifetime, not just for rail admirers, but anyone on board, and just one of the highlights [of the tour] will no question be the Kingston Flyer.”

Together with the Flyer, the tour teams would travel on trains hauled by a 100-yr-previous steam locomotive and two 1950s heritage locomotives for the duration of the two-week excursions around the South Island.

Two tour events set off in the previous several times, likely in opposite instructions.

Mr Jackson mentioned 1 group of 180 started in Blenheim and would vacation by teach to Invercargill prior to currently being transported by luxury mentor to Te Anau for two nights.

On the way to Queenstown they would acquire a experience on the Flyer, shell out two nights in the resort, vacation by mentor to Franz Josef, and then join with the TranzAlpine train service and complete in Christchurch.

The other team started out in Christchurch and was carrying out the reverse trip.

He mentioned the results of the tour had already influenced Pounamu Tourism to seem at jogging far more heritage excursions to assist New Zealand’s economic recovery.

“Just one only desires to glimpse at the United kingdom to see how many hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands of pounds is produced from heritage rail.

“What we’ve realised … is there are so quite a few other heritage products that are of fascination when you get to each city.

“Factors like the Earnslaw and Walter Peak and Kingston Flyer and the Passchendaele locomotive and the transport museum — New Zealand has a phenomenal variety of heritage sights and men and women do just seriously love that.”

Mr Jackson believed the tour was really worth far more than $2million to the South Island financial system and it was also supporting heritage rail and “utilizing a lot of persons in the system”.

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