Unlnown circe 1890
At its peak, East Town employed over 450 people. For generations of local families, a job at "the workshops" meant steady, skilled work: fitters, boilermakers, carpenters, blacksmiths, sailmakers-turned-tarpaulin-makers. It was the kind of place where trades were learned and passed down, where a father might walk his son through the gates for his first day as an apprentice.
The workshops began life in 1880, when a contract was let to the local firm Gibbes and Pinches to build a Locomotive Erecting Shop, Machine Shop and Wood Mill. A second contract, awarded to Thomson and McLean, added the Blacksmiths and Boiler Shops. East Town was only the second railway workshop built in the North Island under Julius Vogel's Great Public Works scheme, a sign of just how important Whanganui was to the rail network in the colony's early expansion.
For its first twenty years, the focus was straightforward: keeping the rolling stock running between Taranaki and Hawke's Bay in good repair. But the site grew steadily. By 1900 the Engine Shed had been relocated, a Paint Shop and wagon servicing pit added, and the Erecting Shop extended.
The 1925 Royal Commission, led by two English railwaymen brought in to review the whole system, reshaped what East Town did. Locomotive work was scaled back, but the Tarpaulin Shop expanded to cover production for the entire North Island, and the Points and Crossings Shop was shifted here from Addington. For a time, East Town was effectively running as two separate operations side by side, one for maintenance and one for locomotives, split only by a road. In 1931 the two were merged into a single, more efficient operation, a change staff welcomed, since it meant better conditions and schedules.
Wanganui Herald
It was the tarpaulins, though, that East Town became best known for nationally. These heavy canvas covers protected goods on wagons all over the country, treated by hand with linseed oil and vegetable black before machines took over the work in 1915. The trade wasn't without its dramas. A brand new Tarpaulin Shop burned down in January 1915, barely a month after opening. A replacement factory built in 1928 lifted production to fifty tarpaulins a week. Then, in a stretch of bad luck in the 1950s, the Tarpaulin Manufacturing Shop burned down again in August 1954, and its replacement had barely opened before the Tarpaulin Depot Repair Shop also went up in flames, just two months later, in October. By 1973, NZR had moved on to PVC tarpaulins, cheaper and easier to repair, and the end of an era for the old canvas trade.
Between 1947 and 1949, the workshops expanded again, with new land purchased at the west end of the yard and a new Motor Shop built. In January 1949, East Town took on its first intake of apprentices, nine carpenters and six fitters, starting a training tradition that would shape the working lives of hundreds of young Whanganui men over the following decades. From 1963, the workshops even took over overhaul work on shunting locomotives that had previously gone to the Hutt Workshops.
Then came rationalisation. Through the 1970s and into the '80s, New Zealand Railways came under increasing pressure to cut costs and consolidate its workshop network around the country. East Town, for all its history and its skilled workforce, was one of the facilities marked for closure. On 17 October 1986, after 106 years, the doors shut for good, and its work, what remained of it, shifted to the Aramoho workshops nearby. Even Aramoho, despite a $866,000 expansion at the time, would eventually close as well.
Forty years on, little remains to mark where East Town once stood, but its legacy lingers in family stories across Whanganui, of trades learned, careers built, and a community shaped by the rhythm of the workshop whistle. For a city that has seen so much of its industrial base come and go, East Town remains a reminder of what Whanganui once was: a genuine railway town, with the skills and the workforce to prove it.
Sources
Image - Railway Workshops, Eastown - Circa 1890 - Unknown Photographer
Wikipedia, "East Town Railway Workshops" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Town_Railway_Workshops
Leitch, David & Stott, Bob (1988)
Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, Link: teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/19055/eastown-railway-workshops
Whanganui District Council Built Heritage Inventory The Wanganui Story by M.J.G. Smart & A.P. Bates (1972) Link: data.whanganui.govt.nz/wdc/HeritageSheets/461.pdf