Otago Central Railway [7]: Kokonga

So today we are having a look at Kokonga, Here's a few maps.

In the last two posts I showed where the station building was relocated to after NZR sold it, and what it looks like today. I don't know when that happened, but probably sometime after 1985 when the station was fully closed.

Here is the overall layout of the station.

The ballast siding went right towards the river, crossing over the main highway, and the embankment downgrade to the crossing remains clear today. The area directly behind the station building was set out as a township, and you can still see the section boundaries on that map, but there is nothing left of that settlement today. There is an old church and some possibly period houses alongside the highway to the north of the ballast siding, and a couple of other houses nearer the station, but of course the relevance of them to the railway isn't clear to me.

Here we have a closer look at some of the detail of the main station buildings.

At the north end of the station yard were the ballast siding, engine shed siding, the water tank and a house. Dangerfield and Emerson describe the water tank as being gravity fed, and while they don't elaborate on how this worked exactly, the railway line is on a ledge between some hills and the river, so it's quite possible a water supply was tapped on a hillside to the west of the station to supply the tank. The engine shed probably dates from the construction days and would have been removed when the railhead moved further westerly.