Other than Wakatipu and Makarewa, all the other names are english/scottish so your pronunciation is ok. Its more we dont drop our jaw for the e.

You came close with "Bluff". It looks simple, but the correct pronunciation is closer to "Blue-f". ;)

You probably(possibly) mispronounced Menzies. It'd be more like Mingus (like the old Lib Dem leader), the z is actually a yogh

If you want idea for a video here we go you could do the fell engine in New Zealand it's an incline engine with a history about it.

A Brit bemoans over the difficulty to pronounce indigenous place names of far away lands... 🤦

Given the other names for varous routes in New Zealand, the 'great' part is highly questionable, but the 'northern' part is almost certainly because, well, it went north From the most significant place it stopped at. There's a tendency for roads and such in NZ, or at least the south island, to be named for whatever place is at the less significant end of them (on the basis that if you're going the other way you have rather less opportunities to pick the wrong one, I guess) so if it was going from a locally significant town to "I don't know exactly how far we'll eventually get yet, but north!", then 'northern' makes some sense. I mean, the two main roads out of Christchurch are "The Main North Road" and "The Main South Road"... and Christchurch is in the centre of the east coast of the South Island (and the largest city on the island... and I think the second(?) largest in the country). Well, admittedly, the section immediately outside of the city to the north has been superseded by a motorway, but they join back up further out.

New Zealand’s pretty bloody habitable they don’t even have snakes. Compared to where I’m from Mackay Central Queensland. It’s paradise

@@uncle7162 you briefly made me question my entire existence, but after looking it up, I can say that "inhabitable" is not the opposite of "habitable". If it's possible to inhabit a place (so you can live there), it's inhabitable.

I agree and I live in the Northern United States where the Great Northern Railway (the American one,) had a terminus near my hometown. So hearing about this one is quite a surprise.

You missunderstood. All great railways north of here

Quite iron-ic indeed.

​@@jklmnopski7421Nice 😂

​@@jklmnopski7421what a golden joke

Doc has a some impressive details on places like Macetown but it takes plenty of digging.

I may provide some additional context here. The term "strap rail" is misleading, as well it is a term which was not in use when these roads were built. The "strap" was wrought iron bar, usually about 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick. While cost was a major consideration, most of these roads were not cheap to build, and it is a common misconception that they were poorly laid. Indeed these earliest roads laid down in the 1830s often cost far more per mile than those built decades later. But to the point: wrought iron was extremely expensive in the U.S. during the 1830s and 1840s, and there were no mills in the states which would roll it into rails, so if any quantity was needed it necessarily had to be imported. And there was a tariff on imported iron, so again advisable to limit as much as possible the amount of iron bar used. When a lot of these lines were being planned out (some as far back as the 1820s) the form of rail, the material to make it out of, etc. was not a settled question. The experts in England were experimenting with cast iron rails, wood rails, fish-belly rails, and so on. The "strap rail" was in most respects the form which gave the most advantages with the least drawbacks. For example: The Philadelphia Norristown & Germantown RR was originally built with all-iron parallel rail supported by cast iron rail chairs (at the time, the latest and greatest in England), at great expense (being one of the most expensive lines, per mile, ever constructed in the U.S. at the time). After being in operation for a few seasons it was found the iron rail, expanding in summer, and shrinking in winter, worked loose. In summer the expansion would cause the cast iron rail chairs to crack, in winter it would shrink and rattle loose in the chairs. They ended up replacing it with "strap rail" by 1837, which did not suffer so much from extreme temperature changes. The problem of snakeheads is mostly legend. There are only a handful of recorded instances of such a thing happening (probably less than a dozen) over the entire history of American railroading. Even back then roads hired section gangs who would walk the route every morning to inspect the track, and loose iron would've been hammered back into place. Derailments often happened, but for other reasons. Flange design was not well understood in the 1830s, and cross ties were often spaced too far apart (four to six feet center to center being common) to keep the rail gauge in check. The earliest lines, laid on stone blocks (as was the style in England at the time) sometimes had a wooden cross tie placed every 20 or so feet to keep the gauge...

@@nostalgiccameralife Badly laid track was far from the only reason trains came off the track. Everything from misunderstandings of how physics worked and lack of standardization to faulty designs and cut corners contributed to derailments. While incidents involving snake heads were indeed a rare occurrence, whenever it did occur the end result was almost always catastrophic.

In North America until around the 1870s, many branch lines and some main lines had wooden rails with iron straps on top to use ordinary flanged wheels, again due to the lower cost. Heavier trains and increased use, along with ‘snakeheads’ (iron straps curling up into the floor similar to the Eschede derailment) led to their use being discontinued.

I heard a tale, when I was in NZ about a tourist who having just arrived and found the local names a bit of a handful, asked a local the directions to onetreehill (onnytreehill in pronunciation). After a bit of head scratching it turned out he was looking for one tree hill😊

Liverpool and Manchester over the Chat Moss wetlands. George Stephenson's idea and still in use currently because it works.

That would be the Liverpool and Manchester Railway over Chat Moss, near Manchester. It's probably the first inter-city railway ever built. Also, the method used by George Stephenson (yes, of Rocket fame) was actually a known method of constructing roads - I think since antiquity! Still a brilliant bit of engineering, though.

@@theenigmaticst7572 lots of people wrongly attribute Rocket to old George Stephenson , but it was produced by his son Robert Stephenson's company with input from his staff and Henry Booth. George Stephenson by that stage was concentrating on the massive civil engineering work required by the Liverpool and Manchester railway. Quite a few accurate videos on Rocket on KZfaq. One of the better ones is : Rocket : The Basics by Anthony Dawson.

Because it was either In the north or Going north (or both), and... honestly the 'great' part... well, sometimes the project really was impressive in it's scale... sometimes it was a matter of trying to Sound impressive for marketing reasons... and I wouldn't be surprised if at least one was either someone being a pretentious twit or at least partially a joke (because humans).

Who is 'we', that is part of the story in many countries, especially in former colonies.

Incidentally, I believe the 'Patent' in Davies' patent locomotives is actually by one William Prosser, who built a proof of concept in London somewhere around 1843

PS It wasn't the only railway to use flangeless wheels, with guide wheels inside the rail though. There was another one near Paris in the 1840s, but I think they had steel rails.

Might want to look into Russian railways then. If I remember rightly, the transsiberian was origionally built with wooden rails on at least parts of it.

Probably nothing older than the war, now.

Willie Wocka and the Kiwi Factory.

when you look at all the logging locomotives running on wood, they have many drive wheels, all either gear or chain driven, spreading the weight and given traction.

Dear god, he's right.