Big Hill rail tunnel works ?

This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025) on page 138.

These labourers digging what appears to be a tunnel, using only picks, shovels and horse-drawn wagons, are in fact working on a cutting through a hill. For deep cuttings like this, it was easier to construct a platform from which to throw spoil down into the wagons. It was fruitless work in this case, though, for it turned out that the ground was too soft to support railway lines, so the route had to be altered, leaving this section known as ‘The Blunder’.