Cog Park

Still home to some of Wellington's marine services including Coastguard, Evans Bay served as the flying boat terminal from 1936 to 1956.
Read on for deeper history as Gavin McLean explains how this reserve came to be named Cog Park.

**Evans Bay Patent Slip Marine Servicing Area (1873)
** **by Gavin McLean **

Steamships appeared on the interprovincial and trans-Tasman routes in the 1850s. Coal-guzzling and subsidy-swilling, they were too inefficient to compete seriously on the New Zealand-Britain run until the mid-1880s. In the 1860s, however, plans for the Panama Canal provoked a display of cargo cultism from the Wellington Chamber of Commerce, which believed that Wellington had only to build slipway facilities for the mail liners to make the city their Pacific mail terminal. It did not work out that way and the canal project was put on hold. However, in 1866 a British firm had sent hundreds of tonnes of machinery to Evans Bay, where it sat for five years until locals, backed by British investors, formed the Wellington Patent Slip Company (WPSCo).

It took two years and diving bells to build the slipway. On 2 May 1873 the 316-ton barque Cyprus rode up the slipway on the 76-m-long cradle known as ‘The Great Southern’. Ships of 2000 tons or more could be winched up along a rail track and into the WPSCo’s complex, but without the expected big Panama liners, most customers were smaller – and therefore less profitable. Disappointed British shareholders jumped at a Union Steam Ship Company takeover bid and must have been furious when the Wellington Harbour Board tried to thwart the deal and imposed onerous conditions on the ‘Southern Octopus’, including building a second, small slipway.

The slipway had its moments. A long-running dispute over travelling allowances here triggered the calamitous 1913 waterfront strike. In 1931 the harbour board took over the site and leased it back to the Union Company. In the Second World War it was used to build minesweepers. The Union Company moved out in 1961. Six years later the board upgraded the smaller slip and closed the older one. Finally, in May 1985 the era of ship-caused traffic jams as another customer was winched across the road came to an end.

The Patent Slipway was an invention of Scotsman Thormas Morton,in 1818. It was the fast alternative for repairing boats, compared with a dry dock, which can take days to be pumped out before work can begin. In Evans Bay, the arrangement was powered by two massive steam engines which hauled ships up the beach and over the road in a cradle. Both those engines have found retirement home at Tokomaru Steam Museum in Palmerston North.

The cogs haven't gone anywhere and some of the posts remain, adorned with information panels which further describe this marvel of 19th century industrial technology.