Someone who knows Arrowtown’s streets pretty well is Graeme Railton, because he built so many of them. The long-time earthmoving contractor, who turned 90 this month and whose business Railton Contracting is still going 61 years down the track, talks to PHILIP CHANDLER about his life and times
Be it the Haast Pass, Glenorchy Rd, Fernhill, Arrowtown, the Crown Terrace and even Queenstown Gardens, long-time Arrowtowner Graeme Railton left his mark during a long innings as a bulldozer driver and earthmoving contractor.
This month, he notched another mark when he celebrated his 90th birthday with family and friends.
Not only is he still living at home, but at 83 he was still driving machinery before heart troubles slowed him down.
Raised in Dunedin, Graeme attended King’s High, then spent three years as a valuation cadet with the city council before landing an earthmoving job, after his employer first let him do his CMT (compulsory military training).
He subsequently worked any where between Invercargill and the Waitaki River.
He also had a long stint with Contract Cultivation building a stretch of the Haast Pass road between ‘the magazine’ and Burke Flat, and building the Pleasant Flat Bridge.
Driving a D8 bulldozer, he recalls at one stage ‘‘hanging over a bloody cliff’’.
Meanwhile, Arrowtown had first loomed into view when his father bought a holiday cottage beside the-then borough council offices in tree-lined Buckingham St.
Through that link he met Dorothy, the daughter of Jim Dennison from Lake Hayes, whom he married at the Arrowtown Presbyterian Church in 1958.
While courting her, Graeme recalls riding his motorbike from Dunedin for a weekend and encountering 6 inches (15cm) of snow just past the Nevis Bluff.
All he could rely on were power poles and the odd marker to tell him where the road was.
Early in their marriage he and Dorothy bought a commercial property in Buckingham St before selling it back to the former owners about two years later.
After working as a harvesting contractor for almost two years, he got a job with Arrowtown contractor Jack Gaudian in 1961.
‘‘He had a bulldozer and a girlfriend, and one thing led to another and he wanted to get married.
‘‘‘Would I run the business for him while he was away?’
‘‘I went and stood in for him and in 1962 I bought the business off him — that was centennial year for the district.’’
Scenic work: Graeme Railton clearing trees in the Queenstown Gardens in the ’60s on his TD9B dozer
Graeme renamed it Railton Contracting, which it remains to this day, with eldest son Grant at the helm since 2015.
At one stage he subcontracted to Queenstowner Darrell McGregor when he was building the Glenorchy Rd, working on a section around the 12 Mile — ‘‘you go up the big long hill, I laid all the culverts’’.
He built many early Fernhill roads, worked on the Crown Terrace and in the Queenstown Gardens — ‘‘we took out trees, I think it had something to do with the formation of the rose garden’’.
In the late ’60s he even helped with a bulldozer installing cable for Coronet’s first chairlift, which had its challenges.
Graeme also formed benching at Gibbston’s Nevis Bluff to access a drilling rig.
However, he estimates almost 40% of his work was in Arrowtown, forming about half of the new Adamson subdivision as the town expanded east of Kent St.
He had two dozers — ‘‘they got changed pretty regularly’’ — plus a grader, compressor and two or three trucks.
He employed some of his five sons, though Mark sadly died while walking Sawpit Gully in 2014.
In 1980, he got a 10-year scheelite mining licence near Glenorchy’s Black Peak, for which a bulldozer was handy.
‘‘The first year was very good, we were getting $12,000 a ton, at the end it had gone down to $3000 and it was uneconomic.’’
Till his heart troubles he also chaired the Glenorchy Battery Association, which tried to restore an historic battery dam, but the slowness of the project frustrated him.
After Dorothy died two years ago, Graeme considered moving to the nearby retirement village but didn’t think it’d offer him anything he couldn’t get living on Cotter Ave.
He says he only goes to an Arrowtown pub if he has one of his sons for company ‘‘because I wouldn’t know any bugger that lived in the town [now]’’.
