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Colourful character right on track

Updated - 10/3/2010 - nzherald.co.nz.

Sixty-three years ago when Rita Angus did her famous picture of Cass Railway Station - voted a few years ago as New Zealand’s greatest painting - she depicted a small figure sitting on the platform, dwarfed by the surrounding mountains, smoking a pipe and presumably waiting for a train to arrive.

These days, if you stopped at the station in the TranzAlpine train and saw a figure sitting there, it could only be one person: Barrie Drummond.

Barrie, who for the past 23 years has been the ganger responsible for the highest section of the track linking Christchurch to Greymouth, is now the only resident of Cass.

At the town’s height in 1910 there were 300 residents but over the years numbers have dwindled and today there is only his old railway house - "the only railway house, the only one they still own, in the country", he claims proudly - and a couple of places used as holiday homes.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/new-zealand-travel/news/article.cfm?c_id=1500882&objectid=10630916

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