Train nearing destination | Manawatu-Wanganui News | Local News in Manawatu-Wanganui

Spending most of the summer making a large sculpture has been tiring but pleasurable for Whanganui UCOL senior lecturer Brit Bunkley.

His work Hear My Train A-Comin' was judged best of the four finalists in Sculpture Wanganui 2011, and he received a $50,000 commission to build it.

It was looking like costing at least $40,000 to do so.

"I love making this kind of stuff. That's why I would do it for almost no money," he said.

The sculpture is to be installed by April 20, probably on a concrete plinth just downstream of the Trafalgar Square Shopping Complex and among the trees and mowed grass beside the Whanganui River.

The train is to come up out of the ground at an 80 degree angle.

The present construction is hollow, so that it can be lowered gently into place by a crane. It could be installed as early as mid-March, Mr Bunkley said.

The bones of the train are a metal framework designed by Wanganui engineers BPL group and "strong enough to withstand an atomic blast".

The frame was built by "jack-of-all-trades" Paul McCormick at Pre-Nail Precision in Hinau St.

Exterior grade Titan board is attached to the skeleton, and special, thinner, pink and gray concrete pavers are glued to the board. The pavers were cut at Extol Mastercraft Engineering.

The joins between them are not mortared, and will eventually fill with dirt and grow moss.

The train still lacks a front panel, which will be reared up in the air and "invisible unless you have a helicopter" when the sculpture is installed. Its tunnel is also still to come and will be made of the same pavers. The work isn't the biggest Mr Bunkley has ever made, but it's the biggest designed to remain permanently in place.

He said the train idea had four origins. It referred to Wanganui and its earlier Eastown Railway Workshops and it used the same coloured pavers as the footpaths of Victoria Ave.

Also, trains are seen globally as a more environmentally efficient form of transport.

Finally there is Mr Bunkley's nostalgia for a New Zealand that existed before he arrived from the United States.

"It's also a kind of romantic allusion to the social democracy of New Zealand 20 or 30 years ago, when in my opinion things worked much better," he said.