Rays Trains Volume-01 pt2 F

Like many New Zealand railway enthusiasts I had seen many great NZ still photographs since the advent of the internet and it's platform for private rail groups on Facebook, and with videos on YouTube.
When I came back to Palmerston North in 2015 I was able to track down the late Ray Mathewson and talk with him about his photography and also his rail videos which began in the early to mid 1980's. Some of these I had already seen courtesy of another departed friend in the Waikato many years ago......

I was lucky to meet not only Ray but also his wife Audrey who was still around at the time. She seemed to have been very supportive of Ray's rail hobby and in fact Ray told me that years ago when they travelled not only around New Zealand but also the USA she had a great deal of input into their trips and they acted upon her suggestion that they deviate from the big railroads and visit more of the smaller lower tier roads.

Ray also told me they both were involved in photography and shared the roles of camera and driving. In this video some if not all the pacing driving shots were piloted by Audrey.

When I first asked Ray about his videos and the possibility of saving them for posterity he was not so keen but did consider my requests. He was not interested in having his own YouTube channel and with all the work involved in producing videos for public viewing.

Furthermore Ray told me that he never intended his videos to be anything other than an extra record of places they went and photographed. That being the case he travelled light. Nearly all his videos were hand held. My opinion was that Ray probably believed that his videos were not of the high standard like his stills and therefore were not intended for public display.

We talked about this a number of times and eventually Ray loaned me a few VHS masters to digitize. After that he was open to further discussion and gave me permission to work some up and publish on my channel, BUT not until his passing........

In this third tape scenes include areas around Wellington, Paekakariki, McKays Crossing, Otaki, Forest Lakes, Ohau and Levin. He was also very big on the use of the "golden" half hour before sunset. Special thanks to John Bovis for his local knowledge input.

Remember this was in the days of the first video cameras available to the NZ public. They were all fully automatic with no manual settings I can remember. The sound was low grade and any loud sounds went into immediate distortion. Sound was often "destroyed" by distorted wind and there is no way to improve that except turning the volume down.

This particular camera had another problem in its picture. It had a very distorted shape with a nastly curl out in the top RH corner (which I have reduced somewhat) and some nasty colour in that area which is still partly seen. But for all that the history in Ray's videos is well worth the effort involved to be kept and shared.

I hope that many will get some pleasure from this series of videos, and a nostalgic buzz for those in the lower North Island in that era..........

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