The new Steam Experience
Stage One - Creating a Foundry

Having successfully opened the new Sawmill experience in June 2008, planning for Shantytown's next attraction, a foundry building, is well underway.

Foundries were a pillar of the extractive industries which developed the West Coast, providing and repairing equipment for goldmines, sawmills, coal mines, shipping, railways and others.  In the same way the Infants Creek sawmill has been used to tell regional sawmilling stories, the foundry will present the golden age of ironwork and steam.

Visitors will be able to enter the industrial world of the early 1900s and experience the heat, smell and, to some extent, the noise of a foundry in action. This will be a unique chance to step into an industrial setting that was such an important part of the community and which, today, has almost entirely disappeared in the developed world.

The style and theme of the new foundry building has been modeled on the Dispatch Foundry established in Greymouth in 1873.Visitors will be introduced to molten iron, metal casting, boiler making, machining, pattern-making and examples of equipment that was created for West Coast industries.  Personal stories will be a strong feature of the display. The 1899 Dispatch steam log winch, owned by Shantytown, is being restored and will become a central feature in the display.

The Foundry building will enable Shantytown to link its existing stories and objects on-site such as sawmilling, gold and steam industries and also promote the wider links between industry and the gold, timber, coast and steam history throughout the West Coast.