the opportunity to secure in their own hands the increase in trade that they anticipated would result from the linking of Onehunga with Auckland by a railway line. The opposing group had secretly resolved to urge the government to extend the railway line to White Bluff where there was, they contended, sufficient depth of water to enable steamers and fair-sized sailing craft to lie close in to the shore. Plans had been prepared by an Auckland marine engineer for a wharf at White Bluff which would render the existing wharf at the foot of Queen Street [Onehunga] no longer necessary. The railway line to the new wharf site would be carried through a tunnel under Queen Street, down Princes Street, then across a stone causeway from the Beachto Hillsborough, and thence along the foreshore to White Bluff.

“Mr J C Hill, who owned the land through which the line would pass, had had street and building sites surveyed in the confident belief that the government would sanction the plans of the promoters. The latter, meantime, were being subjected to the bitter and loud-voiced castigations of their fellow-citizens for their unpatriotic machinations. For long years after, the “Kelly Gang,” as the promoters of the scheme to render nugatory the wharf at the end of Queen Street were execrated by the group which manfully supported the government’s proposal to make Onehunga the terminus of the railway line from Auckland. Actively engaged in the work of defeating the aims of the “Kelly Gang” – three well-to-do members of which