Betty Stamp gambled and always won. Many other sad souls took the same risk at the same odds – and paid. They died grim deaths.

'No, it didn't frighten me,” says Betty Stamp, who would play knucklebones and hopscotch with school friends – and then Russian roulette walking the Matapihi Rail Bridge, sometimes twice a day.

Betty Stamp on the railway bridge she used to cross. Photo: Chris Callinan.

'We had nerves of steel. I think about it now and it gives me the creeps.”

Because while it's a bridge, a rail bridge, an economic lifeline, it's also a 450 metre long tombstone.

'And my name could easily have been on it,” says Betty.

Betty as a young lady on the bridge. Supplied.

The people of Matapihi, who often did that walk of death, used to say the bridge claimed one life a year. It was actually 30 lives in 33 years. Often in the dark and during stormy weather.

In the 1950s, before the footbridge was built, it was written 'that the bridge keeps the people of Matapihi in constant fear. At night wives fear for their husbands and sons”. The same husbands and sons who were walking the tight rope across the harbour – coming home from work or coming home from the pub. Or from the grocers, the butchers or whatever.

Like Betty's mother. ”I still worry about her. Poor Mum. She couldn't sleep ‘til we got home, ‘til we made it across the bridge.”

Betty saw a recent story in The Weekend Sun about a proposal to light the bridge at night, to transform it into an art installation, to showcase it.

'It made me homesick. I thought that bridge is my bridge.”

It also made her think about how close and how often she came to being a statistic; how close she came to not making it to her 92 years.

'We knew the times of the trains, but of course there were always extra ones.” It was an extra one that caught Betty on the bridge one windy day. 'I had my bike and I had to clamber off the line and onto one of the girders.”

Imagine it. Balancing precariously on a narrow steel beam, a five or six metre drop on either side, the tide waiting to engulf you. And the steam train rumbling by trying to shake you free of your perch. Take a walk over the footway. Get a feel for what Betty did. At best vertigo-inducing and at worst lunacy.

'I hung onto my bike with one hand and hung on to the girders for dear life with the other.” The train sailed by. She still feels the fear.

A young man, a young husband called Roy would have felt the same fear moments before he died.

'Poor Roy was crossing the bridge. Those were the days of six o'clock closing. He hadn't turned up for his dinner and his poor wife went looking for him.”

Roy scrambled off the railway line and onto a girder or buttress to escape the train. Thinking the train had passed he popped up, got sideswiped by a foot ladder on the guard's van and was knocked into the water. 'He stood too soon. There was just half a second in it. But he was gone.” Swallowed by the cold dark waters swirling the pylons six metres beneath the Matapihi Rail Bridge. Roy became a number.

Another tragedy involved two young men headed home across the bridge one night. 'One slipped and went into the tide. The other, a strong swimmer, dived in after his mate. 'Both drowned. Both!”

But seems being dangerous and illegal was no deterrent. Not to Betty.

She was one of 10 siblings who grew up on a farm at Matapihi. 'We could see Tauranga, we could see the lights.” The lights beckoned and Betty answered.

'One night a little Maori girl and I sneaked across the bridge. We were just seven or eight. 'We were naughty.” Their clothes were grubby and they were barefoot. 'We were mucking around in a shop and I ran bang into my sister.” There was trouble.

It was a dangerous game at best of times. 'Sometimes they would remove six or seven sleepers for maintenance or painting.” So there was a big breach to negotiate.

'You could run and jump the gap. Or you could tightrope down one rail while balancing and holding hands with another person walking down the other rail.” There were three rules to ensure safe passage. ‘Don't look down, don't look down and don't look down'.

'You would also get to a pylon and stop and listen for a train. Then scramble onto the next one.”

Sure – the railways tried to stop trespassers. 'They started taking names and threatening us with prosecution. I was always disappointed they never took my name and put it in the newspaper.” In fact, Betty knew the railwayman. She says he just waved her on across the bridge.

Betty insists it wasn't danger lust, it was necessity. 'The only other option was a 28km drive around the harbour. But that option wasn't an option because there weren't any cars in Matapihi.” It was do the walk or no work, no groceries or no town.

As a young working woman, a waitress at the New Moon Tearooms, she would cycle to the rail bridge and walk the bridge track – trains and all, in the dead of night, no lights and no pedestrian way. 'One day they were all anxious for me because a train had broken down on the bridge and I couldn't get past.”

A friend of Betty, who naïvely offered to walk her home one night, later admitted he crawled across the bridge on his stomach on the return trip. 'He was scared witless.”

Ronald Stamp also walked Betty home across the Matapihi Rail Bridge on their first date. Scary – but his chivalry was rewarded with her hand in marriage. ‘Smith' became ‘Stamp' and the couple stopped on the Tauranga side of the bridge.

Betty still loves a gamble – not with her life on the rail bridge but with a few dollars on the pokies at the Tauranga Citizens Club.

'There was the time I dropped my torch into the shallows off the bridge. It kept going, kept alight. It scared the hell out of all the Maori boys, who thought it was a kehua (ghost) in the water.”

It was coincidence that stopped the dying. In 1956 Sir John McAlpine, Minister for Railways in the first National Government, was in Tauranga and just happened to witness the harbour being dragged for the body of a boy who had fallen from the bridge.

That was enough for him to offer a dollar-for-dollar subsidy for a footbridge. More than 50 Matapihi residents even gave a few dollars out of their pay packet each week towards the bridge.

Matapihi now belonged to the bright lights across the bridge – where they worked, where they shopped and where they played.

Betty chuckles remembering the good fortune of another chap.

'He tripped or slipped and dumped all his shopping into the drink. Everything went in except him. He managed to hook each arm over each of the railway lines, stopped his fall and probably saved his life.”

He was dangling and they had to haul him up.

Betty hasn't walked the Matapihi Rail Bridge for 60 years.

'I think my last crossing was on a Mothers' Day one year. I carried a couple of my children across to see my Mum. It wasn't any big deal in those days.”

But it's big deal these days because times and attitudes have changed. The rail bridge is for trains, not pedestrians. It is dangerous and also illegal to be on tracks and bridges, other than proper crossings like the footbridge. A successful prosecution could cost you a $10,000 fine.

In the meantime Betty would like to see the lights up. 'I have another eight years,” says the 92-year-old. 'It would be beautiful.”