As evening comes, we arrive back in Auckland, where Rangitoto Island, off in the distance, is there to greet us.

 

I suppose this run won’t make the world’s list of Great Train Journeys. It’s not as long as the Canadien, or as exotic as the Blue Train, or as much an adventure as the Trans-Siberian Express. But it has the advantage of actually going somewhere, much of it through countryside that you won’t see otherwise. It is unquestionably worth the time the journey takes.

Departure was scheduled for 07:25. We overestimated how long it would take a taxi to come pick us up (maybe 3 minutes) and also how much traffic would be on the streets of Wellington at half-past six. (Well, we’re not usually up then. How would we know?) At the station, we had lots of time, and not enough places to buy coffee. Even the office for check in wasn’t open until 7:00.

Eventually we found coffee outside the station, found our seats, and settled into them.

Here’s a view out the back of the train. It looks as much like a lounge as an observation car. We were obviously not the only tourists on board. At 07:28, the station disappeared behind us.

The train ducks through a tunnel to get outside of Wellington proper, then snakes its way up the Tasman Coast. Here’s a look west at Kapiti Island. The early settlers introduced rats, cats, and the like to NZ. In some cases these drove flightless birds to extinction. Kapiti is said to be the largest island in the world with no mammals on it. It’s now a protected wildlife refuge, with human visits only by prior arrangement with the Department of Conservation.

The Overlander’s route covers about 680 kilometers. Along the way it passes over 530 bridges and through 17 tunnels.

 

Around Palmerston North is a large flat agricultural area, one of the most productive in the country. Palmerston home to Massey, my host university, named after an early Prime Minister. Like other New Zealand universities, it has now branched out to other cities, such as Auckland’s Albany campus.

Further along, the route goes into the mountains of the North Island. Of the 530 bridges, perhaps a dozen carry the train 50 or 75 meters above the canyon floors. Here are views of two of the crossings. The driver courteously slows down as we pass over them.

By this time, we were at mid-island. The clouds were a bit different. Now it was Mt. Ruapehu which was cloudless, and gave us a view of the peak. LOTR’s mountain shots were mostly on the South Island, but you can see the family resemblance of the landscape.

It was time for a brief but efficient lunch stop at National Park, the half-way point of the journey. There are north- and south-bound Overlanders. They meet at National Park. The crews exchange trains, permitting both to go home at night. The National Park was the world’s second, after Yellowstone.

North of National Park we entered “king country”. The Tainui tribes felt that part of the strength of the English was their loyalty to the Queen. So they got together to create a Maori king to be a balance. At the time (the 1870’s “land wars”), this was considered rebellion, and caused further confiscation of Maori lands, and considerable death on both sides. Now the office has become a respectable focal point for Maori life and culture, with the king receiving visits from the British royal family.

Beyond and below the spiral is the very green Whakapapa River valley and the great dairy-producing plains of the Waikato.

 

Eventually we pass Hamilton, once one of the biggest switching yards in the southern hemisphere. The corridor from Hamilton to Auckland has nearly half the country’s population. So it’s no surprise that the views  here become less bucolic.

Surveying railroads in new Zealand must have been interesting in the best of times. But north of National Park the engineers faced an especial challenge. They had routes from the south and north, but the elevations were different over 5 kilometers by a difference which would require a gradient of 4%. That’s more than a railroad loco can handle. It actually took some years before a solution was found and the line could be completed. But the solution involved packing about 11 kms. of track into 5 kms linearly, reducing the grade to 2%. From above the track arrangements look an overhand knot with a turn of spiral, a z-shaped curve, and two tunnels. Over the 11 km s. the route turns by about 1080 degrees.

 

Eventually the route was built, completed in 1908. Naturally this bit of trackage has become a piece of railroad folklore. Here are two photographs taken only a few seconds apart on the z-curve. They show the tightness of the curves, which have a radius barely over 100 meters. Traffic is limited to 45 kms/hour over most of the grade.