Aboard a special charter service running the length of New Zealand’s rail network, Thomas Bywater joins train enthusiasts who readily compare it to the Trans-Siberian and the world’s other great rail journeys.
The White Horse of Waimate was little more than a speck on the horizon. There was barely time to notice it without prior warning or binoculars as South Canterbury rolled past on tracks. Fortunately, the train carriage had plenty of both.
The chartered KiwiRail car was a long way south from where it usually would have been.
With 74 passengers and rolling stock - comprising two carriages, a cafe/dining car and a gloriously chilly, open-air viewing car - this was not part of your regular, scheduled service.
The carriage’s overhead screens, normally used on the TranzAlpine leg of the “Great Journeys” network, said we should be somewhere on our way to Greymouth - not hurtling south out of Christchurch.
On a 13-day tour from Auckland to Invercargill, this was a rail detour of epic proportions. Those signed up for the trip were likely to be the only passengers many of the provincial rail stations see all year. Arranged by travel specialists Pukekohe Travel, once every 12 months, it was a trip that rail enthusiasts book well in advance.
Judging by the waves from passers-by and the general intrigue of everyone encountering the southbound carriages, it is something that they would love to see more of, too.
At every station and several embankments en route, we were greeted by long lenses and cameras of trainspotters.
Tour manager Mary Houghton, who runs the operation with husband Terry and tour escort Ross McLeod, says you get used to the attention. The community of South Island train enthusiasts are so dedicated you begin to recognise familiar anoraks. There is one burgundy Subaru driven by a rail enthusiast who joins us for almost the entire trip, racing to meet the train from station to station. Mary’s advice is to wave back.
While carriages are regularly changed - there are sections of private charter and shared travel - and there are many stops along the way through New Zealand’s changing scenery, the train is a reassuring constant. It is a home from home, eagerly waiting at the stations.
Wearing red baseball caps, Mary’s team crowd around a carriage table at the back like it were a generalissimo’s private rail car. Surrounded by daily schedules, contact sheets and printouts, the whole operation is as smooth and timely as if it were… well… run on rails.
The rest of the train is a more relaxed affair. Seats are filled by Aucklanders, avocado farmers from Katikati and expats from Queensland returning to see the motherland. There were also two travelling toys – a stuffed bear named Osmond and a garden gnome named Oscar – belted into a spare seat.
At scenic intervals more hardy travellers would rush forward to the open viewing carriage, to feel the Otago coastline blow through their hair. Gusting 80 knots.
Fortunately, there are many more Kiwi landmarks than the chalk horse of Waimate. In a two-week itinerary, there is plenty of time to explore beyond the rails. With stops bookended by overnights in hotels, the itinerary allows for plenty of day trips and excursions on the two chartered coaches that followed us down the country.
Shortly after 2pm we pulled into the Gothic Victorian railway station on the Oamaru seafront. For a moment we upstaged even the “intergalactic locomotive” at the Steam Punk HQ gallery as the most interesting train in town.
That takes some doing. The giant art installation spits fire and smoke when fed a $2 gold coin.
Oamaru’s quirky reimagining has made the white stone town a clear tourism destination. Taking its cue from the over-ornate buildings, the Waitaki port claims to be the birthplace of the Steam Punk art movement. It is a fantasy reimagining of Victorian-era style that arrived on the waterfront around 2011. You can see why a town whose heyday came to an abrupt end with the Otago gold rush might be prone to nostalgia. In Oamaru, the long 19th century never ended. Victoriana ad absurdum.
But for all its fun and whimsy, it sits uneasily with post-colonial New Zealand. The high street is littered with names like The Victorian Wardrobe or Empire Backpackers. “Imperialism, was it all that bad?” it seems to ask, almost without irony. Still, you can see why the place might idolise an era that built the elegant neoclassical waterfront, just to store wool and grain. The over-engineered warehouses look like Belle Epoque aircraft hangars. A “time-travelling steam train” or “interplanetary airship” sounds less ridiculous when said aloud in Oamaru. If only slightly.
At a time when the rest of New Zealand was made primarily of corrugated iron and number eight wire, the town had a population larger than that of San Francisco. It might be only by arriving by rail that you can see the true Oamaru and understand its place as one-time centre of New Zealand. Now home to assorted bric-a-brac, and a dozen stool pigeons, the 1860s train station is a portal to that era. Even under the grime, it remains a throwback from an older, more elegant era. We were certainly the only arrivals by train in some time.
Looking beyond the Imperial apologist aesthetic, the art movement has done great things for revitalising the South Island town. One part retroactive, another part future-facing, one imagines the Steam Punks would be fans of passenger rail.
If the artsy Waitaki town of Oamaru is about celebrating an imagined history, just outside is a place that remembers another era that could be straight out of a fantasy.
Here is a place once ruled by six-foot, flesh-eating penguins. Although – thankfully – Kumimanu fordycei went extinct some 61 million years ago, their remains are still discovered in the white stone the area is famous for.
The Waitaki Whitestone Geopark near Duntroon is New Zealand’s first Unesco geological heritage site. Freshly granted Unesco status in May 2023, the international recognition is just the latest chapter in a remarkable 200 million-year history. It’s also one of the destinations passengers on the rail tour have a chance to visit, by chartered coach.
All along State Highway 83 are geological oddities, the Elephant Rocks to the Valley of the Whales and millions of striated years of rock. To see the fossil of an enormous baleen whale, suspended in sandstone, was more incredible than anything concocted by a Steam Punk-addled fever dream. Intergalactic locomotives are dull by comparison.
Fortunately, the Vanished World fossil centre in Duntroon provided all the tools for deciphering the stone history. Tools, like a pick and wire brush. As well as a display of the more amazing finds, visitors are invited to dig out ammonites and discarded sharks’ teeth from Waitaki stone. The Waitaki town is an area that has dug into its past as a way of preserving its future.
One person who knows all about regional revitalisation is Mike Gray. The reformed mathematics teacher from Brisbane moved to the region in the 90s after falling for a charming country house, running it as a BnB.
The Tokarahi estate is one of the many surprisingly grand country piles in the hinterland behind Oamaru, monuments to a time “in memoriam”. From gates to the derelict Ngapara primary school, which closed in 1998. As chairman of the Vanished World Trust, Gray saw that the local town needed to raise their tourism profile or go the way of the giant penguin. Today, Duntroon’s Vanished World includes a fossil centre, a working 19th-century forge at Nicol’s Blacksmith Shop and several other Otago curios. The organisation has been part of initiatives such as getting Unesco recognition for the geological heritage site and routing the Alps 2 Ocean Cycle Trail through Duntroon, and coach parties like us.
Returning to the Brydone Hotel, where we were staying on Oamaru’s grand high street, there was just enough time for supper and a slide show. Rail passengers know how to make their own fun.
One of the guests, who had returned from the Trans-Siberian Express, shared notes and some photos from the rails between Vladivostok and Moscow.
I’m not trying to say that the New Zealand rail network can compare to the great Russian train journey – that was for the lecturer to do - but there is a hell of a lot less Siberian tundra and a lot more to be seen between Auckland and Invercargill. Not to mention it is only a 10th of the distance.
On the trip rolling through New Zealand’s historic junctions, from Auckland’s Brownstone Beaux-Arts terminus to Dunedin’s Gothic “Gingerbread House” of a railway station, the appeal has not faded, even if New Zealand’s passenger trains are much diminished.
It’s a transport that attracts fanatical devotion. At the end of the line, I was about ready to join those glued to motorways to protest the country’s lack of passenger light rail infrastructure.
Arriving at Invercargill railway station on an overcast day was an anticlimactic end to the journey. Waiting for station guards to unbolt the steel gates, it was quite a comedown. Though the Southland town is full of rugged charm and hardy gems, the railway station is not one of them.
Perhaps, this was simply a reflection of my sorrow to be leaving as the rest of the passengers carried on along the Catlins coast.
Travelling the storied railways of New Zealand was a look back into history but also perhaps the future. With the Waikato commuter train Te Huia already seeing more than 100,000 passengers travelling into Auckland in its first year, there is clearly an appetite for this 19th-century transport of delight.
The 13-day tour departs Auckland by rail, taking in the Northern Explorer, Coastal Pacific and TranzAlpine rail journeys, and an exclusive private charter from Christchurch to Invercargill.
Airfares, day excursions and some meals are included.
From $6795pp twin share
DETAILS
pukekohetravel.co.nz
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