BACK on TRACK
The nor-wester blew. The bunting fluttered. The guard signalled. At 2.02pm on December 1, 1863, a small green locomotive chuffed out of Christchurch’s colonial railway station on the country’s first regular train service bound for Heathcote 6.8km down the line. “I venture to prophesy,” declared wildly proud provincial superintendent William Sefton Moorhouse, “that at no distant date we shall be able to breakfast at Christchurch and dine at Timaru.”
His dream was realised. By the end of the 1870s – thanks to Premier Julius Vogel’s grand public-works programme – about 2000km of rail, more than half of the existing 3700km network, stitched together the country’s towns and regions.
More than a century later, Auckland Mayor Dove-Myer Robinson laid out his plan for a mass rapid-transit system for the city. “Statements such as ‘Auckland can’t afford it’, or ‘It will cost too much’,” he wrote in 1975, “indicate how little many people know of the benefits of the proposed bus and railway plan … or how necessary and urgent it is.”
His dream was sidelined. After months of discussion, including an “inane debate” about track gauge, writes Andre? Brett in his new book, Can’t Get There from Here, “Robbie’s Rapid Rail” plan was quietly shelved.
By the end of the 1980s, expresses still ran the length of the North and South Island main trunk lines, but only three trains operated beyond Wellington and Auckland. Suburban trains in Christchurch and Dunedin were gone and the mixed passenger and goods services that once carried people and products across regional New Zealand had been lost to a protracted process of deregulation, corporatisation and privatisation.
Transdev has put its hand up to run an overnight passenger train between Auckland and Wellington.
“It was such an incremental process over such a lengthy period of time,” says Brett, who will be taking up a role as a lecturer in history at Curtin University in Perth in 2022, “that the general public did not realise what they were losing until they
