So on Monday Leila and I made our way to Wellington via the Overlander train. I had caught the train along a portion of its length back in 1999 for a 7th form geography field trip to Waitomo Caves, but that was only to Otorohanga. I had been a little freaked out beforehand that our trip might be complicated by the rail upgrade works that have been going on throughout Auckland in the past few weeks (I’ll attempt to give some updates on those in the next few days), but fortunately everything was back to normal on the Eastern Line, which is the one the the Overlander runs along. As it was the ONLY train line running in Auckland on Monday, every single service from the south was headed along that particular way to get to Britomart – which meant that I counted about 8 trains between Britomart and Papakura, where most of the services heading south terminate (a few continue on to Pukekohe).
The early part of the journey, through Auckland, seemed to take forever. I guess it really showed how far Auckland sprawls to the south, but also how slow the train has to go to make sure it doesn’t catch up to other suburban trains that it slots between. I felt a bit confused that we seemed to be going, on average, slower than what I’m used to on suburban trains, but then I guess because we only stopped in a couple of locations, if we’d travelling at the same speed as those trains we would have caught up to them when they stopped at station. I guess that’s a problem that will only ever be solved by creating a third, express, track along the course of the main trunk line throughout Auckland. Anyway, we weren’t in a particular hurry (considering we had 12 hours of the trip ahead of us) I guess it just felt frustrating to be putting along so slowly, and reinforced to me that for a Hamilton to Auckland commuter service to ever become viable some serious work will need to be done to allow express trains to pass the all-stopping services that inevitably slow them down and make the whole ‘express’ name pretty meaningless. After Papakura things sped up a little bit, although not really as much as I would have expected. The scenery was pretty typical of the Franklin District, and then later on the Waikato Region: farmland, with a few more interesting areas of swamp and of course the Waikato River occasionally showing itself to us. The train was really comfortable, with heaps of leg space that I really did appreciate. If I’m to spend 12 hours on any form of transportation then a train is certainly my pick of the bunch. I had expected to spend much of the trip reading, but it was actually just so pleasant to sit staring out the window at the passing scenery, while listening to my iPod that I ended up doing just that for most of the trip. The photo below is pretty typical of the scenery between Papakura and Hamilton:
After Hamilton, as we headed into the King Country the terrain began to get hillier and windier. It felt like we were getting thrown around a bit in the carriages, as walking between carriages to get to a toilet or to check out the outdoor viewing platform was a bit of a mission – I guess a result of the carriages being really really old and also from the very curvy nature of the track as we wound our way towards the Central Volcanic Plateau. Eventually, after heading through Te Kuiti and Taumaranui, with the scenery progressively getting better and better, we made our way to the world-famous Raurimu Spiral. The spiral is a response to one of the trickiest engineering obstacles that the builders of the North Island Main Trunk line had to contend with: basically that it was necessary to get the track up about 200m on to the Volcanic Plateau, but in a straight-line distance of only about 5km, far too steep at a grade of 1:25 than what is possible. So the response was to make the track loop back on itself and then spiral up the hill through a series of tunnels, where the track actually ends up passing over itself creating a spiral. It was pretty cool to travel through, as we got some good commentary. However, it was difficult to photograph, and probably the best one I got was looking back through one of the tunnels that form part of the spiral:
After the Raurimu spiral is was just a short ride on to National Park, where we stopped for lunch. Unfortunately there were a pile of clouds covering Mt Ruapehu, so there weren’t many good photos of the mountain to be taken. I did take a couple of good ones of the train and the line though:
After National Park there were a series of awesome viaducts that we travelled over: first on the Volcanic Plateau itself and then over the Rangitikei River. The Hapawhenua Viaduct was particularly impressive, as due to its curve you’re able to get pretty good photos it while on the train:
After the viaducts the track straighened out a lot, particularly across the plains around Palmerston North. It felt like we were finally getting up to the kind of speeds that the train should be running at – keeping up with cars travelling on the open road next to us. In fact, the closer we got to Wellington the better the standard of the track got. I guess it shows which city values its trains more out of Auckland and Wellington.
After Paraparaumu we linked up with the Wellington commuter service, which I found interesting. I was impressed at the length of the Papaparaumu Line, and also some of the scenery between Paekakariki and Pukerua Bay was particularly amazing. Eventually, 12 hours after leaving Auckland and after heading through a couple of impressively long tunnels, we arrived at Wellington station.
It was a very nice trip, and I’m certainly glad that I did it. However, 12 hours is a heck of a long time and I don’t really know whether I’m in a huge hurry to do it again any time soon.
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