Sometimes Trains

When you’ve been traveling for a long time by ship, sometimes nothing sounds better than a train trip. The world still rocks and rolls in a familiar way, so all of your sea-legs skills still apply, but it’s speeding, or occasionally creeping, across dry land.

This is the fabulous Dunedin railway station, built in 1906 out of basalt and limestone, and considered to be one of the most beautiful in all of New Zealand. It’s the home of what used to be the iconic Taieri Gorge train, now transformed to the somewhat less famous Inlander train due to lack of track maintenance deep in the Taieri Gorge. This train began running in 1907, following what our train conductor described as “our goldrush era, which lasted all of five weeks.”

The train takes you up to Hindon where this old rail car sits as a nostalgic reminder of a moment in time,

back when train cars looked like this. Truth be told, I couldn’t tell you what look the train is sporting today, because each and every car is different. It’s a pretty funny cobbled-together train actually, because one consequence of this hodge-podge of cars is that all of the doors at the ends of the cars are different, which means that all of the door handles are at different heights. And that makes walking between the cars somewhat treacherous, since in some cases the doors open in opposite directions so that you can only get through one door if both doors are open. And one of the cars has Hobbit-height handles, so that you have to bend over to open it. But why was I even walking between cars in the first place?

Because there’s an observation platform on the very end of the train, from which one can take photos without the glare and reflections that come with shooting through the window glass of the lit interior. That’s the theory, but by the time I had figured that out the end of the train had become the front, so that the observation platform was about to be immediately behind the locomotive. I was standing out there waiting when they switched the locomotive around from back to front, a slightly scary but mostly exciting process which looked like this:

The locomotive starts backing toward us,

coming closer, pretty fast,

closer still,

until with a mighty clang the locomotive and our car were coupled. As you can see, this was right under our feet, and the guys who were out there with me and I all cheered and jumped up and down a bit to express our relief at a successful conclusion to the process, one in which we did not get smashed to smithereens by the oncoming locomotive and had a birds-eye view of How Trains Mate.

One of the train crew made a quick check to see that all was well, and we were on our way. A few guys came and went from the platform, taking pictures and then escaping from the noise and soot back into the passenger cars, where, alas, my informal survey revealed that approximately 65% of the passengers were on their phones.

But one British gentleman and I stayed out on the platform the whole time, and he told me that as a boy in England he’d lived near train tracks and had a deep love of trains and rail travel instilled in him from a very early age. Me, I stayed for my late husband Shel and for my son Eric, train lovers both, because I knew that they would have been right there with me if they could have been. Also, I stayed for all womankind, just representing, since not one other woman came out to join us, or even to peek at the passing scenery from our post.

There’s lots of very pretty landscape to be seen from the train, not spectacular when compared to coastal New Zealand, but still nice. The train also passes through lots of tunnels, the longest of which stretches about 1400 feet, which is pretty long when you have your eyes closed and are trying to hold your breath against the flying soot particles. Also, they are very narrow. So narrow that if the train were to get stuck in one even the skinniest person wouldn’t have room to walk out.

This is the best I could manage to show you how narrow they are, because when a huge locomotive fills your whole field of vision you can’t see a tunnel coming up, and also, once I saw it, I kind of automatically ducked and closed my eyes as it rushed toward me.

A highlight of the trip is crossing the Wingatui viaduct, which is 650 feet long and 150 feet high.

So that was a sweet little day on the train through the hills of Otago, along the Taieri River, a journey back in time to pretty much nowhere and then back to Dunedin. A ride for its own sake, not to reach any destination but one to enjoy the simple pleasure of being on a train in the back country, reliving a little bit of rail history.