Transcript
THE RAILWAYS
WILLIAM: If you look at where humans have lived throughout history you’ll notice we tend to cluster near water: Rivers, lakes, coastlines.
MĀNI: And that’s because for the majority of human history travelling long distances over land kinda sucked.
WILLIAM: And land travel in Aotearoa was more difficult than most places! Māori had no beast of burden like horses so they had to carry everything on their backs.
MĀNI: The interior of these islands were full of snow-covered mountains, dense bush, swamps, and fast-flowing rivers. One wrong step could send you plunging off a cliff or swept down a rapid.
WILLIAM: So instead of making trips over land, Māori often paddled or sailed their waka.
MĀNI: Rivers like the Whanganui and the Waikato were the original state highways of Aotearoa. The easiest ways in and out of the centre of Te Ika a Māui, The North Island.
WILLIAM: After European arrival waka were replaced by sailing ships and eventually steamships. Roads and bridges were built for horse drawn vehicles.
MĀNI: Travel got a bit faster and easier… but it was nothing compared to what was about to happen.
WILLIAM: Starting in the 1860s New Zealand was swept along with a global transport revolution: The railway revolution.
MĀNI: The railways changed everything. The country as we know it today, earning its livelihood through farming, horticulture and exports.. None of this could have existed without rail.
WILLIAM: Through to the late 20th century, the railways touched the lives of virtually every New Zealander - passengers, workers, tangata whenua, politicians.
MĀNI: So, all aboard for an adventure into the history of New Zealand’s railways!
STING
MĀNI: It’s hard to exaggerate just how big the railway revolution was…
The fastest horse-drawn stagecoaches had a top speed of about 16 kilometres an hour.
Early English trains could go up to 50 kilometres an hour. Three times as fast.
WILLIAM: 50ks might not seem that fast today, but in the 19th century people said trains were so quick that they “annihilated space and time”.
MĀNI: People and freight could travel faster, further, and cheaper than ever before.
WILLIAM: New Zealand’s first public railway was opened in 1863 from Christchurch to Ferrymead. That same year work began on a railway tunnel connecting Christchurch to Lyttelton Port.
MĀNI: Canterbury politician Henry Sewell described the tunnel as "moonstruck madness" but by 1867 it was finished, and at the time it was one of the longest railway tunnels in the world.
WILLIAM: Other early railways were… Less successful.
MĀNI: A lot less successful… For example, also in 1863 a 12 kilometre route was opened from Invercargill to Makarewa.
But to save money the Southland Provincial Government built the rails out of wood instead of iron.
WILLIAM: The trains were so heavy they crushed and splintered the rails, and sparks from the locomotive sometimes set them on fire.
MĀNI: In the 1860s rail building happened at a small scale. A few kilometres here or there. Little tank engines chugged their way from provincial towns to ports, or mines, or farms.
WILLIAM: By 1870 New Zealand only had 74 kilometres of railways - about the distance from Manukau to Huntly.
MĀNI: But everything was about to change.
In 1870 colonial treasurer Julius Vogel announced a plan to build 16 hundred kilometres of railways in nine years. That’s enough railway to stretch from Cape Reinga to Bluff.
WILLIAM: 1870 marked the beginning of what’s called the “heroic era” of New Zealand railway construction.
By 1880 the rail network had jumped from 74 kilometres to more than two thousand.
MĀNI: In 1892, it cracked three thousand.
WILLIAM: In 1909, it was over four thousand kilometres long.
MĀNI: By the 1920s pretty much every significant town or city in Aotearoa had its own railway station. Often it was the most elaborate and impressive building in town.
WILLIAM: In 1953 the total length of the network peaked at 5-thousand-6-hundred-and-89 kilometres. That’s enough railway to stretch halfway around the moon.
MĀNI: There were all kinds of engineering masterpieces.
Aotearoa is a country crisscrossed by mountain ranges, deep gorges, and wide rivers. It took a lot to lay down tracks through that landscape.
WILLIAM: The most famous stretch of railway is the Raurimu spiral, a cunning series of bends and tunnels which allowed the North Island main trunk line to climb 146 metres over two kilometres.
MĀNI: Then there was the Remutaka incline, a fiercely steep stretch of rail which could only be crossed using special locomotives called Fell Engines, which clung to a third rail with an extra set of wheels mounted sideways.
WILLIAM: Not to mention, the eight-and-a-half-kilometre Ōtira tunnel through the Southern Alps which was finished in 1923.
MĀNI: It was so long it had to use electric locomotives so that the smoke from steam engines wouldn’t poison people and reduce the performance of the locomotive.
WILLIAM: As historian Neill Atkinson notes:
“[The railway network] was arguably the New Zealand state’s greatest achievement … and certainly its greatest financial commitment. Between 1870 and 1929 the £52 million devoted to rail construction accounted for 48 percent of expenditure from the central government’s public works fund - more than state spending on roads and highways, telegraphs, public buildings, immigration, tourism, defence, lighthouses, harbour works and mining put together.”
MĀNI: All that spending caused some problems…. Because to build that big, we had to borrow big.
WILLIAM: The massive loans which financed railways put the government in a tricky spot when a global economic crisis hit Aotearoa in the 1880s and 1890s.
MĀNI: And the costs of railways weren’t just financial. They were also environmental.
New Zealand Railways’ biggest clients were the logging and farming industries. If the railways had never been built, the giant forests of Kauri and Rimu which once cloaked much of the North Island might still be standing today.
WILLIAM: But arguably the biggest cost of the railways was paid by Māori. As Neill Atkinson writes…
“The railway drove an iron wedge into the Māori heartland of the central North Island, creating a 'permanent way' for European colonisation”
MĀNI: Building railways into Māori land often created serious tensions.
Historian Andre Brett said one particularly nasty example was the line between New Plymouth and Waitara, constructed in 1875.
“Construction of a railway through a Māori urupā or burial ground proceeded, despite strong protests that culminated in the kidnapping of the contractor’s seven-year-old daughter (the culprit was never identified, and the ‘girl’ was found decades later living - contentedly, by her own account - in a Māori community near Whakatāne.)”
WILLIAM: The North Island’s Main Trunk Line between Wellington and Auckland also came with a wagonload of controversy. It was built over a 40 year period between the late 1860s and 1908.
MĀNI: The real sticking point was the central section of the line, which cut through Te Rohe Pōtae - the King Country - one of the last parts of Aotearoa where Māori still lived autonomously.
WILLIAM: As Neill Atkinson has written:
“[Julius] Vogel hoped that immigrant roads and railways would spearhead a peaceful Pākehā conquest of the Māori heartland. Profitable employment on public works would hasten the integration of Māori into the European economy, while an influx of settlers would swamp the local Māori population.”
MĀNI: Many Māori were concerned the railways would accelerate colonisation and the loss of land.
In 1883 the famous religious leader Te Kooti, warned Māori to beware “the whistling God of the Pākehā - a monster belching flames and smoke".
WILLIAM: That same year two surveyors were captured by the prophet Te Mahuki who strongly opposed the railway. They were held for three days before being released.
MĀNI: But other Māori, like the Ngāti Maniapoto rangatira Rewi Maniapoto and Wahanui Huatare, hoped the railway would create new opportunities for trade and employment.
WILLIAM: So after lengthy negotiations, Ngāti Maniapoto agreed to allow the main trunk line across their land.
MĀNI: Both rangatira attended a ceremony to turn the first sod of the central section of the line in 1885.
WILLIAM: But the hope railways would bring prosperity for Māori went unfulfilled.
MĀNI: As Te Kooti predicted, Te Rohe Pōtae was opened up to colonisation. The Native Land Court transferred much of the central North Island to colonial farmers and in the end it was those farmers, not Māori, who profited most from the railways.
WILLIAM: Railways were also controversial among Pākehā. Local politicians fought tooth and nail to get the best service.
MĀNI: Quite often railways were built to win votes in important electorates rather than because they gave the best economic and social benefit.
Minister of Railways William Hall-Jones complained.
"First it's a siding, then a platform, then a railway porter, then a station master. You'd be surprised how these requests follow each other."
WILLIAM: Sometimes debates over railways got very intense… When the first Christchurch train pulled into Timaru in 1876 the celebrations turned into a shouting match between politicians - one guest was dragged away by the police.
MĀNI: But despite all these problems railways bound the country together politically. Up until the 1870s, New Zealand wasn’t really a country like we think of it today.
WILLIAM: Instead, it was a collection of provinces. Each was governed more or less independently by a provincial assembly.
MĀNI: …a bit like the United States.
WILLIAM: …And that made a lot of sense.
MĀNI: Yea, how could a Southland MP stay in touch with their constituents when it could take weeks to make a round trip from Invercargill to Wellington on a sailing ship?
WILLIAM: Railways changed everything. Suddenly that kind of trip could be made in a matter of days.
MĀNI: Trains also sped up communication by delivering letters, magazines and newspapers.
WILLIAM: Plus telegraph lines were often built alongside the rails, allowing near instantaneous communication.
MĀNI: Getting a railway station in your town was like going from dial-up internet to high speed fibre.
WILLIAM: Farmers no longer had to spend days or weeks driving cattle and sheep across the land, they could just stick them on a stock train and they’d be at their destination in a few hours.
MĀNI: Trains also carried… Well literally everything you could think of: Crops, fertiliser, timber, coal, furniture…
WILLIAM: ….and of course: People.
MĀNI: Yeah. Trains brought people together. Especially those who lived in more isolated rural areas…
Sociologist Crawford Somerset wrote this about the train from Oxford to Christchurch in the 1930s.
"The train was as much a meeting place as a means of conveyance - a kind of club on wheels. Everyone knew everyone else, and so a trip to town had the excitement of a dozen neighbourly visits in one. The silence of people who work in the isolation of farming was broken in talk and one arrived in town briefed and relaxed with the latest gossip" - Littledene: a New Zealand rural community by Crawford Somerset
WILLIAM: The first few decades of the 20th century are often described as a golden age of New Zealand rail.
There’s a huge amount of romance involved. It’s hard to look at old films showing K-class locomotives sweeping past the Southern Alps without feeling a twinge of nostalgia.
MĀNI: It’s no wonder one of our most famous folk songs is about travelling on the railways.
CLIP Taumarunui on the Main Trunk Line
WILLIAM: But that nostalgia misses some of the dirty bits of the “golden age”.
Just listen to this guy describe what it was like working on a Fell engine as it went through a tunnel while fighting its way up the Remutaka incline…
CLIP: “You didn’t dare leave any bare skin exposed. Exhaust steam would come in under the door and in any cranny that it could.I always felt sorry for livestock particularly pigs in the top deck would scream all the way through the tunnel from the heat from the steam”
MĀNI: Those poor pigs!
WILLIAM: And while travelling by rail has always been much safer than travelling on the road, there were some serious accidents. Most famously the Tangiwai disaster.
MĀNI: On Christmas Eve, 1953, a lahar from Mt Ruapēhu swept away the bridge at Tangiwai and the overnight express from Wellington to Auckland plunged into the Whangaehu River.
WILLIAM: 151 of the 285 people on board were killed, including many children.
MĀNI: More might have died if not for the driver, Charlie Parker, and the fireman, Lance Redman, who both died at the controls trying to stop the train.
WILLIAM: While travelling on trains was ordinarily pretty safe, the jobs of building and maintaining the railways could be dangerous. We’re talking about big, heavy, often fast moving machinery.
Accidents happened, sometimes fatal ones.
MĀNI: But still, it’s hard not to be impressed by the sheer scale of the railways in this era. In 1923 New Zealand Railways carried 14.2 million passengers, and 6 million tonnes of freight.
WILLIAM: Not bad given the New Zealand population was just 1.2 million.
MĀNI: Keeping everything moving was an army of nearly 16 thousand workers - which made the railway department the biggest employer in the country.
New Zealand's National Film Unit painted a portrait of Railway Workers in this documentary from 1948.
CLIP
WILLIAM: In fact, the Railway Department employed so many people that it set up its own housing scheme for workers - it was one of the first examples of social housing in Aotearoa.
MĀNI: In 1923 the Department built a factory in Hamilton which churned out these houses in pieces, stacked them on trains then sent them all over the North Island to be assembled on-site.
WILLIAM: Nearly 16 hundred houses were built for rail workers, including entire suburbs like Frankton in Hamilton and Moera in Lower Hutt.
MĀNI: Some of them are still around today. Tarikaka Street in Wellington has a bunch of them.
WILLIAM: At the same time, massive engineering workshops like this one in Lower Hutt employed thousands of engineers and mechanics.
They also trained up the next generation of workers through apprenticeship schemes.
MĀNI: Railways triggered the birth of New Zealand tourism. That whole idea of getting away to the beach for a long weekend, or overseas tourists heading to Rotorua or Queenstown to see our natural wonders - that all got started thanks to trains.
WILLIAM: The railway department printed thousands of posters like these promoting rail tourism.
MĀNI: People crowded the platforms to travel for the Summer holidays. Many also booked tickets on special excursion trains on the weekends.
WILLIAM: The railways were an important part of Māori urban migration. They helped urban Māori keep up connections with whānau in different parts of the country.
MĀNI: Thousands of workers rode the rails to jobs in the cities, or in the mines.
WILLIAM: Along the way passengers could read a magazine printed by the railway department. It published poems, articles and short stories by some of our most famous writers like James Cowan, Robin Hyde and Denis Glover.
MĀNI: Generations of kids travelled to school on trains. They were strictly segregated by gender but those rules were regularly broken.
WILLIAM: Yeah. One Te Puke high school student said he and other boys would climb on top of the carriage, walk along the roof and drop down at the rear of the girls car.
MĀNI: One notable thing about the railways is how heavily subsidised they were.
WILLIAM: Schoolkids travelled for free, so did livestock on their way to A&P shows.
MĀNI: There were discounts for excursion trains,
WILLIAM: Discounts for Māori attending tangihanga,
MĀNI: Discounts for fertiliser shipments,
WILLIAM: Discounts for sports teams,
MĀNI: Discounts for fresh fruit and veges.
WILLIAM: All these discounts were a massive drain on public finances, but funnily enough there wasn’t much appetite to get rid of them.
MĀNI: Even Railways Minister and future prime minister Gordon Coates wanted to keep them - and his election slogan was was "more business in government, less government in business"
In 1923 he said…
"The railways in New Zealand have never been regarded, or run, as a profit-making concern … [if it were] guided solely by considerations of financial return, much greater profits could be earned. But in my view this would not be utilising the service in the true interest of the Dominion." - Gordon Coates, 1923
WILLIAM: Railways were also tied up in New Zealand’s national identity. We had a fleet of locally built rail cars named after waka hourua, like this one, the Tokomaru...
MĀNI: Classic bit of 20th century cultural appropriation there…
WILLIAM: There was also a train called the Passchendaele, built in Christchurch and named in honour of the soldiers killed in the First World War. It’s still in operation today.
MĀNI: New Zealand Rail teacups were a famous icon of 20th century Aotearoa. They’re still a popular collectors item today.
WILLIAM: So… What happened? If our passenger network looked like this in 1959, why did it look like this in 2020?
MĀNI: Well that’s a very controversial story and you should feel free to get involved in the massive argument I’m sure will be happening in the comments below.
WILLIAM: A big part of the story is the rise of new transport technologies: Cars, trucks and passenger aircraft.
MĀNI: Automobiles started to arrive in Aotearoa in the 1920s and 30s, but they really took off after World War Two.
WILLIAM: New Zealand Railways tried all kinds of strategies to adapt to this competition.
MĀNI: In 1936 a law was passed banning trucks from carrying certain types of goods more than 50 kilometres.
WILLIAM: It was argued competition between trucks and trains would only drive up prices for customers and create inefficiencies.
MĀNI: On the passenger side of things, the Railways Department took a different approach - if you can’t beat-em, join-em.
In 1926 New Zealand Railways bought a bus company in Hawkes Bay and buses increasingly replaced passenger trains… Well… Pretty much everywhere.
WILLIAM: This was partly because New Zealand Railways didn’t have to pay to maintain roads but it did have to pay to maintain railway tracks.
MĀNI: So if it could close down a railway line and replace it with a bus service, that saved the railway department a huge amount of cash, even if it ultimately cost the taxpayer more money and provided a worse service.
WILLIAM: There was also just a vibe among many government officials that railways were old fashioned, the cool new thing was motorways.
MĀNI: Spending tax dollars on rail instead of roads was like buying an old landline phone instead of a new smartphone.
WILLIAM: That vibe wasn’t always shared by the general public. Decisions to reduce rail services often got heavy opposition from locals.
But as the trains got older and more run-down through lack of investment, fewer and fewer people wanted to ride in them, until eventually services were cut altogether.
MĀNI: Today commuter rail only really survives in Wellington and Auckland. Passenger trains still run along the Main Trunk Lines in the North and South Island, but they’re mostly for tourists.
WILLIAM: The decline of passengers hasn’t spelled an end to railways. A huge amount of freight still travels on rails today.
MĀNI: But as with passenger services, trains have struggled to compete with trucks.
WILLIAM: The regulations banning long distance trucks were steadily eased, and then completely removed in the 1980s.
MĀNI: These days a lot of people are calling for a return to rail, and point to how things might have gone differently.
WILLIAM: For example, as far back as the 1950s there was a proposal to completely electrify the North Island Main Trunk line.
If that had happened it might have led to wider electrification of rail all over Aotearoa.
MĀNI: Rail advocates argue increased rail services could be a key part of fighting climate change. Freight trains are estimated to produce about 70 percent fewer carbon emissions than trucks.
WILLIAM: In 2021, the Government set up a new commuter service between Hamilton and Auckland, and aimed to increase rail freight 40 percent by 2052.
MĀNI: So potentially the history of rail could be opening a brand new chapter.
WILLIAM: We’ll just have to wait and see what's coming down the tracks.
