Driving down a disused railway — and into New Zealand’s ‘Forgotten World’

The 7.55 from Wellington to Auckland is known as the Northern Explorer, a train as focused on languid travel and the tremendous scenery of New Zealand as it is on practicality. The journey takes 11 hours; to fly just 65 minutes. I had contrived to arrive in the country with no driving licence but had heard that if I got off more or less halfway in Taumarunui, close to the centre of the North Island, I might not need one.

Outside there was indisputably bonny country, something the train management seemed keen to emphasise by offering no WiFi on board. Well-worn but still effective lines from the conductor told us that they instead had “windows live, constantly updating, though less reliable in tunnels. Look left and right. Maybe even talk to each other.”

The line is mostly used by tourists these days, its relevance dimmed with time and more attractive alternatives. The same might be said for Taumarunui, a town not on the up. “It’s a place that most New Zealanders don’t visit, let alone foreigners,” said Scott Riches-McPherson when he picked me up at the station to take me to Omaka Lodge, a beautifully kept B&B 20 minutes out of town that he runs with partner Chris. I had arrived in Ruapehu — what Americans would call a flyover state, a place forgotten by corporate development. Instead, I hoped it might have retained something abandoned elsewhere — I just wasn’t sure what that might be.

I had just a single night at Omaka Lodge before being taken 19km north to Okahukura and the start of the old Stratford-Okahukura railway, long since abandoned by regular train services and now known as the Forgotten World Line. It’s not quite true to say I had a no-drive experience in New Zealand — from here to Whangamōmona, 82km to the south-west, I would be driving my own “rail cart”.

Imported from Texas, these were crudely converted golf buggies, still with a useless steering wheel, complete with a clip for scorecards. The bottom of the Plexiglas windscreen had labels warning that it was not strong enough to repel golf balls. Most of the time I had the screen folded down, partly because the only projectiles flying towards me were the occasional bugs, but mostly so I could better see the increasingly Hobbitty landscape in front of me — and not just see it, but smell it and listen to it, too.

Unlike conventional rail travel, where there is no control over the scheduling, nor destinations, this trip would allow me to stop when I chose, so long as I wasn’t being halted by other forces. “If we find any wildlife on the track, don’t sit and stare at them,” said guide Kahil Adams, briefing our small group of rail cart drivers. “They’ll just stare back. Get up on them.”

Kahil looked and guided like someone much older than his 23 years. Occasionally he closed his eyes to concentrate on the dizzying statistics from the line’s heyday, occasionally caressing his prodigious tattooed forearms as he scanned his memory for details. When he joked, which was often, I didn’t see the punchlines coming.

We stopped perhaps a dozen times, mostly for history lessons and cups of tea. With the limiters on the carts keeping us to 22kph, the pace was never hurried, and I was told to keep back at least 100m from Kahil in case my cart decided to become a runaway.

Of the 20 tunnels along the route, the first was the longest at 1,525m. Permanently wet and utterly dark inside, it felt like it existed to provide a definition of dank. In its black centre, my guide suggested we turn all the lights off. “They used to run power lines all the way through here, but when the line got decommissioned, some local opportunists came through and ripped out all the copper — made a fortune,” he said, though I could hear a smile forming as he spoke.

“And anyway, that’s the story of how I bought my first house.” Our laughter reverberated around the dark walls, but I was still relieved when we got back outside, past the green patches of moss lacquering the only sliver of the tunnel daylight could reach.

Construction of the line began in 1901 and after two years just 10km had been built. Further delays came with the wretched hat-trick of the first world war, the Spanish flu pandemic, and the Great Depression. It wasn’t until 1932 that the track was finally finished; with all the hand-dug tunnels, complicated bridges and frequent landslips, it had become the most expensive line in New Zealand.

It was used for transporting timber and building materials as the young nation stripped resources from its interior, and for taking passengers into a remote and rugged region that was otherwise hard to reach. But an improving road network provided more competition and by 1983 all scheduled passenger services on the line were halted. Occasional tourist and freight trains continued until a derailment in 2009 brought even those to a stop. In total the line had taken over 30 years of construction for just 50 years of regular service.

The communities it left behind reminded me a little of those withering along America’s Route 66. These towns were built for and by the railway, so when it was abandoned, they began to atrophy. The clearest example of this is Tāngarākau, population once 1,200, now just 14, almost all of whom work in honey production.

The line still runs all the way to Stratford, but the self-styled Republic of Whangamōmona was to be my final destination. At the town’s limits a sign read: “Shit can happen quickly so while here be careful and enjoy.” It was sound advice. Apparently one of the tunnels on the way here had been a wormhole back to a time when the trainline thrived, men were men, and the local pub asked guests to leave their boots at the door.

The Whangamomona Hotel has stood since 1912 and while it doesn’t get as many guests as it should, locals still drink with rare enthusiasm in the bar below. In the US, bars like this, especially along Route 66, often have an aura of artificiality, Americana laid on thick for tourists. In here, I was overwhelmed with authenticity. I wasn’t halfway through a beer when a couple asked the barman not to follow through on his plan to feed a newly skinned goat hide “to the eels” but instead give it to them. They had the ragged thing in a carrier bag moments later, with an apology that it was “a bit hacked up”. They said it wouldn’t be a problem — they were going to use it to make a drum.

As is the case across New Zealand, introduced pests such as goats are persecuted with zeal around these parts. So are feral pigs. I know this because, within an hour, a hunting party came in — their bloody, muddy boots duly removed outside — and started telling stories about the “good-sized pig” they’d killed that morning and hung at the outskirts of town in the afternoon, either as a trophy or warning. Half an hour later, a woman came in looking for a chainsaw. She was not short of offers.

I loved the Whangamomona Hotel but I could only spend a night there before heading deeper into the wilderness to visit Blue Duck Station. This time the mode of transport would be helicopter. It landed on a rugby field out the back of the hotel and soon we were up and away, looking over a landscape much mutilated by agriculture.

Many of the peaks immediately around the town exhibited male pattern baldness, acre after acre razed by ruminants. Before long, the denuded slopes were replaced with intensely thick jungle, demonstrating what this part of New Zealand looks like when left to thrive. At the bottom of steep gullies, the Whanganui River ran varicose and wild. Much of the land around here was given to first world war veterans as they returned home from the front line — hard country to be tamed by hard men. Few succeeded.

Blue Duck Station is, in terms of area covered, the largest tourism project in this region. It is also perhaps its most interesting, a sprawling farm of 7,000 acres running right up against the Whanganui National Park, where owners Dan Steele and his family are returning the land to something wilder. Currently 30 per cent of their business still comes from farming, though another 30 per cent comes from tourism, and a further 30 from manuka honey made by an estimated 75mn bees on site. The remaining 10 per cent comes from carbon credits earned through the planting of trees, though Dan was quick to point out that his approach is very different to the cynical planting of redwoods designed to maximise profit elsewhere in the country. “If you do it right, there’s as much money in bush as there is in pasture,” he told me.

People come to ride on horseback or to slalom around on the Whanganui on jetboats, visiting places like the eerie Bridge To Nowhere (a concrete road bridge with no road access on either side, it was completed in 1936 as the Mangapurua Valley was being settled, but the incomers struggled with the remoteness; six years later only three families remained and development ground to a halt).

Many others come with murder on their minds. There’s a lot of trapping around here — of stoats and possums and rats. Any volunteer who bags a feral cat gets NZ$50 cash in hand. If that sounds brutal or inhumane, it’s done for the benefit of the indigenous animals, especially the cherished kiwis, dozens of which live on the property.

Dan took me on a tour around his land on a noisy and seemingly indestructible all-terrain vehicle, splashing through gullies, visiting points with views up and down intensely green valleys. He looked and sounded like a raw bushman, but he spoke with the insight and concern of a modern-day conservationist.

I liked him immediately, enough that I felt I could ask him if he felt out of place in our final stop. My entire time in the region had been a surprise, but nothing surpassed what we found at the top of the highest peak of Dan’s property. It’s here that he has built the Chef’s Table, a fine-dining restaurant run by an English former station volunteer, Jack Cashmore. We moseyed on in, the mud-spattered vehicle outside, serenity and chef’s whites on the inside.

This restaurant — all wine pairings and amuse-bouches and superlative produce from local suppliers — wouldn’t be out of place in any major city in the world. Dan said that until he built it, he’d never eaten food like this. And yet here it was, on top of a mountain in the not-quite forgotten world of Ruapehu, where they even let us keep our shoes on.