"The Overlander" north to Auckland

We arrive in Wellington late in the afternoon in time to return the rental car. We're pretty pooped from the activity of the past few days and decide to walk around the CND for a short while before having supper. It is a beautiful, but windy city and we wicch we had more time to get to know it better. Wellington, New Zealand's capital city, has only 108,000 people, but then the entire country has only 3.8 million people. I am coming from City of Sydney with 5.2 million people in it.


Saturday started with a 5 AM wake up call so we could catch our 6:15 cab to the train station for our 7:20 departure on The Overlander for the trip back to Auckland. The train ride was quite comfortable and we were seated in the Observation car so our views were grand.

One of the highlights of the ride was a very famous spiral. The spiral represents a terrific response to an engineering challenge faced by the railroad builders over 100 years ago. Coming north from Wellington, the terrain was almost constantly uphill but it rose quite gradually.

As a volcanic country, New Zealand is very mountainous. In the center of the country is a large high plateau several hundred feet above sea level. It is to this plateau that The Overlander made its gradual climb north to Auckland. Unfortunately for the railroad there was no long gradual way back down. As a result the engineers of 1901, with the use only of human labor, dynamite, and horse drawn wagons constructed a way for the train tracks to make their way down 195 feet of elevation in the space of 4 kilometers. To prevent that descent from being like a rollercoaster hill they wound their way around a hillside and created 2 tunnels, 3 bridges and 1 horseshoe curve to get the train gradually down to the level where it could continue its trip northward to Auckland.
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The twelve hour trip through the center of the North Island wnet by relatively fast. We discracted by the beautiful scenery and didn't mind the time. We arrived at the new Britomart Transportation Center in downtown Auckland right on time. We had scouted out where there station was in relations to our hotel so we walked to the same hotel we left on Tuesday to spend our last 2 nights.