Rise and fall - The North Island Main Trunk Line
Expansion of North Island rail
Turning the first sod
Railway workers camp
The last spike
The Parliamentary special
Up and running
After more than 23 years of surveys, engineering challenges and sheer hard work, the main trunk's first through train left Wellington on 7 August 1908. This 'Parliamentary Special' carried MPs to Auckland to meet the US Navy's visiting 'Great White Fleet', and needed 20 and a half hours to make the trip. In the middle section it travelled over a temporary track that the Public Works Department had rushed through in the nick of time.
Following the line's official opening in November, the first regular express service started on 14 February 1909, taking about 18 hours to complete the journey. In 1924 a new 'Night Limited' express, hauled by the celebrated Ab-class Pacific locomotives, cut the trip to just over 14 hours. The interwar years were to be the golden age of main trunk passenger travel.
Despite its discomforts, most business, government and tourist travellers preferred overnight travel, which allowed them to save on accommodation and delivered them at their destination in the early morning. A 'Daylight Limited' was trialled in 1925–6 and 1929–30, but thereafter was confined to the Christmas and Easter holiday periods, when main trunk traffic swelled to bursting point, especially in the late 30s.
The holiday rush
On Christmas Eve 1934, five trains carried 1,800 travellers from Wellington to Auckland, and in 1938 a total of eight expresses ferried more than 3,000 passengers north. Easter traffic also boomed in these years, peaking on the Thursday before Easter 1939, when eight expresses ran each way between Auckland and Wellington. The New Zealand Herald described the bustle of Auckland station at Christmas 1935:
Throngs of people in the most diverse kinds of holiday attire, people laden with suitcases, bags and parcels of every conceivable shape and size, and above all children, armed with buckets and spades, toy aeroplanes, squeakers and a hundred and one other toys, all hurried or were hurried down the platforms, until it seemed that everyone in Auckland was bent on leaving the city.
A downhill spiral
Passenger numbers on the main trunk dwindled from the 1950s due to increasing competition from cars, buses and aeroplanes. After decades running a predominantly overnight service, in the 1960s New Zealand Railways promoted the scenic attractions of daytime travel on the main trunk route. In 1963 a diesel-hauled Scenic Daylight service was introduced, followed by the daytime Blue Streak (1968) and Silver Fern (1972) railcars, which in 1991 were succeeded by the Overlander.
While the main trunk remained a crucial freight artery, passenger numbers continued to fall through the 1980s and 90s. The overnight Northerner service—the heir to the legendary Night Limited—was axed in 2004, followed by the daytime Overlander in 2006.
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