Where have I been this last Week?

Hi everyone!

Last weekend I went on a trip to Arthur’s Pass, a national park roughly 100 kms from Christchurch. I splurged and took the train there and back which turned out to be quite convenient because it leaves Chch (the local abbreviation for Christchurch) in the morning and arrives in Arthur’s Pass by 11am and the return trip leaves around 4pm. The bus route follows an opposite time frame so I managed to gain ~12 hours of time away from Chch by going by train! I took 452 images, of which I have done a quick pairing down of obviously out of focus/duplicates to a mere 366 locatable here. Over the next few days I will (hopefully) go through them to add captions like I have done for the rest of the images so far.

I spent most of the daylight time hiking (or tramping as its called in NZ) and stayed the nights in a bunk house at the local YHA But I’m getting a head of myself, there are probably 2-3 blog posts about my 3 days there.

So I’ll start off with the Train trips there and back and regurgitate some of the more interesting points that were mentioned by our driver over the intercom as we went. The Tranz Alpine train travels along the midland route which bisects the south island from Chch to Greymouth.

Here is a map of its route, found produced from a third party (took me ages to find a decent map too)


View Larger Map

(I'd recommend checking out the larger map link as you can play with what it shows you with the tick boxes on the left)

The line is very dramatic in terms of scenery, moving over many viaducts, through numerous tunnels and over the Waimakari river several times. It was finally finished with the completion of the 8.5km long Otira tunnel in 1923. Prior to then coaches would bridge the gap between the rail lines along Arthur’s Pass. The route was initially started because of a gold rush but that ended before the rail line was finished. Now the line’s main use is transport of relatively clean coal from the west coast to the deepwater port of Lyttelton where it is mostly exported to China for high grade steel production. In total 10 000kg of coal is moved per day over 7 train trips.

The Train departed the Christchurch station at 8:15 am on Friday the 19th, I got there by an easy bus ride from campus. I got my ticket, loaded my backpack into the luggage carriage and found my seat. This was all very civilised when compared to traveling by plane, no metal detectors, no xrays, barely even a boarding pass check. I spent the entire trip hanging out in the observation car.

For the first hour the train moved along the Canterbury plain which is almost entirely agricultural. There were many animals grazing, (according to one of the people I met in the hostel NZ has no factory farmed beasts) mostly sheep, but there were cows and horses too.

By the time we cruised through Sheffield (9:06am) the mountains had leaped into view filling more that 180 degrees of vision. According to our friendly conductor the average elevation was 83m above sea level while Chch is on average 2m abslvl. Arthur’s Pass is 737m abslvl, so there was clearly a lot of climbing coming up! The steepest part of the track I was on was 1:15, which our conductor assured us to be very steep for a train, and the steepest part overall is in the Otira tunnel which is 1:33!

By 9:37am we passed through the first of 16 tunnels and the viewing car was starting to fill with blokes with recording apparatus of diverse value. From then on we moved across 4 viaducts, the tallest of which was 240m above the river below before having the Waimakari river rose up to meet us for the last half hour of the trip to the pass station where I disembarked at 10:50 am. After that the train immediately enters the Otira tunnel and desends back down to the coast on the other side of the Southern Alps.

The return journey was similarly spectacular, leaving A’s P around 4pm and arriving around 6ish (I didn’t keep as accurate notes on the way back) except that this time I knew which sides of the car to stand to get the best pictures. At the end our conductor treated us some absolutely biting standup comedy about how the shopping malls of Chch were the bane of his existence and how teenagers would just hang out txting each other thinking they were having the time of their lives.

That’s all for now, I’ll try to get another post detailing what I actually did (besides standing on a train) tomorrow, though the pics I have up right now give a good teaser.