Category Archives: Life-enhancing experiences

Eat your way round North Yorkshire

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High Street, Pateley Bridge, North Yorkshire

High Street, Pateley Bridge, North Yorkshire

When my mate Richard and I have a day out we take it in turns to choose the itinerary.  He took it into his head he’d never been to Pateley Bridge, west of Ripon:  in fact he had, as he realised when we got there, and it’s a delightful little town, the geographical centre of Nidderdale, with a few historic buildings and more to eat than you could possibly ever consume.

We had lunch at the Crown Hotel [http://www.nidderdale.co.uk/crownhotel], where the Persian lamb turned out to be Persian beef and was none the worse for the metamorphosis, though I wonder how many cows there are in what used to be Persia.

Richard’s wife Janet had asked him to bring her back “something interesting”, and we were spoiled for choice.  At Kendall’s butchers [http://www.kendallsfarmbutchers.co.uk/Contact] he found pork, turkey, stuffing and apple pie (all in one pie, naturally), and I treated myself to the pork and blue cheese alternative.  I’d have had the pork and mushy peas pies that we saw on our way up the hill, but by the time we came down again they’d all been snaffled.

Down the hill, at Weatherhead’s butchers [http://www.nidderdale.co.uk/weatherheads], I couldn’t resist the pork, chilli and chocolate sausages, the pork, spring onion and ginger burgers and a batch of chicken cushions with cream cheese and chorizo filling.

We admired the Oldest Sweetshop in England [http://www.oldestsweetshop.co.uk – the building dated 1661 and the shop founded in 1827 – but we didn’t indulge:  Richard is an ex-dentist and I decided I’d done enough present and future damage to my waistline.

Pateley Bridge is bristling with red plaques pointing out the local history features, and the Nidderdale Museum is based in the former workhouse:  http://www.nidderdalemuseum.com/index.asp.  Neither of the two churches, the older, ruined St Mary’s or its 1825-7 replacement, St Cuthbert’s is remarkable;  indeed, the most exciting building is the former Board School of 1875, now St Cuthbert’s Primary School, dominated by a tower bristling with turrets and gargoyles.

We chose to resist the temptation to visit the Old Bakehouse [8 High St – 01423 711189], though the piles of pastries looked well worth sampling, and drove across to Ripon to work up an appetite for tea.

There we fell upon the Wakeman’s House Café [http://www.ripon-internet.com/local-businesses/858/the-wakemans-house-cafe.html] where we calculated it’d take a fortnight to get through the cake cabinet.

I completed my Christmas shopping at Drinkswell [http://www.drinkswell.co.uk], which stocks every imaginable sort of alcohol from bottles of quality beer to malt whisky at silly prices.  I chose three-packs of beer.

To end the day we wandered around Ripon Cathedral [http://www.riponcathedral.org.uk] in the dusk – quiet, welcoming, virtually empty and beautifully lit.

Magic.

 

Drift into Dent

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Dent Station, Settle & Carlisle Railway, Cumbria

Dent Station, Settle & Carlisle Railway, Cumbria

Dent Station on the Settle & Carlisle railway is the highest main-line railway station in England.  It stands 1,150 feet above sea level.  Its remoteness is such that it lies four miles from the village of Dent, six hundred feet below in the dale.  The site is so bleak that the stationmaster’s house was built with integral double-glazing.

The stretch of line to beyond the summit at Ais Gill (1,168 feet) was notoriously difficult to keep open in snow.  The trackside snow-fences of wooden railway sleepers are a gaunt reminder, even at the height of summer, of conditions in the worst of winter.

In 1947 the drifts reached to the road bridge north of the station platforms and took three weeks to clear.

There is a story, related in the Settle-Carlisle Partnership website [http://www.settle-carlisle.co.uk/stations/dent/storyinfo.cfm?c_Stn=004] of a signalman dying in the Dent signalbox, and his relief laying him on top of the locker until they were relieved at the end of the shift.

After the station buildings were sold in 1985 Neil Ambrose spent twenty years restoring the down-side building.  In 2006 a quantity surveyor, Robin Hughes, bought it for £250,000 and spent a further £150,000 upgrading the interior as holiday accommodation for six.

The adjacent Snow Hut, provided as a base for the track workers who battled, often unsuccessfully, to keep the line open in winter, is now a studio bunk barn for two (or, at a pinch, three).

Details of Dent Station and the Snow Hut are at http://www.dentstation.co.uk/index.php.

The 48-page, A4 handbook for the 2011 Waterways & Railways across the Northern Pennines tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Halfway to the clouds

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Great Orme Tramway, Llandudno: car 6

Great Orme Tramway, Llandudno: car 6

Llandudno’s Great Orme Tramway [Tramffordd y Gogarth] is the only British example of a street-running funicular railway.  It is completely unlike the San Francisco cable-cars, because its trams work in two pairs, permanently fixed to a winding cable.

It opened in two sections, the lower half on July 31st 1902, and the summit section on July 8th 1903.  The winding house was steam-powered from 1902 to 1958, and since then the cables have been electrically hauled.

The lower section of the Great Orme Tramway looks like its San Francisco cousins, because the cable is concealed for much of its length under the roadway in a conduit slot between the running rails.  The upper section, above the half-way winding house, runs on railway track, and the complex arrangement of cables and rails is visible.

Until 1991 the tramway had an overhead trolley-wire solely to carry the telephone-system so that tram-drivers could communicate with the engineman.  Now the communication-system is radio-operated and the trolley poles, which convinced some visitors that this was an electric tramway, are entirely cosmetic.

The line is operated by four trams, 4 and 5 on the lower section and 6 and 7 on the upper:  the first three numbers were taken by jockey-cars, propelled by the cable-connected trams and manhandled along loop tracks between the two sections.  Cars no 1, 2 and 3 were wagons for carrying coal for the boiler house and coffins to St Tudno’s Church:  all three disappeared before 1930.

There has been only one fatal accident:  the drawbar on No 4 snapped on August 23rd 1932, killing the brakesman and a little girl he tried to rescue by jumping from the car.  In 1963 a retired GOT employee revealed to Ivor Wynne Jones [Llandudno:  Queen of Welsh resorts (Landmark 2002)] that the Board of Trade inspector was deceived into thinking the emergency brake worked at the time of his inspection on July 30th 1902.

As a result of compensation claims amounting to £14,000, the original Great Orme Tramway Company went bankrupt, and after a completely new and still effective safety system had been designed for the lower section, a new Great Orme Railway Company was formed in 1934.

The Llandudno Urban District Council compulsorily purchased the tramway in 1949;  the UDC was absorbed by Aberconwy Borough Council in 1974.

After a collision between cars 6 and 7 on April 30th 2000, when the facing points at the loop malfunctioned, injuring seventeen passengers, the entire tramway was closed and refurbished, with an induction-loop system that electronically locates each car on a monitor in the central control-room, and the system was fully operational in time for its centenary in 2002.

Another accident occurred in 2009, when cars 6 and 7 collided as a result of a further points failure on the passing loop:  http://www.raib.gov.uk/cms_resources.cfm?file=/100816_R132010_Great_Orme.pdf.

It’s worth the ride, not only for the vintage travel-experience but also for the views from the top of the Great Orme.  Having blown away the cobwebs at the summit, the smart advice is to return to the Victoria Tram Station and visit Fish Tram Chips alongside:  http://www.thebestof.co.uk/local/llandudno/business-guide/feature/fish-tram-chips/24034.

The most recent history of the tramway is Keith Turner, The Great Orme Tramway – over a century of service (Gwasag Carreg Gwalch 2003).  The tramway website is at
http://www.greatormetramway.com.

 

Eight wonder of the world

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Empire State Building, New York City

Empire State Building, New York City

The Empire State Building, described when it opened in 1931 as “the eighth wonder of the world”, epitomises Manhattan. Perhaps the most elegant of all the New York skyscrapers, faced in Indiana limestone and granite, with stainless steel mullions running from the six-storey base to the Art Deco pinnacle, its setbacks make light of its vast bulk.

Nowadays it wouldn’t get built, because it occupies the site of the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Waldorf-Astoria_1904-1908b.jpg. This grand Victorian pile, originally two hotels of 1893 and 1897, was pulled down in 1930 and the business transferred to its current address at 301 Park Avenue.

The Empire State Building was extended during construction from its planned 86 storeys to 102 storeys to be sure of the accolade of the World’s Tallest Building. It was completed in advance of schedule and below budget, yet initial rentals were so few that it was dubbed the “Empty State Building”. Once again the tallest building in New York City after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, its height to the top of the TV mast is 1,454 feet.

There are comfortable open promenades as well as a glass-enclosed viewing-area at the 86th floor. The view from the 102nd-floor observatory stretches up to eighty miles, reaching into the states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

The mast was originally intended as a mooring for dirigibles, but only one landing was ever attempted. This hair-raising procedure failed because it was impossible to stabilise the end of the airship that wasn’t anchored to the tower.

In 1946 a B-25 bomber collided with the 79th floor in thick fog, killing fourteen and causing only localised damage.

The Empire State lives in New York legend. It starred notably in the film King Kong (1933) where the giant gorilla ends its life clinging to the top of the building.

When the film director Peter Jackson consulted primatologists while planning his 2005 version of King Kong, he was told that a real giant ape would fling excreta at the attacking aircraft, and offer what was discreetly described as a “display-challenge” [John Harlow, ‘Hollywood agenda,’ The Sunday Times, November 2nd 2003].

The Empire State Building is open to the public until midnight, which makes it an admirable and popular place from which to watch the city lights, carpeting the view in all directions.

The official website is http://www.esbnyc.com, and the smart tourist information is at http://www.nycinsiderguide.com/Empire-State-Building.html#axzz1ilC4n9Jg.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘The Big Apple: the architecture of New York City’, please click here.

 

Gorton renaissance

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Monastery of St Francis, Gorton, Manchester (2009)

Monastery of St Francis, Gorton, Manchester (2009)

In November 1861 four Franciscan friars arrived in Manchester to set up the Monastery of St Francis, Gorton, serving the working-class community that grew up round the nearby railway works.

Their buildings were designed by Edward Welby Pugin (1834-75), who possessed much of the vigour of his father, A W N Pugin, and were constructed largely by the physical labour of the brothers and their parishioners.

The first stone was laid on May 24th 1862, and the three wings of the original monastery were complete by 1867.  To raise funds for the Infant School in 1867 Father Francis hired the Free Trade Hall for a bazaar which raised £1,000.

E W Pugin’s magnificent church, 184ft long, 98ft wide and 100ft high, dominates the streets of Gorton and is clearly visible from central Manchester.

By 1900 the Catholic population of Gorton had increased from 300 to over 6,000.  The fathers saw the parish change from a poor village community, initially dependent on cotton (and badly hit by the effects of the American Civil War), into an industrial inner-city suburb.

For almost a century they provided spiritual and pastoral support to the people of Gorton, and – because many of those people were drawn from Wexford, Waterford and Cork – Gaelic classes, lantern lectures on Irish history and St Patrick’s Day celebrations.  They also exported missionaries to China, Peru and elsewhere.

The surrounding nineteenth-century housing was cleared in the early 1970s, and the Monastery became unsustainable.  Eventually, the Franciscans sold the site for £75,000 to a developer who planned to divide the church into a seven-storey apartment-block but instead went bankrupt.

The abandoned buildings were quickly and badly vandalised.  Lead and slates were removed, and there were repeated arson attacks.  Virtually all the decorative features of interest or value were removed or smashed.

In 1997 the Monastery of St Francis and Gorton Trust bought the Monastery for £1 and began the formidable task of bringing the place back into use.  Cornering funds was not the least of their labours:  the Architectural Heritage Fund, English Heritage, the Heritage Lottery Fund, New East Manchester (NEM) and the North West Development Agency (NWDA) between them chipped in millions.

Fixtures that had disappeared in the dark days of dereliction have returned.  A complete set of twelve statues, stolen from the lofty nave arcades, famously appeared as garden ornaments at Sotheby’s:  Manchester City Council bought them for £25,000 and stored them until September 2011 when they returned to the site for restoration.

The art-dealer Patricia Wengraft [http://www.patwengraf.com/Patricia-Wengraf-Fine-European-Sculpture-and-Works-Art-Intro-DesktopDefault.aspx?tabid=1] secured the return of the huge crucifix:  http://www.manchester.gov.uk/news/article/1954/monasterys_giant_crucifix_is_hoisted_back_into_place.  The chains to support it had been handed in mysteriously some time before.

I remember the first public opening in September 2005:  people queued down the street, showing immediately how much St Francis’ Monastery meant to local people who’d grown up, been baptised or married here, and had been uprooted.

The Monastery reopened fully as a community, conference and events centre in 2007.  It’s open to the public most Sundays:  see what’s on offer at http://www.themonastery.co.uk/Whats-on.html.

I would have liked to see something similar happen to St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield.

Just because a place of worship is no longer needed for worship doesn’t prevent it having enormous value to people.

But making the transition requires enormous energy, imagination, devotion, acumen – and the creative support of people in power.

Shiregreen waits…

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Manchester’s Heritage, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

Matthew 12:12

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Pah Homestead, Hillsborough, Auckland, New Zealand

Pah Homestead, Hillsborough, Auckland, New Zealand

When I visited the Auckland Decorative & Fine Arts Society to give a lecture, my hostess Anne Gambrill picked me up at the airport and swept me off for lunch to the Pah Homestead, which is – as the old V&A advert might have said – a very fine café with an art gallery attached [http://www.pahcafe.co.nz/index.cfm].

The homestead was built for a businessman, James Williamson, in 1877-9, to designs by the father-and-son team Edward (c1824-1895) and Thomas (1855–1923) Mahoney, who also built St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Auckland.

It ceased to be a home as early as 1888, after Williamson’s death, and has been successively used by the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches.  Fortunately, although not a stick of furniture remains, the building itself is remarkably intact and rich in plasterwork, joinery, parquet flooring and marble fireplaces.

Auckland City Council purchased it in 2002 to develop it and the surrounding park as an amenity.  As the TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre, the Pah Homestead opened to the public in August 2010.

It is now the home of the James Wallace Art Trust, which collects and displays contemporary New Zealand art.  Sir James Wallace, who has been collecting since the early 1960s, admitted, “I learned enough trying to paint to know that I was no good at it.”  Instead, he invested massively in young artists:  the result is a “diary collection”, from which nothing has been sold.  There is an entertaining attempt to interview Sir James at http://www.nzherald.co.nz/arts/news/article.cfm?c_id=544&objectid=10746252.

Of all that was on offer when I visited the Pah, I most enjoyed Matthew 12/12 by Gregor Kregar (b 1972) – seventy-two ceramic sheep, all in woolly jumpers, crowded into one corner of the room by a ceramic sheepdog:  http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O5.html.  You could say it’s a fresh interpretation of New Zealand lamb.

In addition to live sheep [http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O2.html, http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O3.html and http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O4.html] Gregor Kregar, who is based in Auckland, also does ceramic pigs [http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O7.html] and mongrels [http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O6.html].  Perhaps live pigs and mongrels are less biddable than sheep.
 
You can take a virtual tour of the current exhibition at the Pah Homestead at http://wallaceartstrust.org.nz/wallace-art-awards/virtual-gallery.  Indeed, you can change the colour of the walls if you like.

 

Christmas in a T-shirt: Egypt

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Temple of Ramesses II, Abu Simbel, Egypt

Temple of Ramesses II, Abu Simbel, Egypt

For many years, my summer work in England obliged me to holiday abroad – if at all – at Christmas, and I’ve got used to heading off to exotic locations around the winter solstice.

The first time I chose Egypt I was so beguiled I went back for a second helping.

Egyptology is studied and researched entirely in English, so the local guides are astonishingly fluent, to the extent that on my second tour they invariably addressed our tour-manager, a lady from Essex, as “Na’alie”.

Tourist tours to Egypt tend to follow a pattern:  in Cairo the Pyramids and the Sphinx, together with the Egyptian Museum, are virtually compulsory.  You could hardly not visit them, though not everyone would enjoy the interior of the Great Pyramid, which is rather like Holborn underground with emergency lighting, no ventilation and no escalator.

The Sphinx was smaller than I expected, about half the length of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and I was surprised to find it has a tail.  When you stand level with its paws you notice it’s gazing straight at a Pizza Hut and a Kentucky Fried Chicken operation.

The Egyptian Museum is astonishing, especially if you’ve already seen Tutankhamûn’s modest tomb in the Valley of the Kings at Luxor:  the treasure – case after incredible case of thrones and shrines and beds and a chariot and the mask and two equally rich coffins in gold, lapis lazuli and turquoise – fills half a floor of a building the size of the National Gallery.  There’s no understanding Ancient Egypt, but it’s possible to gain a sense of wonder.

Luxor town made me think of Mabelthorpe with minarets.  Here again, there’s a tourist track – Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, the Temple of Queen Hapshepsut, the Colossi at Memnon and a disconcerting coach-ride to Dendera, which in the 1990s involved an armed convoy of tour-buses high-tailing across the fields and through sleepy villages for an hour:  a tourist bus was blown up some years previously, after which the locals’ sales-opportunities became extremely limited.

Best of all, though, is the Nile cruise – temples at Esna, Edfu, Kom Ombo and Aswan, the location of the First Cataract.

The town of Aswan is dominated by the astonishing Aswan High Dam, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s great legacy, holding back 111 cubic kilometres of water to irrigate the lands downstream and provide up to half of the country’s electricity.

The highlight of my Egyptian travels was a before-dawn plane-journey from Aswan to Abu Simbel for the awesome experience of being inside the great temple of Ramesses II at the moment of sunrise.

What has always been a great archaeological miracle is now an engineering marvel, for the entire rock-hewn temple was dismantled in 1964-8, moved 200 metres and raised 65 metres away from the rising waters of the Aswan Dam.

I’ve never before or since paid over £100 for a half-day excursion, and I don’t regret a penny of my early-morning odyssey to Abu Simbel.

For the moment Egypt is an uncertain destination for holidaymaking but not completely out of bounds.  The warm and friendly Egyptian people continue, in the manner to which they are accustomed, to welcome visitors to their breathtaking land.

UK Foreign Office advice about travel to Egypt is at http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/travel-and-living-abroad/travel-advice-by-country/middle-east-north-africa/egypt.

 

Edgwarebury

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Edgwarebury, Hertfordshire

Edgwarebury, Hertfordshire

Branching off Station Road, in the middle of the North London suburb of Edgware, is Edgwarebury Lane, lined with elegant thirties houses.

It crosses the busy A41 Edgware Way, otherwise the Watford by-pass, where pedestrians are provided with a very grand footbridge.

North of the A41 the houses eventually give way to tennis courts and a cemetery, and the road diminishes into a bridleway, though the bridge over the M1 motorway is built to main-road dimensions.

Edgwarebury Lane then climbs steeply past the Dower House, and eventually reaches the former Edgwarebury Hotel, now the Laura Ashley The Manor Hotel:  https://www.lauraashleyhotels.com/en/themanorelstree/thehotel.html.

The name, and the persistence of the route against the grain of the modern road-system, suggest that Edgwarebury must have been at least as important as the once-rural village of Edgware.

This is, of course, not a sensible or practical way of reaching the Edgwarebury Hotel.  It’s reached via Barnet Lane and the last few hundred yards of the old lane.

The hotel was originally Edgwarebury House, the residence of Sir Trevor Dawson (1866-1931), managing director of the armaments company Vickers Ltd.

As an essay in Victorian or Edwardian black-and-white revival, it has one attractive show front, looking south across a gently-sloping garden surrounded by trees and looking across to distant views of London.

Within, the major rooms are embellished with antique carved timber and stained glass.  It has all the hallmarks of a late nineteenth-century interest in collecting architectural antiques.

It served as a location for the Hammer horror film The Devil Rides Out (1968), the rather more cheerful Stardust (1974) and much else.

It’s my favourite place to stay in the London area, whenever its special deals are cheaper than Premier Inn.

I like to walk down Barnet Lane, where the local motorists often drive at absurd speeds, to the crossroads and eat at the Eastern Brasserie [0208-207-6212], which serves the sort of Indian meals where you savour every mouthful, from the popadoms at the start to the slices of orange at the finish.

It’s always been one of my favourite start-of-the-weekend-in-London experiences.

There is an informative article about Edgewarebury Lane at http://hidden-london.com/gazetteer/edgwarebury.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

Water pump

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Claverton Pumping Station, Kennet & Avon Canal, Somerset

Claverton Pumping Station, Kennet & Avon Canal, Somerset

There’s something strangely miraculous about using water to lift water.

It’s not by any means unusual.  Even before the Industrial Revolution, in mines particularly, waterwheels were used to harness the power to lift water vertically, using Heath Robinson contrivances called “rag and chain” pumps.

The engineer George Sorocold (c1668-c1738) used waterwheels to provide mains water to houses, first in Derby, and then elsewhere including the area around London Bridge.

Just about the only surviving example, however, is at the Claverton Pumping Station on the Kennet & Avon Canal, a few miles outside Bath.

The Kennet & Avon notoriously suffered water-supply problems, primarily because its summit level was so short, but also because the stretch along the Avon valley around Limpley Stoke was continually drained by the Bath locks and also leaked like a sieve.

The Claverton pump uses two adjacent breastshot waterwheels, each seventeen feet in diameter, to lift water fifty gallons at a time 48 feet from the River Avon into the canal.

It’s an oddly peaceful piece of machinery.  The wheelhouse has all the illusory ease of water-power.  It’s easy to forget the amount of energy concealed in the tranquil water and the idle splashing of the wheel paddles.

The water drives what is in effect a beam engine, very like the more familiar stationary steam engine, but at Claverton there’s no heat, no sense of simmering energy.  It’s extraordinarily restful to watch the beam rise and fall without apparent effort.

The pump started work in 1813, and stopped finally when an obstruction stripped many of the oak teeth from the main spur wheel in 1952.  The canal was no longer navigable by that time and the British Transport Commission chose to replace it with a diesel pump simply to fulfill their legal obligation to maintain a level of water.

Fortunately, industrial archaeologists were alert to the significance of the place, and the Kennet & Avon Canal Trust, assisted by the then Bath University of Technology and apprentices from the British Aircraft Corporation at Filton, Bristol, painstakingly restored it.

The water was heaved from the river into the canal once more in 1976.

Now it’s possible to enjoy the sights and sounds of eighteenth-century engineering on regular opening days.  The team-members at Claverton are very welcoming:  they have an excellent coffee machine and an executive loo.

The best access is by walking along the towpath.  Arriving by car involves dodgy parking and an unnerving crossing of the Wessex Main Line railway.

Details of opening times and operating days for the Claverton Pump are at http://www.claverton.org.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Waterways and Railways between Thames and Severn tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Train through Middle Earth

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KiwiRail Overlander train at National Park, North Island, New Zealand (2011)

KiwiRail Overlander train at National Park, North Island, New Zealand (2011)

When I did a lecture-tour for the New Zealand Decorative & Fine Arts Societies [http://www.nadfas.org.uk/default.asp?section=209&page=1179] their travel co-ordinator Jenny offered me the option of travelling from Hamilton to Wellington (that is, much of the length of the North Island) by air or by rail.

For me that’s a no-brainer.  There’s no finer way to see a land than through the window of a railway carriage.

Until 2012 [see below] the Overlander took twelve hours for the full journey from Auckland to Wellington, 9½ hours from Hamilton southwards.  It’s a comfortable, leisurely trip, at the time using rolling stock very similar to the TranzAlpine.

Mark Smith, the Man in Seat 61, points out that this is the journey that inspired the film producer Peter Jackson, who first read J R R Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings on a train on the North Island Main Trunk Railway and returned to the region to shoot his film trilogy Lord of the Rings (2001-3).

The journey is an unmissable opportunity to sense the scale of the North Island.  The line climbs into the volcanic centre of the island, and then drops into the precipitous Rangitikei gorge.  Towards evening it finds its way to the west coast, where on fine summer evenings there’s a grandstand view of the sunset.

Driving a railway through the heart of the island took nearly a quarter of a century:  construction started in 1885 and the last spike was driven in 1908.

The engineering is spectacular.  The most memorable feature of all is the Raurimu Spiral, which lifts the line 132 metres within a distance of two kilometres, by twists and a spiral over 6.8 kilometres of track.  It’s one of those stretches of railway where the train nearly meets itself coming back:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raurimu_Spiral.

Some of the viaducts on the final 1908 section are as impressive as those on the TranzAlpine line.  The Makatote Viaduct [http://trains.wellington.net.nz/misc2/makatote_1983.jpg] is an original steel structure, 258 feet above the river-bed;  the curved Hapuawhenua Viaduct is a modern concrete replacement, 167 feet high, built on a diversion from which the earlier steel viaduct is visible to the east of the line – http://www.ohakunecoachroad.co.nz/pages/hapuawhenua-viaduct.html and http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&sll=-43.221299,171.928037&sspn=0.002533,0.004967&ie=UTF8&ll=-39.385256,175.399566&spn=0.002687,0.004967&t=h&z=18.

The most endearing and surprising landmark on the journey south is at Mangaweka, where a DC3 aircraft rests beside the Hub Café:  http://www.mangaweka.co.nz/dc3-aeroplane.html

New Zealanders customarily disparage their railways, which were built with difficulty and have been managed half-heartedly over the years.  It’s as if the nation can’t decide whether rail is essential or superfluous to the task of transportation across the two mountainous land-masses.

The North Island Main Trunk Railway has been improved over the years by building deviations before and after the Second World War, and by a piecemeal electrification.  The Wellington-Paekakariki section was electrified at 1,500V DC in 1940, and 255 miles between Palmerston North and Hamilton were electrified to 25 kV 50 Hz AC in the 1980s.

This means that the Overlander leaves Auckland behind a diesel locomotive, changes to electric power at Hamilton and back to diesel haulage at Palmerston North, running under electric wires it does not use from Waikanae through the Wellington suburbs to its terminus:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Northisland_NZ_NIMT.png.

In 2006 there was a strong likelihood that the Overlander, the only remaining train between the North Island’s two biggest cities, would close completely:  the service was reprieved three days before the closing date, and both the line and the rolling-stock were refurbished.  As a result, passenger numbers rose significantly, and the length of the trains and the number of days’ service have repeatedly increased.

If you don’t use it, you lose it.

Update:  In June 2012 the Overlander was rebranded, speeded up but reduced in frequency as the Northern Explorer:  http://www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-standard/news/7164511/Dash-to-catch-the-last-train.  The route and the scenery are just the same but the rolling stock is improved.

An excellent description and a practical guide to booking trips on the Northern Explorer is at http://www.seat61.com/Overlander.htm.