Daily Photo – Strath Taieri Railway line towards Pukerangi

I was finding my way to Middlemarch, a town approximately 80 kilometres northwest of Dunedin. Along the way, I was tempted to detour onto one of the many sideroads that break off from State Highway 87, where the sealed surface gives way to gravel that crunches under the tyres and twists its way past the dry, tussock and rock-covered hills surrounding the Strath Taieri. Before long, curiosity got the better of me and I turned down one, eventually coming across the railway line that was once a crucial connection between Dunedin and the Otago goldfields. But the thing is, it was lucky the thing got built at all.

Thanks to inconsistent government funding and the wonderfully flawed Co-operative building system, it took a staggering 12 years to complete the 64 kilometres of track. The 1891 brainchild of Richard Seddon, the Co-operative System was a government-led employment scheme that bypassed private contractors and hired gangs of workers directly, prioritising relief for unemployment over the speed or cost-effectiveness of construction. In short, it was less about building a railway quickly and more about making sure people had work.

Of course, while it was being built, there never seemed to be a shortage of disasters along the way. One particularly difficult stop, not far from Middlemarch, was Pukerangi, originally known as Barewood. It was a notoriously windswept and exposed place that lacked access to fresh water. So while the workers struggled to construct massive stone viaducts, water often had to be hauled in by horse and cart or locomotive simply so they could survive the summer heat. And when they were not suffering through the heat, their accommodation huts were in danger of being blown off the ridgelines because somebody had decided it was a good idea to camp on the most exposed parts of the plateau.

Then there was the decision to allow trains and horse-drawn wagons to share the same narrow route, which naturally led to terrifying encounters for local farmers who suddenly found a train bearing down on them while crossing a bridge. To top things off, on one section engineers insisted on cutting the track directly into sheer rock faces rather than tunnelling, leaving parts of the line suspended precariously above the Taieri River and resulting in 300 metres of track taking two years to complete.

If anything, it is a wonder the railway ever reached Middlemarch at all. Yet despite all the chaos, the quality of the workmanship was so exceptional that much of it remains in near-perfect condition today, even if the line itself now ends abruptly at the Middlemarch station, where the steel rails give way to the Otago Central Rail Trail.