TranzAlpine

Few trains cross an entire climate divide before lunch. From Christchurch the line sprints the chessboard Canterbury Plains, then climbs into gorge country on a ladder of short tunnels and tall viaducts, the Staircase among them, high above the Waimakariri’s turquoise braids, while the open-air viewing car fills with wind-blasted photographers. Beyond the alpine crest everything flips: beech rainforest, cloud, greenstone rivers and the moody West Coast light down to Greymouth.

Stations

1. 2 kmChristchurch +1
2. 22 kmRolleston
3. 47 kmDarfield
4. 70 kmSpringfield
5. 138 kmArthur's Pass
6. 151 kmOtira
7. 195 kmMoana (Lake Brunner)
8. 232 kmGreymouth

The stations OpenStreetMap lists for this service, in order, with the distance along the line as drawn here. A train may skip some of them. A +N after a station: N other routes on this map stop or end there, and the map draws it as a station where lines meet.

Along the way

• Canterbury Plains sprint
• Staircase Viaduct
• Craigieburn high country
• Bealey braids below Arthur’s Pass
• Otira rainforest descent
• Lake Brunner (Moana) shore

How this line was checked

• The 230 km this route shares with OpenStreetMap relation 1598960 is drawn from that relation's own nodes, thinned to within under 25 m of them
• Checked against OpenStreetMap: the whole line lies on real track, a median 4 m from it
• The operator publishes this line's timetable: KiwiRail, a place to look it up, not a check of our drawing
• Wikipedia has an article for this line
• See for yourself: open this line on the map with OpenStreetMap's own railway drawn underneath it

Questions and answers

Read more on Wikipedia ↗