St Arnaud is a tiny village (pop 442) on the shores of Lake Rotoiti in the Nelson Lakes National Park. The road through St Arnaud was temporarily a major highway following the Kaikoura earthquake in November 2016. Massive and multiple landslips over the coast road north of Kaikoura required over a year’s work to get the road open again, which meant anyone travelling between the lower parts of the South Island and Picton had to go via the alternative route. The detour was marked on this sign at Kawatiri Junction as the “Picton Detour”.
Kawatiri Junction, the turnoff from State Highway 6 to Picton
Since the coastal road reopened at the end of 2017, it’s no longer the detour, but the sign hasn’t really caught up yet, hence the temporary fix. The road had a hard time over that 13 months, taking on way more traffic than it was designed for. Small stopping-off points like St Arnaud and Springs Junction became temporary truck stops and food caravans popped up to feed all the hungry travellers.
Building and maintaining infrastructure in the South Island has never been an easy task. The mountains are steep and prone to erosion, slips and the occasional earthquake. The old railway platform at Kawatiri Junction is a reminder of just how hard it can be building in such difficult country.
The old railway platform at Kawatiri Junction
In the 1860s, the Nelson Provincial Council started investigating the possibility of a railroad connecting Nelson to the rest of the South Island. Today, it is sometimes referred to as “the railway to nowhere”. Work began in 1876, and although the railway had reached as far as Glenhope in 1912, work on the 6.5 kilometre Glenhope-Kawatiri section stopped and started during the war years, then ground to a complete halt in 1917. Work on the Kawatiri tunnel began in 1920 and a workers’ camp was set up across the river from the tunnel work site, at a place called Woodhen Bend/Pikomanu. The workforce built up to around 300 at its peak and the camp had its own post office. The tunnel, which is sometimes called the Pikomanu tunnel, cuts 185 metres through a granite spur around which the Hope River flows. North and south of the tunnel, bridges crossed the river, providing what must’ve been spectacular views of the river running through the beech-forested hillsides.
Today the tunnel is part of the Kawatiri Historic Railway Walk. The platform at Kawatiri Junction has a number of panels describing the area’s history, and the walk starts just north of the carpark. The walk goes through beech forest along the path the railway track used to follow before crossing the Hope River via a footbridge built on the old railbridge supports.
The footbridge was built on the old railbridge supports
The concrete above the entrance to the tunnel says 1923, the year work on the tunnel was finally completed. It was another three years, though, before trains were using it to get to Kawatiri Junction.
The tunnel, completed in 1923, cuts through a granite spur
At only 185 metres long, you don’t really need a torch to walk through the old Kawatiri rail tunnel, and being without a torch adds to the eerie, damp atmosphere.
The damp, eerie Kawatiri tunnel
The tunnel cuts through granite, and digging out the tunnel was hard work. At first, workers had only hand tools for digging the holes dynamite was placed in, and rubble was cleared using picks and shovels. Later, once about a third of the tunnel had been cut, a compressor was available, making drilling easier. Altogether, work on the tunnel took three years.
The tunnel exits above the Hope River, where you can see the supports for the old railbridge. The walk goes up and over the tunnel, following the bend in the river, then loops back down to the southern end of the tunnel and you can follow the track back to the carpark at Kawatiri Junction.
The railbridge supports in the Hope River
In the end, Kawatiri Station was to operate for just five years.
The stop before Kawatiri was at Glenhope Station, which closed in 1955 when the entire line was finally closed.
Glenhope Station is now a barn
Today the old station serves as a barn, with a lean-to hay shelter built onto the side of the original building. There are no railway lines remaining; they were taken up soon after the line was closed. The Glenhope station is visible from State Highway 6; if you’re going north, it’s on the left-hand side, just before the turnoff to Moonlight Road. It’s not publicly accessible, however, as it’s on private land. But from the road, you do get a glimpse of the past, when a railway line ran through the beech forests of the Tasman District, all the way up to Nelson.
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