On the main trunk line

The overlander. Picture / Greg Bowker

Britomart Station, September 30, 6.50am. What was to have been the final Auckland to Wellington passenger service is due to depart at 7.25. As eager passengers arrive, a voice on the PA instructs them to report to the yellow podium on the platform for seat allocation.

Obediently they form a long, orderly queue. The podium is unoccupied. 7am comes and goes. Then 7.15.

I ask the train driver if he can get someone to come and start allocating seats. "I just drive the train, mate," he says. An enterprising woman walks up and down the line suggesting that "we all get on and just leave them to sort it out". As half the passengers comply uncertainly, a humourless woman with a lapel badge announcing that she's a member of the Railway Enthusiasts Society oozes disapproval. "It's not permitted," she hisses.

The partial rebellion prompts some official action. Word goes through the carriages that someone has told everybody to get off. I suspect the enthusiast. The mutiny is crushed. At 7.29am the yellow podium is occupied. By the time we leave, we're running almost half an hour late.

The day will be punctuated with observations by staff that it's "a very big train today". That's the explanation for the muffins being finished by Pukekohe ("You're joking, aren't you?" says a tidy pensioner in disbelief). But the train sold out in July, as soon as it was announced it was to be the last.

Now it's been spared, albeit in a stripped-down form - three days a week for a probationary two years, with the possibility of a daily service over summer. But such inefficiency seems an odd way to proclaim the value of a service that the taxpayer was being asked to pay $1.75 million a year to subsidise. When airlines will fly you the length of the island for about the same price and allow you to check yourself in in a few seconds, rail needs a point of difference. While the dishevelled Britomart experience does have a certain antique charm, it's not about to bring the customers back.

Once we're under way, though, the sense of magic is revived. The memories flood back of the university-day trips on the old Night Limited. The guard would come through the carriages intoning "Next stop Taum'runui time for refreshments" and, once the train was running again, would return to collect the heavy china NZR cups, most of which had already found their way into duffel bags or parka pockets.

Train travel has a charm that no road trip can match. The rhythmic clicking and gentle rocking is both soothing and inspiring, imitating as it does the beat of music of the metre of verse. Better still, the train gives the traveller the sense of actually going somewhere, unlike aircraft travel, which transplants you, with sudden violence, in another location far away.

And the Overlander follows the track less travelled. The main trunk line snakes down the western side of the island's spine, rubbing shoulders with State Highway 1 only for the first and last sections. The track takes us across the lush Waikato and through the King Country, where the pasture land becomes more rugged and steep. The colour of the spring growth is so intense that it's easy to understand why northern hemisphere tourists report that their abiding impression of this country is of its greenness.

Soon, we are far from the highway, rolling through country that owes its prosperity to the rail. The train was the communities' only link to the outside world. It brought supplies in and took away the fruits of local industry - notably the timber that was being shaven off the crown of the island.

Through the trip, the on-board staff keep up an informative commentary on the history, geography and sights. On this almost-historic day, they are joined by a couple of rail historians, but the standard patter is excellent. What's better is that most of the staff are Maori, so the place names are euphoniously pronounced, and the history is subtly inflected with reminders that there was stuff happening here before the burly loggers arrived with their bullock teams and borrowed money.

Down the back of the last carriage, Chris Cape, son of the late Peter, the doyen of indigenous folk music, is playing a couple of his father's songs. He proposed himself as on-board entertainment for the final trip, and endlessly repeated renditions of Taum'runui on the Main Trunk Line and She'll Be Right are his payment.

Jenny Greener of Marton asks us to sign a scrapbook she has lovingly compiled to mark the final trip. She's a regular and passionate passenger - her cellphone ringtone is steam-train whistle - but it looks like the end of the line for her. Her midweek trips to look after a grandchild in Wellington won't be possible now, at least not until the promised summer timetable begins. At National Park, where the northbound and southbound trains meet and the crews change over, Ruapehu mayor Sue Morris and Green MP Sue Kedgley, who organised a petition to save the Overlander, parade up and down the platform as the locals do a roaring trade in sizzled sausages and steaks (the venison is cheaper than the beef).

Then it's across the Rangitikei Plains and the Manawatu and down the coast to the capital. We arrive 45 minutes late. Farewelling us, the staff tell us repeatedly that the survival of the Overlander depends on us. It's an odd appeal, which seeks to foster a sense of guilt. In an era of cheap airfares, it's an odd service that demands support. The magic of the rail endures - but it may not be enough to save the train.