How New Zealand moved, from coastal steamers and trams to cars and planes

For its first decades New Zealand travelled by sea. Then it rode trains and trams in numbers it has never matched since, and then it stopped. A scroll through more than a century of Official Yearbooks and the official records that followed shows how each way of getting around rose, peaked and gave way to the next.

A country of ports

In 1899 New Zealand’s ports recorded 21,354 vessels entering coastwise. Sixteen thousand of them were steamers. The country had been settled from the sea and it still lived by it. The 1910 Yearbook put it plainly: the extensive coastline and numerous harbours “facilitate travelling and the distribution of goods by sea.”

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Wellington, Lyttelton and Auckland were the big three, but the map of coastal traffic in 1900 shows how many places counted as a port. Dunedin, Napier, Gisborne and Westport each handled more than 300,000 tons of coastal shipping that year, and Timaru and Picton more than 250,000. Nelson, Greymouth, New Plymouth and Bluff each handled more than 170,000 tons, and Thames, Oamaru and Whanganui more than 100,000. Even Foxton, Patea and Hokianga appear in the table.

The quickest way from Auckland to the south was by ship. From 1883 the Union Steam Ship Company ran an express from Onehunga to Lyttelton, calling at New Plymouth and Wellington. The 930-ton Takapuna steamed at 14 knots to complete the voyage in 36 hours, with 150 passengers in 35 cabins.

Before that, the trip took days. In September 1868 the steamer Rangatira left Wellington at eleven in the morning on the 7th and reached the Manukau on Saturday the 12th, calling at Whanganui and New Plymouth on the way. Two years later the Airedale’s 54-hour passage from the Manukau to Wellington, by way of New Plymouth, Nelson and Picton, was reported as a record. The Rangatira’s advertised fares that spring were five pounds saloon and three pounds ten shillings steerage, Wellington to the Manukau.

Overland was worse. When Governor Bowen rode from Napier to Auckland by way of Taupō and Rotorua in April 1872, the Daily Southern Cross reckoned that once the Taupō road was finished coaches might run from Napier, and soon Wellington, to Auckland “in about four days.” No record of anyone doing it then has been found.

Inland, the rivers did the same job. The Whanganui River’s first commercial steamer service began in 1886, and from 1891 Alexander Hatrick’s paddle steamers ran a ten-hour service to Pipiriki. Before the Main Trunk railway was finished the river was part of the overland route from Auckland to Wellington, with a floating hotel moored at the Ohura River for travellers heading to or from the railhead at Taumarunui.

Where there was no ship there was a horse. The Cobb and Co coaches began in Otago in 1861. The horse population kept climbing long after the first railways, and did not peak until 1911, at 404,284 animals in a country of just over a million people.

Iron roads

The railways changed the map from the coast inward. Government lines grew from 1,884 kilometres in 1880 to 3,385 in 1900 and 4,821 by 1920. Lines spread inland from the main ports, and in 1908 the North Island Main Trunk joined Auckland and Wellington. Newswire’s map of every railway New Zealand built shows the network spreading line by line. Within a year the Onehunga express was gone. The Union Company withdrew the service in 1909 because the train had taken its passengers.

The numbers tell the story of a country that took to the train. In 1880 the railways carried 3 million passengers. By 1900 it was 5.5 million, and by 1910 it was 11 million, more than ten for every person in the country. Once season tickets were counted from 1912 the total was 20 million journeys, and by 1921 it was 28.8 million. That was more than 22 rail journeys a year for every New Zealander, in a population of 1.27 million.

Even before the last rails were laid the route was in use. In November 1907 the Taranaki Herald described the trip: train from Auckland to Taumarunui, a 25-mile coach ride to Ohakune for 15 shillings, a Public Works train to Mataroa and the railway on to Taihape, reaching there in two days and Wellington on the third.

The first daily through express ran in mid-February 1909 on a scheduled run of 19 hours 13 minutes. The fare was 39 shillings and a penny first class and 21 shillings and twopence second. In December 1924 the Night Limited cut that to 14 hours 20 minutes, leaving both cities at 7.10pm and arriving at 9.30am with six stops and two sleeping cars. Thirty years later, in 1955, the Night Limited still left Wellington at 7.15pm and arrived in Auckland at 9.15am. The overnight express was barely faster than it had been in 1924.

The tram city

Inside the cities something even bigger was happening. The Tramways Act of 1872 had allowed horse and steam trams, but the electric tram arrived in Auckland in 1902, Dunedin in 1903, Wellington in 1904 and Christchurch in 1905. By 1916 Whanganui, Invercargill, Napier, Gisborne and New Plymouth had them too.

The first national count, in 1911, found 82.9 million tram passengers a year. By 1921 it was 139.7 million and by 1925 152.5 million. That is 110 tram rides a year for every man, woman and child, on top of 19 train journeys each. These are Yearbook figures for the electric tramway undertakings, and up to 1927 they include an unknown number of bus passengers carried by the same authorities.

By the late 1930s there was one bicycle for every six people as well. Between 1900 and 1950 nearly 800,000 bicycles were imported.

The peak

Public transport reached its high point in the war. Petrol was rationed and troops were moving. In the year to March 1944 the electric trams carried 220.2 million passengers, 133 rides for every person in the country, and the railways 38.6 million journeys. New Zealand had 1.66 million people. It has never travelled that way since.

The car

Motor vehicles had to be registered from 1925. There were 106,091 cars in 1927 and 233,812 in 1950, about 12 for every hundred people. Then the postwar boom arrived. By 1960 there were 502,574 cars and by 1970 861,958, which is 31 for every hundred people. The car count had risen more than three and a half times in twenty years.

Everything else fell. The trams, trolley buses and buses of the six city tramway authorities carried 203.5 million passengers in 1950. All council passenger services together carried 141 million in 1960 and 101 million in 1970. The trams went first. Gisborne closed its system at the end of the 1920s and Napier’s did not survive the 1931 earthquake, but the rest went within fourteen years. Whanganui stopped in 1950, Invercargill in 1952, Christchurch and New Plymouth in 1954, Auckland and Dunedin in 1956. Wellington’s last tram ran on 2 May 1964.

Rail went the same way more slowly. Journeys per person fell from 13.6 in 1950 to 7.5 in 1970 and 5.1 in 1980. Country branch lines closed and the network shrank from 5,689 kilometres in 1953 to 4,516 by 1980. The 1970 Yearbook recorded a steady decline in passenger journeys since 1961 “in face of competition from other forms of transport.”

The horse had already gone. From 404,284 in 1911 the count fell to 217,689 in 1945 and 104,995 in 1960, after which the census stopped counting them.

The car was not a quick alternative between the two cities for a long time. In 1912 a pioneering party took eight days to drive from Wellington to Auckland, six of them on the road between Taihape and Hamilton. Record attempts came down fast, from 16 hours in 1920 to 13 hours 19 minutes by Norman “Wizard” Smith in an Essex in 1924, but those were races, not journeys. Today Google Maps puts the drive at 7 hours 38 minutes by State Highway 1.

Wings

Union Airways, a Union Steam Ship Company venture, flew its first scheduled service from Dunedin to Christchurch on 15 January 1936 and built an air main trunk from Palmerston North to Dunedin via Blenheim and Christchurch. In the year to March 1936 the scheduled services carried 9,106 passengers. NAC took over the private airlines on 1 April 1947 and by December 1951 flew a network from Kaitāia to Invercargill. In the year to March 1951 domestic airlines carried 238,405 passengers. Te Ara puts NAC’s 1951 total at about one sixth of the population.

Then the numbers climbed the way the trams had fifty years earlier. Domestic air passengers reached 650,812 in 1960, 1.17 million in the year to March 1968, months before the first Boeing 737 arrived, 2.48 million in 1980 and 4.5 million in 1990. By 1990 the average New Zealander flew 1.3 times a year within the country. No official count of all domestic air passengers has been published since the 1990s, but Air New Zealand alone carried 11.5 million domestic passengers in the year to June 2019, more than two for every person in the country, and 10 million in the year to June 2026.

The plane made the distance disappear. In November 1936 Union Airways was licensed to fly Wellington to Auckland by Lockheed Electra, leaving at noon and arriving at three, so that as the Evening Post put it “our two largest cities will be within three hours travel time of each other.” The daily service began on 27 June 1937 at six pounds single, twelve pounds return, with ten-minute stops at Palmerston North and New Plymouth. NAC’s fare in 1947 was five pounds, and six pounds fifteen shillings by 1959. Ahead of the Boeing 737’s first scheduled service on 14 October 1968 the Press printed the new flight times. Auckland to Wellington, one hour. In February 1969 the Railways Road Services coach advertised the lowest fare on the road at $9.20 single.

Today Air New Zealand flies the route more than ten times a day in about an hour and ten minutes, from $89. The Northern Explorer takes ten hours forty minutes three days a week, from $249. The InterCity coach takes about eleven and a half hours overnight.

The strait

Between the islands the overnight ship held on longest. The Union Company’s Lyttelton to Wellington service began in 1895 with the elderly steamer Penguin once a week, became nightly in 1905, and from 1907 was run by purpose-built turbine ferries. Wellingtonians, NZ History records, set their watches by the ships. In the year to March 1939 the Lyttelton express carried 261,669 passengers, and all sea passengers between the islands that year numbered 334,823.

The rail ferry Aramoana began the Wellington to Picton run in 1962, and carried 123,520 passengers in its first seven and a half months. By 1970 the rail ferries carried 433,699 a year and by 1984 729,089. The Lyttelton steamer express made its last sailing in 1976. The Interislander carried 825,000 passengers in the year to June 2019 and 605,000 in the year to June 2025, with Bluebridge taking a share it does not publish. Port Marlborough counted 1.26 million ferry and cruise passengers through Picton in 2019 and 1.15 million in 2025.

Back on the rails

Rail fell to about 10.4 million journeys in 1993, three for every New Zealander, the lowest recorded figure. Then Auckland rebuilt its network. Britomart opened in 2003, electric trains began carrying passengers in April 2014, and Auckland’s rail boardings rose from 6.8 million in the year to June 2008 to 21.4 million in 2019. National rail boardings reached 35.7 million that year, seven a person. The only years with more were 1943 and 1944, when the country was at war and petrol was rationed, and back then there were a third as many people to share the seats. The pandemic took it back to 15.3 million in 2022, and by 2024 it had recovered to 23.9 million.

All public transport together tells the same story. New Zealanders made 84 million bus, train and ferry trips in the year to June 2001, 168 million in 2019 and 154 million in 2024. That is 29 trips a person. In 1944 they made 133 on the trams alone.

The car has not gone anywhere. At the end of 2024 there were 3.53 million light passenger vehicles for 5.29 million people, 67 for every hundred, against 31 cars per hundred in 1970 and 12 in 1950 on the Yearbooks’ narrower count of private cars. Auckland’s City Rail Link opened this month. Whether it starts a fourth act in this story, after the ship, the train and the car, is a question the next set of numbers will answer.

Sources

NZ Transport Agency public transport performance data 2008/09 to 2023/24; Ministry of Transport transport indicators (TV020) 2000/01 to 2008/09 and vehicle fleet statistics; Stats NZ estimated resident population; Auckland Transport and Metlink patronage; KiwiRail annual reports; Port Marlborough annual reports; Air New Zealand annual reports; Papers Past: Daily Southern Cross 14 Sep 1868 and 29 Apr 1872; Auckland Star 17 Jun 1870; Wellington Independent 29 Oct 1870; Taranaki Herald 30 Nov 1907 and 3 Jul 1908; Evening Post 2 Dec 1908, 15 Feb 1909, 15 Mar 1924, 11 Dec 1924, 13 Feb 1932, 13 Nov 1936, 3 Jun 1937 and 25 Feb 1955; Poverty Bay Herald 21 Feb 1920; Press 4 Sep 1947, 3 Nov 1959, 3 Oct 1968 and 8 Feb 1969. Air New Zealand, Great Journeys NZ, InterCity and Google Maps, checked 16 Sep 2026. New Zealand Official Yearbooks 1893 to 2008 (Stats NZ digitised collection): railway statistics, tramway and omnibus returns, motor vehicle licensing, civil aviation, Cook Strait and inter-island passenger returns, live-stock returns, population estimates. Te Ara: Ferries, Public transport, Railways, Aviation, Bicycles, Coaches and long-distance buses. NZ History: Lyttelton–Wellington ferries. New Zealand Geographic: Smokestacks and paddle-wheels. Wikipedia: Trams in New Zealand, Union Airways of New Zealand, New Zealand AM class electric multiple unit (checked against the cited dates). Every figure in this article and the interactive is traced to a named table or page; the working files, including the extracted Yearbook series, are held by Newswire.

How did your family get around? If you rode the trams, took the Lyttelton ferry or remember the first time you flew, tell us in the comments.