3-016-783 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Opening of the first railway in New Zealand, at Christchurch, Canterbury Province, 1864. Engraving from a sketch by Mr. R. Kelly. Canterbury was the first province '...to introduce the railway locomotive and the electric telegraph...The event...was one of no ordinary interest to the province, and drew together a large number of the inhabitants. Trains continued to run up and down throughout the day, and afforded gratuitous rides, as well as immense amusement, to crowds of colony-bred young people, to whom a ride in a railway-train was, perhaps, a novelty; as well as to many others, who had not enjoyed that mode of conveyance since they emigrated from the old country...The Lyttelton and Christchurch line is the beginning of a system of railways, to be carried to the north and south of the Canterbury province, which will open up millions of acres of splendid alluvial plain that lie between the coast line and the snow-capped ranges of the Southern Alps. Our Engraving takes in a distant view of those mountains, which, covered with perpetual snow, and as high as those of Switzerland, form the backbone of the Middle Island of New Zealand, traversing almost its whole length, and leaving a space of some fifty miles in width along its eastern shore'. From "Illustrated London News", 1864.