Driving Creek Railway

A potter needed clay. The clay was up a hill behind his pottery, on a hillside three kilometres north of Coromandel Town that a century of kauri logging, gold mining and farming had stripped bare, and the cheapest way to bring it down was a railway. So Barry Brickell built one — by hand, on a budget, out of second-hand rails bought at scrap-steel price from closing Waikato coal mines, on sleepers cut from his own pines and ballast traded for pottery.

He never stopped. Over the next quarter of a century the line climbed away from the clay pit and kept going: five zigzag reversing points stacked up the face of the hill, three tunnels dug by hand, ten bridges — among them a double-deck viaduct its builders reckon has no equal anywhere in the railway world — and two spirals. It is 381 millimetres between the rails — fifteen inches — and it climbs 112 metres in 2.7 kilometres, on gradients as steep as 1 in 14. In 1990, after a cousin who happened to be a civil engineer had test-loaded every structure to one and a half times its design weight, the Ministry of Transport licensed it to carry fare-paying passengers at six dollars a head.

What you ride today is that railway, finished. The train leaves the potteries, crosses the gully on No. 1 bridge, works up through the tunnels and the switchbacks and over the double-decker, and stops after 2.7 kilometres at the EyeFull Tower — an octagonal wooden lookout modelled on an Auckland harbour lighthouse, standing clear of the canopy with the Hauraki Gulf laid out below it. It takes an hour and a quarter, there and back. The forest the line runs through was planted by the man who built it, tree by tree, and the whole property is now held by a conservation trust that thinks in centuries.

The train sits under a canopy beside the pottery, and the first thing you notice is that it is not a toy. The rails came from Waikato coal mines. The carriages were designed and built in the workshop forty metres away. The line ahead of you was surveyed with a home-made instrument its builder called a gradimeter — a Vickers gun sight on a tripod with levelling screws — because a proper theodolite was heavier than he wanted to carry through scrub.

Out of the yard the track crosses No. 1 bridge, a 43.6-metre span thrown across two diverging streams in 1977 to reach the clay and the firewood higher up. Everything above that point exists because the hill kept refusing to be climbed. Where the gradient beat him, Brickell doubled back: five reversing points — Ravington, Hoki Mai, Cascade, Horopito and Rima — each one a short level shelf where the driver walks to the other end and the train sets off the other way, gaining height on every leg. Where doubling back was not enough, he tunnelled, or spiralled, or both.

The double-decker

Between Cascade and Hoki Mai the line does something its builders reckon no other railway anywhere does. Three years of surveying, hand-dug earthworks and overlapping cuttings produced a viaduct with a track on each deck: the train crosses the lower level, climbs away round a spiral, and comes back to cross the same structure on the deck above, the top span running 45.9 metres across the gully. It opened in 1991. In 2004 unseasonal rain put a slip across the approaches and trains terminated short of it for a season; two new bridges and a concrete retaining wall at Cascade fixed that, and the line has run since.

The forest, and the top

For most of the climb you are inside bush — tree ferns closing overhead, the track a metre wide between them, the sea appearing and disappearing as the train swings through another reversal. Very little of this forest is original. The property was pasture and wild pine when Brickell bought it, and more than 27,000 native trees — kauri, rimu, tōtara, mataī, miro, kōwhai — were carried up this railway in wagons over thirty years and planted by hand. What closes over the carriage roof is a plantation that grew up while the line was being built.

The last stretch above Rima was the hardest to survey: old slips, a steep face, a third tunnel and a forty-metre bridge. The first passengers reached it in December 2001, and the EyeFull Tower — the pun is on the view as much as on Paris — was finished two years later and opened by Dame Catherine Tizard. You get off, climb the deck, and look out over Coromandel Town, its harbour, the mussel farms and the islands of the Hauraki Gulf. Then the same train takes you back down through the same forest, and the whole thing has taken an hour and a quarter.

Four departures a day, every day of the year except Christmas Day. The site is open 9.00am to 4.30pm and the railway runs to a fixed board that does not change with the season.

The operator publishes the departure times and a duration of 75 minutes, which includes the climb, the stop at the tower and the run back down; the return times above are that duration added to each departure rather than a separately published figure.

Good to know:

• The four times above run all year. We swept the operator's booking system month by month from September 2026 to June 2027 and found the same four departures loaded on every single date, with 25 December the only day missing.
• School holidays and long weekends add four more. In the peak blocks the board doubles to 09:45, 10:30, 11:15, 12:00, 13:30, 14:15, 15:00 and 15:45 — that pattern was loaded solid for 26 September to 11 October 2026, and single extra departures appear on scattered dates through the summer. If the day you want looks full, check it again nearer the time; capacity is added rather than moved.
• Book ahead and arrive fifteen minutes early. Seating is limited to one train at a time and payment is taken at booking; check-in is at the reception by the pottery, where the guide collects tickets and gives the safety briefing.
• It runs in the rain. Most of the route is inside sheltered forest and ponchos are lent out at reception. Only severe weather stops it, and the operator then offers a later departure, a new date or a full refund.
• Wheelchair users are carried, with a space that has to be reserved at the time of booking. Driving Creek is a Hāpai Access Card partner: a support person travels free, or a cardholder travelling alone gets ten per cent off.

Times and running days as of September 2026, read from Driving Creek's own published information and confirmed date by date in its live booking system. Confirm before travelling at drivingcreek.nz (opens in a new tab).

Driving Creek sells this train itself, online or at the reception desk, and there is one class of travel. When we checked its booking system in September 2026 a return ride was NZD 57 for an adult and NZD 32 for a child aged four to sixteen. Infants under four travel free but must be declared when booking, and a child under two who is not yet walking has to be carried in a front pack. Anyone thirteen or under must be with an adult.

A family pass for two adults and two children is NZD 155, with further children added at NZD 22 each — cheaper than four singles by a clear margin. Wheelchair spaces are sold at the same adult and child fares and have to be reserved when booking. Driving Creek is a not-for-profit: the fare goes to the trapping, the replanting and the pottery, not to a shareholder.

No rail pass covers this railway, and none ever will. Interrail and Eurail are European products with no validity in New Zealand, and KiwiRail's Great Journeys brand — which has sold multi-trip passes for its own scenic trains and the Interislander ferry — has nothing to do with Driving Creek. This is a private 381 mm line on private land, owned by a charitable trust, and its only seller is itself.

Two things do reduce what you pay. Book two Driving Creek activities in the same transaction and fifteen per cent comes off the total — the railway pairs with the eight-line zipline canopy tour or a wheel-throwing pottery class, the two bookings can be on different days, and the discount is applied automatically at checkout. That offer is advertised as ending on 27 September 2026, so check it is still running before you count on it. And a Hāpai Access Card holder brings a support person free, or takes ten per cent off if travelling independently.

Checked against drivingcreek.nz in September 2026.

The railway is a seventy-five-minute ride three kilometres north of a town of about 1,800 people, which means the rest of the day is the Coromandel's problem to solve. It solves it well. Within half an hour of the station there is a gold battery from 1899 that still crushes rock under New Zealand's largest working water wheel, a harbour farmed for mussels, two kauri groves that the sawmillers somehow missed, and — over the range on the eastern coast — a beach a British newspaper once called one of the twenty most deserted in the world.

There is a neat historical joke in the geography. The valley the train climbs out of is the one named in the claim Charles Ring registered in November 1852, later recorded by the Geological Survey as the first authenticated gold discovery in New Zealand. Prospectors came for the metal, loggers for the kauri, and a potter came for the clay that was under both of them.

The ride is an hour and a quarter and the last train leaves at three in the afternoon, so nobody stays here for the railway alone — you stay because Coromandel Town is two and a half hours from Auckland by a road that winds the whole way, and arriving in the dark to catch a 9.45am departure is a poor plan. The town has around 1,800 residents and a short main street; everything in it is within a few minutes' walk of everything else, and the railway is three kilometres up the coast road from the roundabout.

Two kinds of bed suit this trip. In the town itself you are walking distance from the cafés, the wharf and the Saturday market, and five minutes' drive from the station. Up in the bush on the hills behind — Buffalo Road climbs past the gold battery, and the smaller lodges sit in the same regenerating forest the railway runs through — you get the birdsong that the railway's forty years of trapping and planting paid for. Book ahead between late December and February, when the peninsula's population multiplies and the train doubles its departures.