The Old Tangarakau Township
26 Tangarakau Road, Tangarakau, Taranaki 4397
Number 2 in our top 3 haunted and Abandoned towns to investigate Is the Old Tangarakau Township.
Now farmland and Bush, Tangarakau once was a thriving community of 1200 people. Mini Mysteries drives an overlooked route.
Tangarakau. It's a tiny dot on the map 90 minutes' drive from both Stratford and Taumarunui - so remote that it isn't even on the Forgotten Highway.
You must turn off State Highway 43 and drive 6km into bush and rugged farmland to reach all that's left of it, which is almost nothing.
There's a campground with cabins and provision for motor homes, a working farm, the heavily rainforested banks of the Tangarakau River and surrounding hills to explore and plenty of outdoor activities: fossil collecting, kayaking, hunting.
In the spirit of Mini Mysteries, this peaceful rural retreat is a great place to reflect on what isn't there. Even the name, which translates as "to fell trees" seems appropriate, for there's nothing but paddocks where a community of 1200 tunnellers and railway workers once thrived.
Tangarakau was the epicentre of an epic construction job accomplished with picks, shovels and dynamite - a project which it's said would have cost $9 billion in today's money.
Construction of the Stratford-Okahukura railway line began from Stratford in 1901 and took more than three decades to complete. The link was mothballed in 2009, though you can still ride over it in tourist railcarts.
Stratford is one and a half hours from The ghost town, and that first sight Of Mt. Taranaki is always splendid.
For most of its life this railway thrived, with goods trains carrying coal, stock and wool and passenger railcars travelling both ways every day.
Building the link was a marvel.
It sliced through four ranges, racking up countless cuttings and boring 24 tunnels with a combined length of more than 10.5km.
These tunnels, several more than 1km long, generated epic tales. As you will see if you take a railcart tour, they had regularly spaced man-sized niches in the walls, places to shelter when caught in the light of an oncoming train. While under construction, one tunnel became a short cut for school children and it's said a minister, who preached at two churches on the same Sunday, used to cut through another near Ohura.
Many locals used the tunnels as shortcuts to the next village, risking a quick scuttle to the nearest niche.
Tunnellers and other workers, some of whom had families, had to live somewhere and Tangarakau was one of those places. In 1925, more than 1000 people formed a bustling township here.
One feature of visiting Tangarakau on the railcarts is that the railway ballast on this part of the track is full of fossils.
For about 10 years, during the height of construction, Tangarakau boasted a drapery store, hairdresser and tobacconist, boot shop, tearooms, confectioner and fruiterer, social rooms, post office and savings bank, police station, a boarding house, resident doctor and dispensary (formed by a co-operative Tangarakau Medical Association), a maternity home, cinema and social hall, lending library and reading room, a well-equipped school, recreation ground and tennis court.
The streets were lit by a power station provided by the Public Works Department.
According to Taranaki's Ghost Town by Derek Morris, men who built the Stratford-Okahukura railway line earned only a few pounds a week. But everyone gave a day's wages to the victims of the 1931 Hawke's Bay earthquake.
Children were included in all community events, sports and twice-a-week silent movies.
But a common complaint was that, since Tangarakau lacked refrigeration, kids got to eat icecream only two or three times a year during picnic visits to New Plymouth. After the line was completed in 1932, the workers drifted away and most buildings were dismantled and removed. During the 1960s, the population dwindled to eight. Now only Bushlands Holiday Park remains.
Not far from the ghost town, in the spectacular Tangarakau Gorge, is the grave of pioneer surveyor Joshua Morgan who died in 1893.
Morgan was an extraordinary man - the first European to cross the Urewera Ranges and an eyewitness to the 1886 Tarawera eruption. He spoke fluent Maori and often used English and Maori interchangeably.
Morgan fell ill while surveying the road linking Stratford and Taumarunui and did not survive to see the historic railway line through to completion.
Morgan's tomb has become a place for travellers to pause and reflect on those who built the Stratford-Okahukura railway line.
Along the Forgotten World Highway you'll catch sight of tourists riding railcarts, the only vehicles which now use the mothballed Stratford-Okahukura railway line.
Railcarts approach one of the 24 once well-used tunnels on the Stratford-Okahukura railway line.
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