When Nature with a mighty seismic impulse formed a site for Wellington she left much for its future inhabitants to do, and for well nigh a century they have been doing it with a dogged determination.

She lured the first settlers into a magnificent harbour, but gave them only a meagre foothold between the hills and the sea. Three generations have now been consolidating and expanding that foothold. They have forced the ocean back foot by foot until several hundred acres have been reclaimed, and what was once sea and sandy beach is now great city blocks and streets teeming with traffic.

Nature, too, had ringed them in with a solid rampart of hills that had to be surmounted before the rich lands beyond could be reached. Thus to the westward one line of railway climbs by a steep sinuous track up a grade of 1 in 40 through a series of seven tunnels. To the eastward the other railway, after winding tortuously for six miles along the narrow shore of the harbour, and traversing a rich, populous river valley, climbs the Rimutaka Range and descends into the wide and fertile Wairarapa Plains by a centre-rail track on a grade of 1 in 15.

Up to 1908 the West Coast railway, to Longburn (83 miles) was owned and operated by the Wellington-Manawatu Railway Company, the East Coast line to Napier being part of the Government system.

With the opening of the Main Trunk railway to Auckland (426 miles) in 1908, the Government took over the Manawatu line. With the unification of ownership in 1908 the separate passenger terminals at Thorndon and Lambton, three-quarters of a mile apart, were retained, and though schemes were immediately formulated for combining the two terminals they still remain separate entities in this year, 1929.