Portal:Trains/Selected article/Week 1, 2021

The Palmerston North–Gisborne Line (PNGL) is a secondary main line railway in the North Island of New Zealand. It branches from the North Island Main Trunk at Palmerston North and runs east through the Manawatū Gorge to Woodville, where it meets the Wairarapa Line, and then proceeds to Hastings and Napier in Hawke's Bay before following the coast north to Gisborne. Construction began in 1872, but the entire line was not completed until 1942. The line crosses the runway of Gisborne Airport, one of the world's only railways to do so since Pakistan's Khyber Pass Railway closed. The line has been freight only since October 2001, when the Bay Express passenger train was cancelled. In October 2016 KiwiRail and the Port of Napier announced an intention to reopen the section of line between Wairoa and the port from late 2017 due to a surge in forestry log traffic. In February 2018 the section was still mothballed and Minister for Regional Economic Development Shane Jones announced the allocation of $5 million from the Provincial Development Fund to reopen it for forestry trains. The first train on the Napier-Wairoa line for six years ran from Napier to Eskdale on 6 June 2018 to make a ballast drop. It reopened in June 2019.