Special places archive
May 2004
Wellington cable car museum
Broken link
In the 1890s in Wellington, entrepreneurs built a cable tramway to connect the port city to newly subdivided building lots on the hills above. It was a great success. It operated until the 1970s, when a new cable tramway was built on the same right-of-way.
The old winding house and maintenance depot at the top of the line was converted to the Wellington cable car museum, opened in 2000. The museum website is a model of clear information and story-telling. Each web page is headed by a little picture of a tramcar climbing an incline (gratuitous animation for which I am happy to forgive the designer).
This photo shows the upper terminus in about 1918. You can see a tramcar and trailer in the middle. In the background is a kiosk built by the tramway company. On the right is the winding house which now houses the museum. [Picture from the collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library, from the museum website.]
See some of my photographs of the cable tramway.