Wellington Cable Car

The Wellington Cable Car is the city's most photographed attraction, but almost nobody knows it was built as a real estate scam. In eighteen ninety-eight, the Kelburn and Karori Tramway Company was formed by shareholders of the Upland Estate Company, who owned land in the hills above the city and needed a way to get buyers up there. The cable car was the marketing hook — early property buyers in nineteen-oh-two received free cable car passes with their land purchase. Build it and they will come, except in this case, build it and they will buy houses.

It opened on the twenty-second of February, nineteen-oh-two, and was an instant success — over four hundred and twenty-five thousand passenger trips in the first year. The engineer, Dunedin-born James Fulton, designed something globally unusual: a hybrid between a cable car and a funicular, using both a continuous loop haulage cable with a San Francisco-style gripper and a funicular balance cable. It was the only system of its kind in the world.

Then came the university. Charles Pharazyn, a wealthy sheep farmer with a major stake in the tramway company, offered a thousand-pound donation to Victoria University — on the condition it be built in Kelburn, so that students would ride the cable car daily. The university took the deal, and Victoria University of Wellington has been up that hill ever since. A city's major university, located where it is, because of a cable car investor's business interests.

The original wooden cars — nicknamed the Red Rattlers for the noise they made through the three tunnels — were retired in nineteen seventy-eight despite public protests. The line was rebuilt by Swiss firm Habegger as a standard funicular. It climbs a hundred and twenty metres over six hundred and twelve metres of track, at a gradient of one in five. At the top: the Botanic Garden, the Cable Car Museum in the original winding house, and views that explain why someone would build a railway up a cliff to sell houses.