New Zealand... not known in North America for it's trains. And this video is not helping that. Yes.... it is good for scenery, and the ride is interesting. But... it is a tourist movie, more so than a train video for rail fans. As a train fan who enjoys railroad videos.... I can not say that I was impressed.

An interesting and enjoyable video in Highball's "Rail Adventures" series. I bought it because my father grew up near where this video was filmed (I live in the US), and good rail video from New Zealand is hard to come by. It is hard to figure out the market Highball has in mind for "Rail Adventures", since there is too much straight rail content to attract the travelogue market, and I suspect railfans like myself will find the electronic music throughout annoying. You can turn that off and listen to just the natural train sounds, but it is not possible to turn JUST the music off (it ought to be). Anyway, this is a well photographed trip on a tourist train through 18 miles of a scenic remote canyon near Dunedin, New Zealand. The city now owns the line for this train; it had been abandoned and apparently is not used for anything else, but seems well maintained. Virtually the whole video is shot from the rear platform of the train of receding track, so it is a bit bouncy, but I happen to like that view and it shows off the fine canyon scenery well. There is some cab footage, but only a few scenery shots and views of the train from the ground; just one shot for a few seconds of a car interior. The scenery is great, all the tunnels are shown, and the line ends up at a small town in the middle of flat valley ranching country reminiscent of eastern Wyoming.

As far as I know, there is no other video of this line. I did wish for a somewhat more varied view, and there are some errors in content judgment, e.g., an undue fascination with showing the view looking down on the coupler and the track (once is enough), where the line first enters the canyon is not shown, and the commentary is very sparse (though I found what little there is informative). Video quality in BluRay is typically first-rate. Suggestion: watch all the way through with Track 3 so you can hear the commentary (unfortunately you also get the music, which mainly obliterates the natural train sounds); then in the future just listen to Track 1 (natural sound only) and it will be fine. The video runs 71 minutes, and there is a generous 33 minutes of unnarrated previews, including 19 minutes from Highball's Route 66 video.

Not very interessant and very poor views of trains. Only landscapes filmed on board.