Railways have been a significant part of New Zealand life, yet their treatment in historiography often does not reflect this. I argue for a greater appreciation of railways, focusing upon their role in shaping the developing colony in the nineteenth-century. I introduce the existing literature to indicate contributions with which greater engagement is required and to identify directions requiring further research. The provincial ‘prehistory’ of railways preceding the Vogel boom of the 1870s requires particular emphasis; railways figured prominently in the settler imagination even though physical construction was minimal. I then show that the forces unleashed by Vogel were more than economic and offer tentative conclusions regarding the railway’s role within a range of fields. The railway was a site for contesting morality, it deepened the colonial project and identity, and it defined the contours of daily life.

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Transport networks can play an important role in responses to extreme climate events, especially when governments own the network and intervene directly. Railways occupied a central place in Australian rural development by the late nineteenth century, a topic that has been discussed widely by scholars of economic history. Much less is known about their contribution during the severe drought crises faced by rural communities. We investigate the role railways played during the Federation Drought of 1895–1903 in sustaining Australia’s largest export industry, pastoralism. Government ownership of the railways enabled subsidies to be offered for the movement of livestock from drought areas and fodder to those areas. These policies assisted the rapid recovery of pastoral output and contributed to longer-term industry improvements. The intervention, however, came at significant financial cost to the railways, which was borne for the public good as part of an economic developmental purpose. The costs and benefits of drought relief policies continue to be debated today; our study demonstrates the major role transport networks can play in response to extreme climate events, both for immediate relief and in shaping subsequent behaviours.

New Zealand provides a valuable case study of the relationship between colonial statecraft and forest conservation. This article explores the connections between Premier Julius Vogel’s Forests Act of 1874 and the abolition of New Zealand’s provinces in 1876, locating conservation within the broader context of popular discontent with provincialism. It argues that previous perspectives have either downplayed or exaggerated the significance of conservation to provincial abolition, and that the relationship between the two was complex and uneven. Abolition profoundly affected conservation, but the stimulus for abolition had been gathering elsewhere even as conservation shaped its timing.