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Even on a bike, blink and you’ll miss Kokonga (Bending River). A shame really, because if you call into the gangers’ shed on the station site the information panel will tell you this once was quite a township. Kokonga's station site is a great place to look around and perhaps begin to identify some of the ranges that encircle the Maniototo Plains.

Around the time Kokonga was a major railway construction camp, rails ran down from the station site to the Taieri for wagons to be loaded with river gravel. Winched back up to the station, the wagons were hitched to a locomotive and hauled to the head of line construction for their loads to be used as ballast; coarse rock used to support sleepers and track. Another system to get gravel up from the Taieri River to the station site was a bucket cableway.

Kokonga - Waipiata

• 14.5km separates Kokonga from Waipiata.
• Between Kokonga and Waipiata the trail skirts farmland that was once the 2km wide Taieri Lake. A few kilometres after leaving Kokonga for Waipiata, Rail Trailers pass by where stone was collected to build the Dunedin Railway Station, reputed to be New Zealand’s most photographed building.

Kokonga – Tiroiti

• 8km separates Kokonga from Tiroiti.
• After it crosses State Highway 87 at Daisybank the trail goes through a vegetation transition zone from lower rainfall Central Otago to more of a moist coastal influence.
• From the wide open spaces of the Maniototo the trail now traverses through what is known as the Upper Taieri Gorge

Hard basalt stone for the main body of the Dunedin Railway Station was collected and roughly shaped at an area some 3.7km from the Kokonga Station site in the direction of Waipiata Photo: Otago Settlers Museum	As yet the site where some 2000 tonnes of basalt for the Dunedin Railway Station was collected and loaded onto wagons at a small siding between January 1904 and October 1905 is not well identified. However if you look around you’ll see rocks similar to this in a paddock alongside the trail. Photo: John Gibson
This stunning view of the Kakanui Mountains, with the Ida Range making an appearance to the left of the photo, awaits Rail Trailers travelling between Kokonga and where the trail crosses State Highway 87 at Daisybank Photo: Matthew Sole.

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