The clubhouse at the heart of Gore's smallest railway once had a working life of its own. According to a 2010 listing on the Waymarking website, the Gore Model Engineering Club meets in a former signal tower from the town's railway yards, and its raised track loops around the Hamilton Park playground, crosses a trestle and ducks beneath the trees.

The club says the line is open to the public on Sunday afternoons. In a Facebook post, the Gore Model Engineering Club said its Hamilton Park miniature trains run from 1pm to 3pm on Sundays, weather permitting, at the park on the northern edge of Gore beside State Highway 1, next to the children's playground. Rides have cost $2 at recent club events, the ODT's Ensign has reported.

Why does a handful of little engines matter? Because the trains are run entirely by volunteers, and the club has said plainly that it needs more of them. After its Easter Fun Day at Hamilton Park drew about 500 people in March, club president Rhonda Wilson told The Ensign that riders were turning up in record numbers. "We have more kids and parents riding here than we have ever had. It's just amazing," she said. In the same breath came the catch: "We just love it. We just need some more volunteers to run it."

The deal on offer is a generous one. Volunteers who join as members get free rides for their children for the year, and the commitment Wilson described was roughly a couple of hours, about once a month. "Come and talk to us, they can come and become a member, their kids can ride free for the year," she said. She was also blunt about what is at stake for the town: "Gore needs to support what we've got here."

Wilson has a personal stake in the line. The Ensign reported last year that she took the club on after her husband died, and that some of the trains belong to her while others are owned by the club. The club has made a habit of special holiday runs, from an Easter Bunny Run in April 2025, when drivers, conductors and even the engines wore bunny ears, to an evening run with lights the following month, when the trains' small working headlights came into their own.

Gore railway station in an Archives New Zealand photograph dated between about 1887 and 1915. The model engineers' clubrooms at Hamilton Park are a former signal tower from the Gore railway yards. File photo. Photo: Archives New Zealand / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
Gore railway station in an Archives New Zealand photograph dated between about 1887 and 1915. The model engineers' clubrooms at Hamilton Park are a former signal tower from the Gore railway yards. File photo. Photo: Archives New Zealand / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

Hamilton Park itself is changing around the tracks. The lower part of the park was once the Gore landfill, and since 2022 Southland Forest & Bird members, schools and service clubs have been planting it out in natives, with a goal of 2500 trees around the lower park and the Waikaka Way Walkway. The idea came from the late Margaret and Don Lamont. "They had the vision that they wanted the landfill to have a native forest," Forest & Bird member Jenny Campbell told The Ensign in 2024.

A ride-on miniature railway near Waipuna Road in Auckland, one of many club-run lines around New Zealand. File photo. Photo: Ingolfson / Wikimedia Commons, public domain
A ride-on miniature railway near Waipuna Road in Auckland, one of many club-run lines around New Zealand. File photo. Photo: Ingolfson / Wikimedia Commons, public domain

So the signal tower stands at the centre of a park that is growing greener by the year, with a small railway that keeps drawing families back. As Wilson put it in March: "The kids love it. They come back and back."

The Hamilton Park miniature trains run on Sundays from 1pm to 3pm, weather permitting, beside the children's playground at Hamilton Park, at the northern end of Gore off State Highway 1.