The Moutohora Branch was a branch line railway that formed part of New Zealand's national rail network in Poverty Bay in the North Island of New Zealand. The branch ran for 78 km approximately North-West from Gisborne into the rugged and steep Raukumara Range to the terminus at Moutohora. Construction started in 1900, and the line was opened to Moutohora on 26 November 1917. Built to the New Zealand standard gauge the line was originally intended to become part of a railway to Auckland via Rotorua, and later as part of an East Coast Main Trunk Railway running from Gisborne to Pokeno by way of Ōpōtiki, Taneatua, Tauranga, and Paeroa. This comprehensive scheme never came to pass, and the branch line it subsequently became was closed in March 1959. The branch had four names during its lifetime. Initially, it was authorised as a Gisborne to Rotorua line and labelled as such in the Public Works Statement until 1910. From then, while isolated from the rest of the NZR system, it was known as the Gisborne section (later the Palmerston North–Gisborne Line) of the NZR. Once Gisborne was linked to the rest of the NZR network in 1942 the line became the Motuhora Branch, to be renamed the Moutohora Branch in 1952, when the New Zealand Geographic Board decided on this spelling for the line's terminal locality. Construction The first report on proposals to link Gisborne and the rest of Poverty Bay to the outside world by rail was made in 1886, but nothing eventuated at that time. In April 1897 the East Coast Railway League was established to press for the development of rail connections, and in 1899 the Government announced that Gisborne was to be connected to Auckland by a line of rail. Work on the line started in early 1900. On 14 January the then Minister for Railways, the Joseph Ward, turned the first sod. The first of the line ran across coastal plains with few obstacles, and the line was opened to Kaitaratahi on 10 November 1902. A Gisborne-Rotorua line from Makaraka to Mōtū of about was authorised by the Railways Authorisation Act, 1904. An eventual connection to the Rotorua Branch disappeared after a 1911 survey to connect the "Gisborne Section" with the East Coast Main Trunk. Once past this point the line required large river bridging works, four tunnels, heavy earthworks and the construction of two