Volunteer Story Celebration 2025 - Wellington Tramway Museum

Who are the Wellington Tramway Museum volunteers? Some delight in working with heavy machinery; others are only too happy to share their skills in detailed woodwork conservation - just look at Tram 17, one of Wellington’s original electric trams of 1904 which has been lovingly restored after half a century’s post-war life as a bach sleepout in Raumati. Others drive the trams and share their enthusiasm as they yarn with passengers and point out the many features of interest along the 1.8km tram route. Others, off-site, drive the accounting systems, social media accounts and contractural obligations which any organisation of the Museum’s size has to have as core infrastructure.

We all volunteer because it gives us a shared pleasure, and we know that we are part of a team contributing by our personal efforts to “make history come alive” and enable it to be carried forward for new generations to pick up and move further forward.

We are all motivated by the idea of working together to save these relics of the now-vanished 1950's New Zealand and to make it a much enjoyed attraction within modern Kapiti’s marvellous mosaic of attractions.

I’m certain that two common threads have united the Tram volunteers over those sixty years:

• the first being that all of them valued what other volunteers had done for them through their family, sporting and working lives - think Plunket, surf life saving, service clubs; and
• the second being that all saw for themselves and celebrated the contributions of their fellow-volunteers working in close proximity to the trams - think the Kapiti US Marines Trust, tree planters in the regenerating natural environment, the equestrian fraternity.

Just blokes in sheds? Just train-spotters? - much more than that. There’s a fine camaraderie; we enjoy it, we enjoy making the enduring contribution, and we enjoy doing it on the wonderful Kapiti Coast!
If you'd like to be part of the Wellington Tramway Museum team, check out their current volunteer role here