Papua New Guinea is commonly thought to be a land without railways. At the very least, railways do not immediately come to mind as a topic for historical research in Papua New Guinea. Nevertheless, we set out to document and record something of the history of local railways in 1971, initially as individual projects. Inevitably, our interest in the topic of railways brought us together and we have been working collaboratively on our research since 1980.

At first the task was to identify and document the railways which have operated in Papua New Guinea. To our surprise, we now have records of...