Steam Ferry Toroa

The last of Auckland’s steam ferries

Toroa is the last of Auckland’s steam ferries. Launched on 28 April 1925 from George Niccol’s yard at St Mary’s Bay, she carried more than a thousand passengers at a time across the Waitematā for fifty five years, and by the time she was withdrawn from service in 1980 she had carried over seventy million people.

She was built for the Devonport Steam Ferry Company as a double-ended vessel driven by a triple expansion steam engine, working the Devonport run alongside Makora. Before the Auckland Harbour Bridge opened in 1959, the two ferries moved twenty thousand or more passengers between the city and the North Shore on a busy day. Toroa was the last steam passenger ferry ever built for Auckland.

From 1960 she sailed for North Shore Ferries, and from 1964 until she was decommissioned in August 1980 she ran to Waiheke as needed. She is now at Selwood Road in Henderson, in the care of the Toroa Preservation Society, undergoing a restoration that reached her centenary in 2025.

Toroa sits outside the protection most heritage places rely on. Rules under the New Zealand Heritage List and Auckland Council’s Unitary Plan exclude movable watercraft from formal heritage recognition, because a historic place is anchored to land and to the things fixed to it. A hundred-year-old steam ferry being restored plank by plank has no listing pathway, no heritage covenant, and no archaeological authority standing behind it.

Documenting her in photorealistic 3D makes that gap visible, and creates a record that does not depend on the vessel surviving. Repeated captures through the restoration turn a single snapshot into an evolving account of the work as it happens.