Elisabeth Easther took a quirky rail trip and has been singing the little engines' praises ever since.

The Government has just set best-practice guidelines for fracking in various parts of the country.

Police said the crash occurred just before 7.30am at the intersection of Egmont and Bishop Roads, and involved a large truck, car and motorcycle.

The family of a former New Zealand woman had pleaded with her repeatedly to leave the man who allegedly killed her in Australia.

Rural adventures are reviving small-town New Zealand, writes Elisabeth Easther.

A house was destroyed by fire in the small Taranaki town of Okaiawa last night.

The two mountaineers who died on Mt Taranaki had little chance of surviving for two nights and a day in their shallow hole in the hard snow and freezing wind, says a leading local guide.

One of two climbers who died after being trapped on Mt Taranaki this weekend had texted her father saying she didn't expect to survive.

Two Auckland climbers are facing a second night in a snow cave on Mount Taranaki with no overnight equipment, after rescuers were driven back by foul weather today.

A woman killed in a collision with a school bus in Taranaki yesterday was a young German national.

Terrified school children screamed and cried as their bus collided with a car, its windscreen shattered and it began to fill with smoke.

A 24-year-old woman who was missing overnight after going to a Taranaki beach has been found safe today.

Amble for hours in any direction, writes Jane Jeffries.

There has been a bit of head-scratching in the Taranaki settlement of Oakura after an electricity company mailed a bill to a street lamp.

An 18-year-old woman has been abducted and sexually assaulted by up to five men in the Taranaki town of Waitara.

The survival of the most endangered kiwi species is being pinned on a feisty young kiwi chick which was released to its new home on a predator-free island today.

A kiwi hit by a car in the Waitotara Valley, Taranaki, last week is getting a health check-up from Massey University vets.

Tauranga Art Gallery has come under fire for displaying two photos that feature coarsely worded messages scrawled in ballpoint beside images of a 1974 gay liberation dance.

Maori elders blessed the scene of a fatal car crash in South Wairarapa this morning where the body of the 17-year-old crash victim lay covered on the road.