Hobson runs some tests and arrives at some conclusions: he hasn't survived an event which has evaporated the rest of the world's population; he's arrived, somehow, in a replica of Earth which is otherwise void of people. The Old Station is the first of three Auckland landmarks which Hobson visits: the others are Pah Homestead in Monte Cecilia Park, and St-Matthews-in-the-City on Hobson Street. But what do these locations have in common? Pah Homestead — though situation on a Pa site (which might be a home of none other than Pōtatau Te Wherowhero) — is modelled on Osborne House on the Isle of Wight; St Matthew's is John Loughborough Pearson's scaled down version of his work on Truro Cathedral in Cornwall; and Auckland Railway Station pays explicit homeage both to Union Station in Washington, D.C. and to Pennsylvania Station in New York City. The implication is clear: much of Auckland is already a replica; the city's landmarks are facsimile editions of foreign sites. The Old Station, like so much of Pākehā New Zealand, is, again, an unheimlich locality — a place haunted by the spectre of elsewhere... The metal ceiling in the main lobby of Auckland's Old Station is manufactured in Germany — shipped out in parts then reassembled in situ. When war begins to seem increasingly likely, its origins are downplayed; the giant fasces embalzoned on the station's facade, however, are thought to be alright.
— Oscar Mardell
Synopsis: After a top-secret experiment misfires, a scientist may be the only man left alive in the world.