Paintings came off walls and glasses jangled in the Outram Hotel as a short, sharp earthquake rumbled Dunedin and surrounding areas last night.
The quake, which occurred at 6.44pm, measured 4.1 on the Richter scale and was centred 30km west of Dunedin, at a depth of just 4km.
There were no reports of damage, but a few rattled nerves, when the shaking subsided after a few seconds.
Outram Hotel publican Janine Falloon told the Otago Daily Times the shaking seemed to last only three or four seconds, but felt ''pretty significant''.
She was upstairs at the time and ''certainly'' felt it. Some patrons in the downstairs bar thought a car had crashed into the building.
''A couple of pictures fell off the wall upstairs and the light was doing the sway, and all the glasses were jangling,'' she said.
Callum Wilson, of Middlemarch, was in his lounge when he heard what sounded like a ''diesel loco'' outside.
He was contemplating whether to take cover when the shaking stopped after ''seven or eight seconds''.
''There was a lot of noise and then there was just an abrupt small shudder and it stopped,'' he said.
''I immediately thought it was an earthquake.''
There were no signs of damage, but he was ''a little bit'' shaken by the experience, as was his swimming pool.
''We have got a swimming pool outside and there was a tiny ripple on it,'' he said.
Taieri Gorge Railways chief executive Murray Bond said the railway line through the gorge would be checked by staff for signs of damage or track alignment problems before this morning's 9.30 service.
''I doubt with a magnitude-4 that we have got anything like the track not [being] there, but this is what we do,'' he said.
The check would have been done anyway, as staff examined the track every Friday morning, operations manager Grant Craig said.
There was a brief flurry of earthquake-related tweets after the shake and by 9pm more than 1200 people had logged reports of the earthquake on the GeoNet website.
Most reports came from Dunedin, but some were from as far away as Oamaru, Queenstown and Invercargill.
GNS Science duty seismologist Caroline Holden said that was to be expected for an earthquake occurring so close to a city.
''I expected it to be felt widely in Dunedin, which it was.''
The GeoNet website gave the earthquake a score of 6 out of 12 on Modified Mercalli scale. Shaking at the epicentre would have been strong, albeit brief, she said.
''If you are right next to it you would get a good, very short but sharp jolt.
''You don't want to be in a 12. It's kind of what happened in Christchurch, when buildings just collapsed,'' she said.
