Auckland has shut its entire passenger rail network for four days over the Matariki long weekend so crews can run one last full rehearsal of the City Rail Link, the underground project that will reshape how the city moves. Every train line is closed from Thursday 9 July through to Sunday 12 July, with buses replacing services across the network while engineers put the new timetable through its paces one final time.
The shutdown is the last big network-wide closure before the $5.5 billion link opens to the public, and it comes just over a week after ownership of the finished tunnels and stations passed from the Link Alliance construction consortium to KiwiRail and Auckland Transport. Auckland Transport chief executive Stacey van der Putten described the weekend as “one of the last big pushes” to get the line ready, telling RNZ that “we have to do those final testings” before an opening date can be locked in.
The City Rail Link is a 3.45 kilometre pair of tunnels running underneath the central city, turning what has for decades been a dead-end railway at the downtown Waitematā station, better known to most Aucklanders as Britomart, into a proper loop. Instead of trains reaching the waterfront and then having to reverse back out the way they came, they will now run straight through and back out to the suburbs. That single change is expected to roughly double how many trains the network can carry, lifting the ceiling from about 20 trains an hour to as many as 48 once the system is running at full tilt.
Two brand new underground stations open with the link. Te Waihorotiu sits in the middle of the city near Aotea Square and the theatre district, putting a train station within walking distance of the busiest part of the central business district for the first time. The second, Karanga-a-Hape, is buried 33 metres below Karangahape Road, the ridge-top strip of bars, shops and music venues that has never had a rail connection. Reaching the platforms there means riding what Auckland Transport says is now the longest escalator in New Zealand, a 43 metre run of 210 steps that takes roughly a minute to travel end to end.
Alongside the two new stops, the existing Waitematā terminus has been rebuilt as a through station and the old Mount Eden station has been replaced by a much larger interchange named Maungawhau, where the new tunnels meet the existing western line. Together the four stations are meant to pull a large share of the region’s commuters underground and out of the traffic that clogs the motorways every morning.
The Matariki weekend closure is essentially a dress rehearsal for the whole system running the way it will once the doors open. Louise Pengelly of Auckland One Rail, the company that runs the trains, said the exercise was going smoothly. “Today is the final rehearsal for our full timetable,” she told RNZ. “So far, so good.” She said the network would not launch at full speed straight away. “When we open there will be 14 trains an hour through the tunnel part of the network,” she said, “out on the outer routes the frequency will still be about once every ten minutes.” Frequencies are expected to climb steadily over the following months as staff and passengers settle into the new pattern.
KiwiRail, which owns and maintains the tracks, is using the four quiet days to finish off work that is hard to do while trains are running. “We’re just completing some of the final touches on the network,” KiwiRail’s Bevan Assink said, adding that “it’s the last time we’ll be doing a full network closure” before the line opens. A separate maintenance shutdown is still planned for the Christmas period, but this is the last time the whole network will go dark specifically for the rail link.
What Auckland Transport has still not given is a firm opening date. Officials have confirmed only that the link will open on a Sunday, and have been careful in public not to promise a day. The handover on 30 June started a clock that runs at least six to eight weeks, driven largely by the need to give train crews formal notice of the major roster changes that come with the new timetable. Van der Putten said that once the safety cases for Auckland One Rail and KiwiRail are approved, “we’ll then provide a recommendation, there’ll be an announcement on opening, and that’ll give a six week timeline for the doors to open to the general public.” On that basis the first fare-paying passengers are unlikely to travel through the tunnels before the second half of August, with an announcement expected within about a week.
The project has been a long and expensive road. Preliminary work began in 2016 and major construction started in 2018, with the cost climbing from early estimates of around $3 billion to the final figure of roughly $5.5 billion, pushed up by the pandemic, inflation and labour shortages. It is the largest transport project the country has undertaken, jointly funded by the government and Auckland Council, and it has torn up large parts of the central city for the better part of a decade. The handover late last month and this weekend’s final rehearsal are the clearest signs yet that the disruption is nearly over.
For the roughly 1.7 million people who live in the wider Auckland region, the payoff is meant to be a rail network that finally works like a metro, with frequent trains you can turn up and catch without checking a timetable. Whether it lives up to that promise will only become clear once the tunnels fill with commuters, but after four days of buses and a network gone quiet for Matariki, Auckland is closer than it has ever been to finding out.
Are you an Auckland commuter waiting on the City Rail Link, or has the long build changed how you get around the city? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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