Auckland commuters climbed back onto their trains this morning after the region’s rail network reopened from a four-day shutdown over the Matariki long weekend, a closure that transport bosses say was the last full stoppage the city will have to endure before the City Rail Link finally opens.
The network went dark on Thursday for a full-scale dress rehearsal of the new underground line, then stayed closed through the long weekend while crews finished works on the Southern and Western lines. Trains started running again on Monday. Auckland Transport and KiwiRail are still refusing to name an opening day for the tunnel itself, but they have made one firm promise. This was the final time the whole network would be switched off at once.
“We’re just completing some of the final touches on the network, we’ve got works on the Southern Line and the Western Line, and it’s the last time we’ll be doing a full network closure,” KiwiRail’s Bevan Assink told RNZ during the rehearsal. He acknowledged the repeated disruptions had worn thin with an increasingly impatient public, but said the era of city-wide shutdowns was ending.
Assink said the old network was never built for the kind of service Auckland now wants from it. “The Auckland network was built for a freight network back in the 1800s, so we’ve really had to lift the whole standard and rebuild the network up to a standard where it can cope with a modern metro system,” he said. The next job, he explained, was learning to fix and maintain sections of the line without stopping everything. “What we’re now looking to move towards is to be able to sectionalise it, so we’ll only need to do small closures every now and then, no different to what you see on the motorways.” One more round of routine maintenance is still planned over the Christmas holidays.
Thursday’s rehearsal ran a mock morning peak through the finished tunnels, with mostly empty trains pulling in every couple of minutes carrying staff armed with clipboards. It was a chance for drivers, station crews and the controllers in the operations centre to practise the full timetable one last time before real passengers arrive. “Today is the final rehearsal for our full timetable,” Auckland One Rail’s Louise Pengelly said. “It gives all of our train crew, our station crew, our controllers in the operations centre the opportunity to have a final practise.”
The City Rail Link is a pair of 3.45 kilometre tunnels running under the central city, turning what has been a dead-end line at the downtown waterfront into a loop that trains can run straight through. It is the biggest change to Auckland rail in generations, and the project was formally handed over to its operators at the end of June. Two brand new underground stations come with it. Te Waihorotiu sits about 11 metres below the midtown streets near Aotea Square, with entrances on Victoria and Wellesley streets, and is expected to become the busiest train station in the country. Karanga-a-Hape lies 33 metres beneath Karangahape Road, the deepest station on the network, reached by a series of escalators that include New Zealand’s longest at 43 metres and 210 steps, a full minute’s ride from top to bottom.
Standing in the still-empty Karanga-a-Hape platform, AT chief executive Stacey van der Putten stuck to the line the agency has held for weeks. A date is coming, but not yet. “We have to do those final testings. There’s a timeline for us to follow, one of the integral pieces of that is making sure Auckland One Rail and KiwiRail have their safety cases approved,” she said. “Once we have the surety of that, 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.”
Pressed for a best guess, she would not bite. “I think we all have a date in mind, but it would be presumptuous at this point. Next week we’ll be better informed to understand what that may look like.” The opening is set to fall on a Sunday, with roughly six weeks of notice once the call is made. Reporting has narrowed the likely window to somewhere between mid August and late September, with August floated as the front runner.
Whenever the doors do open, the first few months will be a slow build rather than a big bang. The line will start on a reduced timetable while everyone gets used to it. “When we open there will be 14 trains an hour through the tunnel part of the network, out on the outer routes the frequency will still be about once every ten minutes,” Pengelly said. “Once we see that timetable working safely and reliably we’ll increase the frequency. This is a major timetable change, the biggest Auckland rail has seen in generations, so it’s probably expected that we’ll have a few bedding-in issues, but that’s exactly why we’re starting out slow.”
Auckland Transport has committed to ramping up to a full timetable within six months of the opening, while KiwiRail has pledged to keep the network running to timetable for the rest of the year, building on its earlier promise that full shutdowns were finished for good. For commuters who have put up with holiday closures, replacement buses and a five year rebuild, the message from this weekend was simple enough. The disruption is nearly over, and the trains are about to go somewhere new.
Are you looking forward to riding through the new tunnels, or has the wait tested your patience? Share your thoughts 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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