Auckland’s City Rail Link carried its first passengers on Sunday morning, but the celebrations had barely started when a small fire at Waitematā station stopped trains running through the new tunnels for up to an hour.
The first service, a South City line train, left Ōtāhuhu at 4.57am and was timetabled to reach the new Karanga-a-Hape station at 5.22am, according to the opening-day timetable Auckland Transport published in August. 1News reported that the first services bound for the tunnels were packed.
Just over an hour after the first departure, the tunnels were shut. In a statement carried by 1News, Auckland Transport said services through the City Rail Link were suspended at about 6am after smoke and a small fire were found in a lighting cable, inside a panel above one of the platforms at Waitematā, the downtown station formerly known as Britomart. AT said the fire was unrelated to any City Rail Link systems, that Fire and Emergency crews responded quickly and put it out, and that services resumed within an hour.
Auckland Transport chief executive Stacey van der Putten told RNZ the fire may have been caused by an electrical short circuit. “Clearance has been given, recovery to open in progress – services will resume and temporarily bypass Waitemata,” she said.
While the tunnels were closed, East West line trains detoured through Parnell and skipped Waitematā, Te Waihorotiu and Karanga-a-Hape, and South City line trains ended at Newmarket, 1News reported. Stuff reported that Waitematā station was evacuated. Trains then went back to their usual routes but for a time ran through Waitematā without stopping. AT thanked Aucklanders for their patience and said it would take some time to get services fully back to normal because trains had to be moved back into the right positions.
The fire came after what AT called an extensive programme of emergency testing for the underground network. In the lead-up to opening, emergency services and the rail agencies ran 15 live exercises involving more than 1,400 volunteer passengers, testing station fires, train failures in tunnels, derailments and mass evacuations, according to an AT release on 24 August. Around 200 personnel and more than 50 emergency service vehicles took part, and a final exercise in late August simulated a fire on a train near Te Waihorotiu station. KiwiRail leads the response to incidents in the tunnels from its Auckland Rail Operations Centre, while rail operator Auckland One Rail handles unplanned events on trains and in the stations.
“The City Rail Link’s underground environment, with tunnels more than 40 metres below ground in some parts, presents unique challenges around access, evacuation and communication, requiring specialist planning and coordination,” City Rail Link Ltd chief executive Patrick Brockie said in that release.
KiwiRail chief metro officer Bevan Assink had also promised extra staff for the launch when the opening date was announced on 6 August. “We’ll have extra maintenance crews and more people working round the clock at our rail operations centre – all ready to go in case there are any issues during the launch period, while everything beds in,” Assink said.
The $5.493 billion project is the largest transport infrastructure project New Zealand has ever built, according to City Rail Link Ltd. Its twin 3.45-kilometre tunnels run up to 42 metres below the city centre, linking Waitematā with a redeveloped Maungawhau station on the Western Line. Two new underground stations have been added, Te Waihorotiu in midtown with entrances on Victoria and Wellesley Streets, and Karanga-a-Hape with entrances at Mercury Lane and Beresford Square. Waitematā has been turned from a dead-end terminus into a through station. The project is funded jointly by the Government and Auckland Council.
The opening redraws the whole Auckland rail map. The old Eastern and Western lines merge into a single East West line running from Manukau to Swanson, the Southern line becomes the South City line from Pukekohe with a loop through the city centre, and the Onehunga line is extended to Henderson as the Onehunga West line, RNZ reported. Fares and fare zones are unchanged. The first weekday timetable starts on Monday 14 September, and under the new off-peak timetable trains run every 15 minutes all day at weekends, AT said.
Some trips become much quicker. AT’s journey planner shows New Lynn to Te Waihorotiu taking 24 minutes on the East West line, against 40 minutes before with a change to a bus at Kingsland, RNZ reported. Not every trip is faster. A morning trip from Panmure to Waitematā gains about three minutes, which an AT spokesperson put down partly to the time trains now spend waiting at Waitematā before continuing into the tunnels.
The idea is far older than the tunnels. New Zealand Railway Observer editor Graeme Carter told RNZ the Northern Railway League proposed a tunnel between Auckland and Morningside, that another proposal followed in 1918, and that in 1923 the idea attracted government attention. In the mid-1970s Mayor Sir Dove-Myer Robinson’s underground loop, nicknamed Robbie’s Rapid Rail, was dropped by the Muldoon government, which preferred to spend on motorways. The City Rail Link’s projected cost rose from $3.4 billion to $5.5 billion during construction, a rise RNZ attributed partly to the decision to build for nine-car trains, as well as to inflation, Covid-19 lockdowns and staffing issues.
Former mayor Len Brown, whose lobbying for Government support helped get the project started, told RNZ’s Saturday Morning on 12 September he would be at the opening “singing and dancing”. “Believe your analysis and the data that you are basing your decisions on, and then go for it,” Brown said, reflecting on what he believed Auckland got right with the project.
Public interest has been high. More than 43,000 people toured the new stations during First Look open days in August, AT said, and it warned ahead of Sunday that trains and stations would be busy on opening day and asked people to be patient.
If you want to see how the new network fits together, our Auckland Moves map animates every scheduled train and ferry in Auckland from AT’s published timetable, including services through the new City Rail Link stations.
Did you ride the City Rail Link on its first day, or were you caught up in the morning delays? Tell us how your trip went 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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