The opening date for the $5.5 billion City Rail Link remains a tight secret – with Auckland councillors even prevented from trying to narrow it down to a particular month.
But all indications remain for a Sunday in the first half of September. The project works have received their Auckland Council code compliance certificate ahead of time, final safety and service checks are being made and station open days have been set (for August 8, 15, and 22).
At a briefing for the council’s transport and infrastructure committee on Tuesday, officials repeatedly asked politicians to limit any speculation on the CRL go-live date.
One attempt, by Councillor Richard Hills, to be able to tell inquiring constituents what month between now and Christmas it would open was resisted. Hills told officials from CRL Ltd, Auckland Transport, Auckland OneRail and KiwiRail he was constantly being pressed for when the system would be open to the public.
Hills said it looked like his own favoured date, August 30, had now fallen away.
“There’s a lot of people getting upset, concerned; there’s a lot of businesses just wanting kind-of hope. Some people are like, is it August-September or is it November-December. And I think just putting something out there to give people another bit of ‘Uh, okay, so it’s around this time’.
“People deserve a little bit of direction. I know the two issues behind the scenes, why there’s a little bit of delay, but is there any way to bring down that six-week date announcement at all? Can we help?”
Council infrastructure chief Barry Potter replied: “Can we just hold that, please? It’s the most common question that everyone keeps getting asked. Let’s just keep working through the process. It is getting closer.”
However, councillors heard that rectifying final emergency services matters identified in trial runs, ‘special case variations’ required by Auckland OneRail and KiwiRail from regulators and then a six-week window for the operator to change staff rosters in preparation were still in play.
No more network shutdowns
There was some good news for commuters, amid all the open date secrecy and technical detail.
Officials confirmed Aucklanders have had the last of the total rail network shutdowns for track maintenance that have marked summer holidays and Easter and other long weekends for years. “Those days are finished,” KiwiRail’s metros chief Jon Knight said.
Any future work would involve only partial closures of tracks, done at night or on public holidays, and would not occur when big events were happening in the city.
The peak summer holiday period from Christmas Eve until January 2 would be exempt “so a modern city can have a commuter network it can rely on”, according to Knight. “We want to enable those special events to be supported and for people to go to the heart of the city”.
While proposed CRL train timetables would see relatively early ends of services each night – last trains before midnight – the operators and KiwiRail would have later services for holiday weekends on their radar for the future.
Also, new protocols were being finalised to ensure if freight trains encounter problems somewhere around Auckland the whole system doesn’t get frozen; passenger services would now continue with planned system workarounds.
CRL Ltd chief executive Patrick Brockie told councillors the handover of assets to Auckland Transport (stations) and KiwiRail (tunnel and track) had occurred, with about two thirds of the value of assets being in the stations.
Efforts were focused now on “safety critical” and “service critical” snags, or minor defects, with “virtually no safety critical” problems remaining.
A final rehearsal on Thursday July 9, including recovery from actual disruptions, was a success and no further working trials were needed.
What’s the next big project coming down the line?
With no opening date to discuss, committee members turned their questioning to what might follow CRL in Auckland’s rail and transport future.
Tau Henare, a member of Houkura – the Independent Māori Statutory Board – asked: “Once it’s open – what’s next for the rail corridor here in Tāmaki? Is there some big plan?”
The answer: In the first year, officials would look to increase train frequencies on CRL and in the years to come continue removing level crossings to minimise interruptions and safety matters. With greater frequency, more trains would be needed and ordered.
But on major projects, a 30-year plan formed by KiwiRail and Auckland Transport included only the new cross-Auckland freight line from Avondale to Southdown being considered for the medium to longer term.
(Newsroom has covered the KiwiRail push for the line through Onehunga here.)
Henare had wondered about the possibility of passenger services between Helensville and Henderson, and Councillor Greg Sayers asked about services being extended to Huapai, from the current western line end point at Swanson.
“My understanding was that once the CRL got opened there might be some capacity as to how trains to Huapai could be worked up, and who might be funding it?
“I’m looking at a timeframe on when it might be able to be done, in case it could be incorporated into the LTP [council long-term plan].”
AT’s rail chief, Mark Lambert, said work on the Huapai service would need to be redone now and was unlikely to be ready for councillors’ consideration of the LTP, which will be debated later this year.
Knight told Councillor Christine Fletcher the proposed Avondale-Southdown cross town line was a priority for KiwiRail, to improve the whole network by adding a freight route option.
It would add resilience, to run more passenger services.
The new route’s business plan would also look at parallel opportunities next to the rail line for “urban growth, in line with council’s long-term plan, at what opportunity’s available in public private partnership. All of those things are being scoped”.
KiwiRail could brief the committee on that project at its next meeting on the scope of the cross-town railway and “what it could unlock for Auckland”.
Fletcher welcomed further information, given councillors were making “big decisions” over its Plan Change-120 housing density changes, but weren’t aware of how such a new rail corridor might look and affect development.
The population of northwestern areas around Huapai and Kumeu are projected to grow rapidly in coming years, among the fastest in the region.
Lambert told Councillor Ken Turner from Henderson that both AT and KiwiRail were committed to “doing a piece of work” to consider services to Huapai.
Five freight trains run through the western line north each week.
Lambert said studies had estimated what work would be needed on the Swanson tunnel to take passenger services “and it is in the tens of millions [of dollars]”.
“That’s a piece of work we are committed to do, after CRL, that’s to review that and come back with the actual requirements to potentially operate a passenger service.”
Turner jokingly asked if those tens of millions could be somehow taken from the billions of dollars planned for the north-western busway, but chair Andy Baker said officials did not need to respond.
