June - July 2021
TRANSPORT
more on weekends and some that enable trips from Auckland to Hamilton in the morning. With the current trains available even just bouncing them back and forth between Auckland and Hamilton, say every two hours, would make it much more useful. More Stations The only stop between Hamilton and Papakura is in Huntly. Yet there are a number of communities along the route, including some seeing a lot of growth, that also should be being served too. In particular Tuakau, Pokeno, Te Kauwhata and Ngaruawahia. Combined those four towns are home to about 20,000 people so represents a substantial increase to the possible catchment and combined with more services we might even start to see some commuting from them to Hamilton. Speed improvements At about 1 hour 40 from Hamilton to Papakura the service averages at just
64km/h over the 105km distance. Once they’ve finished fixing the tracks in Auckland there really should be a focus on
getting it faster, which likely requires Kiwirail upgrading the tracks. If it was possible to get the average speed up to
80km/h it would bring the travel time down by about 20 minutes and would start to become time competitive with driving.
Case study: Rapid rail in Malaysia The Malaysian rail network was once remarkably similar to New Zealand’s, originally developed by the British in the colonial era. But while New Zealand has not progressed very far beyond this, the Malaysian government did a comprehensive overhaul of its rail to turn it from an an ailing freight line into a higher-speed rapid rail route. This project was impressive in its extent and outcomes, Greater Auckland reports. They electrified and double tracked the whole line, purchased brand new narrow gauge electric tilt trains and a new depot to keep them in, upgraded stations, eased curves, rebuilt the trackbed to high speed standards, grade separated road crossings, fixed all the drainage along the way, built one major tunnel to bypass a mountain range, and combined that with a new viaduct to skip a particularly windy section of route. This was topped off with a new branch line into the city of Butterworth to access a new terminal station. Today a 400km trip between Kuala Lumpur and Butterworth takes just 4
hours. The journey took almost twice as long before the upgrade. Clearly a fantastic improvement, but what of the cost? Obviously this scale of comprehensive upgrade isn’t cheap. In total, the whole package of tracks, electrification, stations, trains, depots and crossings for 400km cost the equivalent of around $7 billion NZ dollars, or about NZ$18m per kilometre. What does this mean for New Zealand? Given the similarity of the train and track systems between the two countries, it’s reasonable to expect we could do a full electric rapid rail overhaul for about the same cost. That is a very significant chunk of money, but it would buy not only a regional rapid rail system with frequent electric passenger trains running at fast average speeds between Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga, it would also fix up and electrify the main freight routes of the North Island. A relative bargain compared to some of our highway projects.
The future of Te Huia Greater Auckland's analysis of the Ministry of Transport's original Hamilton to Auckland Intercity Connectivity Interim Indicative Business Case indicates the Te Huia service is meant to be much more than it is today. The report comes up with a shortlist of four scenarios which, if any are implemented, paint a promising future for the service. Scenario A – Electrified 110km/h Electrify to Hamilton with a maximum speed along the route of 110km/h. This option is expected to cost about $2.2 billion and would see a total Britomart to Hamilton City journey time of just under two hours (113 minutes). Scenario B – Electrified, realigned up to 160km/h This goes a step further by including some corridor improvements to enable speeds of up to 160km/h. This is expected to cost about $5 billion and would reduce the end to end travel time to an estimated 88 minutes, or just under 1½ hours. This would put it at about the same speed as driving off-peak. 60 infrastructurenews.co.nz
Scenario C – New dedicated 160km/h corridor Using the same 160km/h top speeds, this takes the step of delivering it via an entirely new corridor. They estimate it would shave an extra 9-minutes off the journey for time of 79 minutes, but a completely new corridor comes with a hefty price tag of $12.2 billion. Scenario D – New dedicated 250km/h corridor This scenario looks at what if we built that new corridor in Scenario C with standard gauge tracks with trains capable of up to 250km/h. At $13.6 billion this doesn’t cost all that much more than C but would save an additional 10 minutes on the journey for a total time of just 69 minutes. One of the issues with this however is that standard gauge track would only be between Southern Auckland and Hamilton so users would still have to transfer to an express service to get through Auckland.
