Essay: As Wellington commuters face train trials and Auckland deals with dialled back services, John Campbell writes that the logic of investing in train services is unquestionable.
On April 28, KiwiRail issued a media statement containing the revelatory detail that “there is only one Track Evaluation Car in New Zealand”, and it was broken.
Two islands. Roughly 4000 kilometres of rail track. One “Track Evaluation Car”. (The capital letters are KiwiRail’s, by the way. But with just one in the country, “Track Evaluation Car” could probably insist on being called “Sir.”)
The consequence of Sir being broken was, as KiwiRail put it, somewhat coyly: “Trains to and from Wellington will be running more slowly.”
Slowly, yes. And, also, not running at all.
A “rapid review” was ordered. (“Rapid” being markedly at odds with the speed of Wellington’s trains.)
The Transport Minister, for whom sternness does not appear to come naturally, used phrases like “dropped the ball”, “do better”, and “put this right”.
In an interview with Lisa Owen on RNZ, Michael Wood sounded as cross as a teacher who’d found their favourite Year 12 class eating lunch before the bell: “The Government is extremely disappointed about this.”
Wellington’s Mayors went harder. Like a locomotive.
Porirua’s Anita Baker called it “third world”. Hutt City Mayor, Campbell Barry, insisted the third world is better.
Dear old Wellington. Slow trains, no trains, and finding itself stranded somewhere between third world and not as good as third world.
While KiwiRail apologised, repeatedly, and apologies aren’t always so forthcoming in the wasteland that passes for public accountability in this country, it all felt indicative of a larger malaise.
In short, our passenger rail operations sometimes feel like a weak imitation of the kind of service people need and deserve. And the kind of service that might persuade people to abandon their cars.
Union Pacific Big Boy
I need to declare an interest here - I like trains. Lots.
The extent of this affection has, I suspect, been somewhat overstated. Mostly by me.
Shooting in Japan, in 2018, Andy Dalton (the brilliant cameraman I work with) and I were using trains to get about. And we were constantly delighted by how cheap, reliable and easy-to-use they were.
One day, at Yokohama Station, I expressed my appreciation, on camera. For reasons known only to the moment, I eschewed my usual restraint and did a little dance on the platform. The clip was played on Breakfast. Twice.
Within days of that clip going to air, people were emailing me photos of steam trains, and stopping me on the street to tell me they’d once ridden a Union Pacific Big Boy, Class 4884-1, and they had done a little dance, too.
What do you say? I didn’t have the heart to tell them I liked trains, but not that much. (Although, if I was going to fall for a train, a Union Pacific Big Boy sounds hard to beat.) And so I’d sigh my appreciation, wistfully, knowing I’d never ride a Big Boy, and they’d wander off into the world happy in the knowledge they’d met a fellow ferroequinologist.
When my son was little, he did love trains. Truly love. That was a very special time. We’d head down to Britomart on a Saturday afternoon and buy a ticket for the next train leaving, to anywhere. And off we’d go. My son watching the train, me watching him. His beautiful happiness. (They were joyful adventures.)
I’ve also lived in London. And as a New Zealander for whom public transport was often a last resort, the train services there were a revelation. Why would you own a car in London? (When public transport works, it does something magical - it makes cars disappear.)
All of this leads me to the belief that as a response to the misery of congestion in our largest cities, as a response to annual emissions of 4.5 metric tons of carbon dioxide per typical petrol car, and as a response to the cost of purchase, petrol and parking, rail can offer a meaningful alternative. If it’s available, if it’s reliable, and if it’s electric.
Rail treated as an extravagance
So, why don’t we do rail very well?
Population is an issue. Australia does a good train – but supported by a population five times greater than ours. (It’s worthy of note, however, that year after year, Transperth is voted Australia’s best metropolitan commuter rail network – and Perth is geographically estranged from everywhere, and its population is not that much greater than Auckland’s.)
Why do we seem to treat passenger rail as if it were inconsequential, anachronistic, inconvenient, or more trouble than it’s worth?
It all feels rather ingrained.
In 2008, when Helen Clark’s Labour Government decided to purchase Toll Holding’s rail and ferry operations, essentially buying back the punch-drunk remnants of the New Zealand Rail operation that had been sold by National in 1993, John Key used absurdity as his attack weapon.
In an urgent debate in Parliament, the (then) Leader of the Opposition wielded the phrase “train set” nine times. As if it were child’s play.
The inference was that the purchase was a folly. A whim. “Michael Cullen”, John Key roared, was “playing with his little train set” – and the country was funding this indulgence.
This is politics, of course. But it also speaks to a sense of rail, particularly passenger rail, as a kind of extravagance.
Christopher Luxon called the nascent Te Huia service a “white elephant”.
“National”, he told Morning Report, is not up for “subsidising, you know, white elephant public transport projects, like a slow train from Hamilton to Auckland.”
Lost in his assessment was the idea that a train between Hamilton and Auckland might be worth investing in - and that it might become less slow over time. Or the idea that an alternative to the southern motorway (a carbon foundry, which is routinely a kind of hell) might be a thing worth developing. Or an understanding that using new forms of public transport is a habit that grows. Or the realisation that what makes the Te Huia so much less efficient than a Yokohama commuter train (for example) is precisely the kind of under-investment that becomes self-fulfilling. If you don’t build it, they can’t come. If you do build it but it's shitty, they won’t come. But to build it and make it attractive and fast, costs money.
Money. We’re constantly told the cost of rail, and that scrutiny seems rigorous, even pejorative, in ways less often applied to roading.
Rail has a public cost. Cars somehow, almost, appear recused of such considerations.
This is nonsense, of course. As the Ministry of Transport tells us: “The cost of building and maintaining local roads is shared between central government, through Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency, and local councils.”
How much are we spending on our roads?
Waka Kotahi has a fascinating dashboard that shows total expenditure on “road improvements” in the decade up to 2022, was $18.5 billion. Road maintenance? A further $19 billion. Whatever that is, it’s not free. (Source: NZTA)
We could, of course, have not built motorways, and have left roads as rutted farm-tracks, or narrow, country lanes, but that’s not an argument advanced by sane people. We understand that investment increases capacity, efficiency and speed. We seem to understand it less with rail.
Long, slow rebuild in Auckland
Public transport is also about habit. And habit needs reliability.
Wairarapa, for example, hasn’t had regular off-peak train services for almost two years. Buses are put on. Expecting to catch a train through a nice, straight tunnel in the hill, and seeing a bus arrive to take you over the hill instead, that long and winding road, the nightmare carsickness of my childhood, is like ordering an eye fillet and getting beef jerky. It doesn’t make you want to return.
In short, every time something goes wrong, and “disruption” is the word deployed by service providers, people return to their cars. A habit is broken.
That is the opposite of what should be taking place.
This is striking in Auckland right now, where something remarkable is unhappening.
After years of rapid growth in passenger rail usage (setting aside the stay-at-home duration of the pandemic), after monthly rail trips rising from 1,165,000 in March 2014 to 2,147,000 in March 2019, which truly is a staggering increase in just five years, Aucklanders are being rewarded with rolling closures.
It’s called “The Rail Network Rebuild”. And rebuild it is. But it also involves a reduction.
Like the failure of the “Track Evaluation Car” and its much (much) briefer impact on Wellington’s rail services, it speaks of investment that was too long delayed.
Or does it?
As André Brett persuasively argues in The Spinoff, KiwiRail hasn’t really explained why so much work has to be done, taking a total of three years to be completed.
“I need to be clear,” Brett says, “this just does not happen to entire transport networks in other cities".
"Moreover, it does not happen with the most privileged transport mode in New Zealand: roads. Imagine if the Auckland Harbour Bridge was shut for most of 2023. People would lose their minds.”
Yes. They would.
KiwiRail, on the company’s website, says that (in association with Auckland Transport) they’ve made the “difficult decision to sequentially close rail lines, or sections of line, to electric commuter trains while this work is undertaken”.
And then eleven words on City Rail Link that speak to what seems like a bizarre planning vacuum: “To get the majority of the work done before CRL opens…”
So, the country’s largest city, home to one in three New Zealanders, in which rail is triumphantly, belatedly, becoming a habit, in which a 3.45 kilometre long rail tunnel is being built underneath the city centre at a cost of $5.493 billion, is undertaking a highly disruptive rebuild, over three years, that may not be finished when the link is opened.
Someone call the mayors of Hutt and Porirua and ask them – is that third world, or nowhere near that good?
Emma Vitz has done fine work, also in The Spinoff, analysing the likely impact of this in 2023: “Over the course of the year, these rail closures will waste over a million hours of Aucklanders’ time.”
A million hours.
Vitz assesses the cost of this loss: “Perhaps the most concerning part of all of this is a possible death spiral of public transport in Auckland. If people can’t use trains due to line closures for several years, their transportation habits will change. Instead of using a patchwork system of buses, those who can will turn to private cars. By the time the rail network rebuild finishes in three years’ time, the demand for trains may be significantly lower than before. At that point, it’s difficult to justify any further investment.”
Build it, and they will come. Reduce it, and they will leave again. Back to their cars, back to congestion, back to greenhouse gas emissions, back to lives spent becalmed on the north-western motorway.
And so rail, which offers so much that’s useful, is effectively sabotaged by its own, strange management. A stoned accumulation of own goals. (I’m being figurative here. But so little of this makes sense.)
The rapid review may address this. But what’s required, ultimately, is an acknowledgement that rail can make a difference worth making, and that to not do so is a failure far greater than the “disruptions” themselves.
Shares in freefall
In 1993, New Zealand Rail (as it was then) was sold by the National Government.
The purchaser was a consortium made up (in part) of US rail company, Wisconsin Central, and New Zealand Merchant Bankers, Fay Richwhite.
The company’s named was changed to Tranz Rail, and it was floated on the share market at $6.19 a share.
Within a year, shares were as high as $9. Many of them bought by New Zealanders, who believed in rail, could see the trains and tracks and stations, caught the 7:19 to work, and thought that they were investing in solid things. Something safe.
Within six years, the shares were below fifty cents.
“Tranz Rail shares went into a free fall today,” the New Zealand Herald reported, on April 16 2003, almost exactly 20 years ago. “Shares in the already battered rail company crashed over 50 per cent this morning to a low of 30 cents, but later recovered to 43 cents shortly after 10am.”
From $9 to 43 cents.
Anyone who was here during that time, and old enough to read the papers and watch the news, will remember that fall. How inexplicable it seemed. The sense that something that ought to be good, had been reduced by a pouncing opportunism, then abandonment, to something hollow. The genuine feeling of betrayal.
By 2008, as we saw earlier, the Government had purchased the company back.
And here we are, 15 years on, hoping that this time, surely, we’ll get it right?
Wellington's disruptions. The Wairarapa's slow buses. Ferry disasters. No commuter trains, at all, in the South Island. Auckland’s bewilderingly long and impactful rebuild. The one, ageing Track Evaluation Car going clunk.
Rail deserves better.
We all do.
This isn’t about a love of trains. But a knowledge of what they can do.
When they work, they take cars off the road, they reduce emissions, they make traveling calmer and simpler, and they become habit forming because the habit is good.
To not achieve that, now, is a failure we shouldn’t accept.
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