KiwiRail reveals partial culprit behind Auckland train disruptions

KiwiRail has revealed that a "very concerning" manufacturing defect is partly to blame for a series of disruptions to Auckland's train network over the past few months.

In an appearance at a meeting of the Auckland Council Transport and Infrastructure Committee last week and picked up by Greater Auckland, the state-owned enterprise gave an update on the state of the network and the work underway to prepare it for the opening of the City Rail Link.

KiwiRail programme director Bevan Assink said there have been a "number of failures" at Britomart in new points machines which were installed at the end of last year.

These devices control the movement of trains from one track onto another and are crucial infrastructure for the rail network.

A "latent fault" was found to sit within the frequency converter, Assink said.

"This is essentially the brains of the points machine itself, and this takes the inputs from the signalling system around when to move them and so on."

There are 16 of these faulty converters currently installed around the network, with more set to be installed in the City Rail Link and in Wellington.

Assink said KiwiRail was to some degree "relieved" as they now had a "smoking gun".

"For many months there, we were getting these intermittent failures and were struggling to trace it back to the root cause. Thankfully, we now have that root cause."

KiwiRail will "proactively" manage the failures, but the frequency converters will ultimately all need to be replaced, he said.

"Unfortunately, I cannot guarantee that we won't have more failures going forward until we can completely get these frequency converters changed out."

KiwiRail general manager of metros Jon Knight said an international expert has helped complete stage one of an audit.

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"It will go into stage two and stage three, which is a complete network signalling control interface review."

Auckland's trains have experienced disruptions for several reasons over the past few months, including two periods of industrial action, heat-related speed restrictions, and KiwiRail's ongoing rail network rebuild.