Passenger Transport

Join Restore Passenger Rail NZ 

20221106 :  Inquiry into the future of inter-regional passenger rail in New Zealand

Submission by Alan Preston

  The North Auckland Line connects at Helensville with the West Auckland suburban railway line.

Trains to Huapai are currently ( 2017 ) lobbying for services to be extended from Auckland

See also : Public Transport Users' Associationhttp://ptua.org.nz/1/

Cooltrainz

Barry Read is a designer who lives near the North Auckland line at Wayby, south of Wellsford

Read an article about Cooltrainz here on Stuff.co.nz (29th of November 2009)

2022-11-05 Otago Daily Times : All Aboard For Passenger Rail in The South

To have a closer look at Cooltrainz, go to : http://www.futurerailnz.com/

Listen to Barry Reid talking about the self powered 'Cooltrainz' he's designed to run between Wellsford and Auckland

  with Noel McCarthy Radio National on Thusday the 13th of January 2011

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Auckland_Line

Meanwhile..  2017-08-17 From 'Greater Auckland'

Auckland to Whangarei-Northland

A passenger service between Whangarei and Auckland, was dismissed due to several factors, including that the current line to northland takes a route through West Auckland that follows a very winding and indirect alignment.

Furthermore, the route is very long, with the distance being almost 200km by rail with only one town of significant size in between.

Even with significant upgrades it is likely that the route north would not be time competitive with driving.

The quality of the track is currently very poor, requiring a large investment to bring it up to standard. KiwiRail reports

it would cost $240 million just to bring the railway from Waitakere to Whangarei up to the standard as the line between Hamilton and Port of Tauranga. In addition, due to low freight volumes combined with constraints at the New Lynn trench as well as other corridor issues, there are

no plans for a third track on the line north of Auckland.

This would result in passenger services being stuck behind all stops Western Line services.

Greater Auckland would support the introduction tourist trains to Whangarei,

That was from Page 42 of the report ( which you can view here ).

Long distance passenger services

In the early days of the line, services were very localised and catered to local rather than national needs. When the line was completed, a through passenger express was established between Auckland and Opua. This was known as the Northland Express, and by the 1950s, it ran thrice weekly and took five hours and twenty minutes to run from Auckland to Whangarei. However, due to the twisting nature of the line, passenger services were inherently slow and they struggled to compete with private cars.

In November 1956, the Northland Express carriage train was replaced by a railcar service utilising 88 seaters. These popular services barely lasted longer than a decade, being withdrawn in July 1967 as the railcars proved mechanically unreliable. The Auckland Harbour Bridge had opened in 1959 and drastically cut road transport times north, and in the face of heightened competition, the railway could not compete and no dedicated passenger service replaced the railcars. Passenger carriages were now attached to some freight trains to create mixed services that ran between Whangarei and Auckland and from Whangarei to Okaihau and Opua; as they adhered to the freight schedules, the mixed trains ran much slower than the previous dedicated passenger services. This slow pace made them unpopular and the last mixed trains ran in 1976. Since this time, no passenger trains have run beyond the northern extremity of Auckland's suburban network with the exception of excursion trains a few times per year.[