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Ricky Wilson/Stuff
Passengers were left waiting at stations across Auckland on Friday after power was shutdown across much of the network.
Auckland’s rail commuters faced mass cancellations on Friday but it is not known if the country’s largest city will be part of a new review.
Minister of Transport Michael Wood launched a rapid review of KiwiRail’s operations on Monday after weeks of disruptions were announced for Wellington services.
However, a spokesperson for the Minister of Transport said on Friday the terms of reference for the review have not yet been set.
Matt Lowrie from urban advocacy group Greater Auckland said service faults are far too regular in Auckland and it was frustrating the government called a review after one day of disruptions in Wellington, yet after years of issues in Auckland there’s been “complete radio silence from the government”.
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“The number of faults is ridiculous for a city of this size,” Lowrie said.
“Passengers are the ones who are left behind and get slugged with extra costs from daycare when they can’t get there to pick up their children in time.”
Lowrie said the more outages there are, the less confidence people have in the service and it takes a long time to get them back to using trains.
“At this point we need to be talking about the future of KiwiRail and whether it should continue in its current form,” Lowrie said.
RICKY WILSON/Stuff
It is not yet known whether Auckland’s rail network operations will be part of a government review launched early this week after disruptions to Wellington’s service.
KiwiRail’s chief planning and asset development officer, David Gordon, said the organisation is looking at how it will undertake network maintenance in Auckland when City Rail Link (CRL) operations start, bringing more frequent services and more wear and tear on the network, and less time to maintain it.
The current investigation is part of a programme looking at the wider long term needs of the Auckland metro network, Gordon said.
A councillor on the Auckland Transport (AT) board, Andy Baker, said as a daily train user he is really frustrated by ongoing issues which he blamed on the underfunding of KiwiRail by successive governments.
Bruce Mackay / STUFF
Transport Minister Michael Wood is unimpressed by KiwiRail’s explanation for train delays but is confident a review is the right approach.
“KiwiRail funding should be a major election issue this year in my view,” Baker said.
Councillor Mike Lee, who is also on the AT board, said although equipment failures were blamed for the outage he put the failure on a corporate management culture in public transport with insufficient focus on delivering service to the public.
Auckland’s mayor Wayne Brown did not have an opinion on whether Auckland should be included in the KiwiRail review but echoed Baker’s sentiment, saying: “the reported line fault at Grafton is the result of many years of under-investment that we are finally addressing”.
On Friday afternoon, KiwiRail’s chief operations officer Siva Sivapakkiam apologised for the disruptions and said the outage had been caused by overhead lines arcing after wet weather moved contaminants onto an insulator.
The cancellations come on top of years of major shutdowns across the network on which about 50,000 trips are taken daily.
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