The Newmarket stuff-up

It would seem as though a rail upgrade in Auckland can never go off without a hitch, and so it is proving with the Newmarket Station improvements. The station itself is coming along very nicely indeed, and will be ready for train services on January 18th – in just over a week’s time. In fact, next Thursday Steven Joyce will officially open the station while also announcing that the contract for Auckland’s rail electrification has been signed. However, as always, the devil is in the detail, and it would appears as though a rather important detail has been left out of the construction of the trackwork that will accompany  the new Newmarket station.

However, before I go into that point it’s worthwhile giving a bit of background into the Newmarket station, its location, the rather complex train movements that are required from it, and so on. As you can see in the map below, the problem really stems from the fact that the station is in the wrong location, on the southern side of the junction of the Western Line and the Southern Line, rather than the northern side. If the station was located to the north of this junction – around where Railway Street is – then both lines could “come together” nicely before heading towards Britomart. Unfortunately the station can’t really be located there. For a start, there’s simply not enough room without some massive land purchases, and secondly it would make the station quite a lot further from the centre of Newmarket – which certainly wouldn’t be ideal.

Which means that we’re left with the Western Line (the blue line in the map above) having to do a pretty annoying change of direction to backtrack and then head around the corner and out on the Western Line. For the last while the Newmarket West station has avoided this issue, although obviously that has come at the cost of having to separate the two Newmarket stations, effectively making it impossible to transfer between services. This ‘back-tracking’ has always been a bug-bear (at least until recently) for those catching trains on the Western Line, but it does seem as though there was really no alternative to it, and so the station and track upgrade sought to minimise the annoyance to as great an extent as possible.  Here’s what the Project DART page says about the upgrade:

The new track layout at the station and junction, shown below, will allow a wide range of service options, including a direct connection between Britomart and the west, and possible west to south services. This connection will speed up and simplify crowd movements for major events such as those held at Eden Park, the Domain or Mt Smart Stadium.

This image is attached:

It would seem as though the main plan here is to minimise the adverse effects of the station location by offering maximum flexibility in how trains can move through the Newmarket junction and access the station. Obviously when you have a train on one part of the track, or passing through it, you can’t have another train in the way. Where you do potentially end up with trains crossing over the paths of each other, you need a complex signalling system to ensure they don’t crash into each other. This is where flexibility comes in handy, as you potentially have quite a few different ways in which you could thread a train through the junction and into the Newmarket station. With 10 minute frequencies each way at peak hour, plus some trains to/from Onehunga, it’s likely that there will be a pretty large number of trains will work their way through this junction.

Unfortunately, one part of the tracks on the image above has not been built, which is shown on the diagram below (thanks to Geoff from the bettertransport forums for putting this diagram together): The red link is the part that won’t be constructed, which will (apparently) place a lot more pressure on the green link, with trains running in both directions on both lines potentially having to use this green bit of track. I think that originally a train heading from Britomart to the west would have run along the bottom track, stopped at the platform right at the bottom of the Newmarket station, and then used the red link to go west. Now that isn’t to be built, it will have to shift to the green line to access the station, potentially holding up trains trying to go from Newmarket to Britomart.

Nobody seems really sure why this red link hasn’t been built, perhaps because of a shortage of funding, perhaps because local neighbours were already complaining about the noise form the junction (what did they expect living next to a railway line?), or perhaps because of sheer incompetence.  Either way, it seems truly silly to not include the final piece of the puzzle for the Newmarket junction, already a bit of a sub-standard “pinch point” on the network. Surely a small bit of extra track wouldn’t cost that much?

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