It did get rather lost in the news surrounding the opening of Newmarket station, but on Thursday there was perhaps an even more important milestone for Auckland’s rail system – the signing of the contract for electrification. Here’s some extracts from the Herald article on the signing of the contract:
Auckland’s $1 billion rail electrification project is considered past the point of no return after a contract was signed yesterday for about 3500 masts and 80km of overhead wires.
KiwiRail signed the $80 million contract with a joint venture of Hawkins Infrastructure and Australian company Laing O’Rourke just before Transport Minister Steven Joyce formally opened Newmarket’s grand new $35 million railway station…
…Mr Joyce said the Government made a commitment to proceeding with electrification before being elected in 2008, and he was proud to have honoured that without help from a regional fuel tax which would have been “just too big an imposition on Auckland motorists”.
Yesterday’s electrification deal follows a $90 million signalling contract signed in April, and the Government’s announcement in November that it will lend KiwiRail $500 million to buy about 114 electric railcars.
An assurance from the minister to about 120 guests at the Newmarket Station opening that the first electric trains would be “on the ground and operational from 2013” drew applause led by Auckland Regional Council chairman Mike Lee, who spent much of last year fretting about a lack of funds for them.
It is great that there’s now no chance electrification won’t happen. I suppose that if you think about it, electrification was a no-brainer. Auckland will need new trains once the current fleet of ex-Perth diesel units need to be scrapped (some are long overdue for that to happen), and over the course of 30 years it is actually cheaper to electrify the system and run electric trains than it is to buy new diesel trains and run those for 30 years (because electric trains are much cheaper to run operationally).
The other benefits of electrification, such as having trains that are faster to accelerate, quieter, more reliable and generally just better are actually secondary to the point that electrification is actually the cheapest option. The only real alternative to electrification would be to get rid of the rail system altogether – which would be completely insane after just spending $600 million on Project DART (nevermind the enormous amounts that would need to be spent on widening motorways or building busways to replace the rail system). Electrification is also essential if we are to one day build the CBD Rail Tunnel, which itself is essential if we are to ever expand the rail network.
Nevertheless, it does seem as though the government thought long and hard about cancelling this project. I’m guessing that someone pointed out electrification is the cheapest option to keep Auckland’s rail system running, and that was the end of the debate.
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It never fails to amaze me that National is so predictable in their dislike of pubic transport. Perhaps it’s the neo-liberal dislike of the wealthy being made to associate with us filthy commoners. However, they did do the next best thing to cancelling the project which was to merely loan the money to Kiwirail for the trains, nothing like shackling a company to debt to make it compliant.
Is it even possible to get new DMU’s? I just get the assumption that 3rd world countries get their trains from 1st world countries that have upgraded to electrification.
Sorry, I guess that doesn’t say much for Auckland…. But that was then and now we have upgraded
I know new DMU’s have been bought in England in recent years, but I think these are more for intercity/cross-country services than suburban services. Although England is another place where electrification is seriously lacking. Most unlike Western Europe where you hardly ever see DMU’s, only on very rural, sparsely populated areas.
I am guessing you can still buy diesel locos to haul carriage as Auckland has been doing but I highly doubt the market for DMUs could be very big.
I remember reading a while ago something along the lines of, one of the reasons EMU’s were cheaper was that all manufacturers were set up to mass produce them. While they could also make DMU’s it would likely require them to change their production lines which added cost.
Cheaper to build but also, perhaps even more importantly, a heck of a lot cheaper to operate. Unless you’re a Saudi oil baron (or Steven Joyce), pretty much everyone else agrees that peak oil will have dramatic effects some time within the next 30 years (the only question is when, and how dramatic those effects are) – so being stuck with diesel trains is going to become very very expensive.
Not as expensive as being stuck with over three millon pertol and diesel vehicles with little alternatives..!
My deep seated fears that somehow the carpet is going to be pulled out from under electrification are somewhat dissapating…