Some good news in today’s NZ Herald – that we are going to end up getting a decent number of trains. The bad news is that it’ll be this time next year before the deal’s finalised. Well let’s just hope that’s because good things take time.
KiwiRail has set the bogies rolling for its $500 million purchase of sleek electric trains for Auckland, telling international suppliers it wants to close a deal by this time next year…
…In an industry engagement document issued on Friday to formally alert suppliers to its needs, the state-owned corporation has confirmed a requirement for up to 114 self-propelled electric railcars for delivery from early 2013 and “by no later than 2014”.
These are likely to form up to 38 three-car trains, each with about 240 seats, although KiwiRail says it will consider industry suggestions for alternative configurations…
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When they get to the stage where they have the tenders in I wonder if they will actually show them to the public. It would be nice to see the options before the decision is made. It could even be a good idea to get some public buy in rather than just announcing what we will get.
So the 13 additional electric locos will be pulled from freight duty? i.e. we will still really only have half a modern system…..
Good news that these trains are required to handle the CBD tunnel…
At rtc, no we will have 38 self propelled trains plus I assume our existing locos that do not need to be retired pulling services from outside the wires and possibly peak hour trains…
That means the system can handle at least 27,000 seated people at a time… Pretty good…
I certainly do not want to see ANY electric locos taken from the North Island Main Trunk line.
Will the 13 electric locos be brand new stock then?
I may be wrong but they way I read that was; if we want the existing SA sets to be hauled electrically we need 13 electric locos from somewhere, whether new or sourced from the NIMT, otherwise we can still pull them using the existing diesel locos owned by ARTA…
This is all that’s said in the article about the locos:
I imagine that the electric locos will mainly be used to haul limited stop services during the peak to keep the timetabling tighter. Also while we are getting 38 EMU’s I imagine that during peak times there will only be about half that running as the other half will be used to lenghten trains to 6 carriages.
Yeah someone did the sums at one point about how many trains you need to run 10 minute frequencies on the three main lines. I can’t remember what the total was though.
To clarify, will it be the Brushes on the suburban passenger trains?
In one sense, if they haul the Pukekohe expresses in peak they will at least be still on the NIMT!
Bringing back, for me, the fond memories of the 3900s in Brisbane on the peak SX runs – seeing them shunt at Michelton on the branch line was the most memorable. I don’t remember them anywhere on the single track though, like up at the terminus where there was no wire for a shunt IIRC.
The wires only go as far as Swanson in the west and Papakura in the south. So any services beyond there (from Huapai or Pukekohe) will be diesel hauled.
Electric services will be a mixture of EMUs and electric loco-hauled services. A lot of investment has gone into getting the SA trains and I imagine the powers to be will want to get their money’s worth out of it.
The original Working group report had the electrics coming off the NIMT. This would also play into the people calling for the NIMT to be dieselified so I can imagine Joyce would be happy with that. There’s no money for any new electric locos so the NIMT is really the only possible source.