It’s easy to constantly criticise Auckland’s rail system for its short-comings. Today I caught the train in from Morningside to Grafton (a pretty unfair two-stage trip) and noticed that the internal train map still said “opening in mid 2010” next to its Onehunga branch. I also thought for quite some time that I would end up getting a free ride, as the clippie didn’t enter our carriage until we had almost reached Grafton (some people who got on at Mt Albert were paying at that point). I’m pretty sure a pile of St Peter’s College students disembarking at Grafton managed to get away without paying their fares.

But anyway, it’s easy to criticise. Sometimes we forget how bad things used to be – so it’s insightful to read an August 2001 NZ Herald article on the state of the railway network back then:

Tranz Metro is removing the walls from nine of its 40 Auckland train shelters as part of its plan to fight graffiti, assaults on people and other murky goings-on.

The rail operator plans to replace the walls – possibly with clear plastic ones. But until this happens, commuters are being left exposed to the elements.

Tranz Metro spokesperson Sue Foley said the walls started coming off last week after a survey of 400 passengers found they were worried about their “personal security” while sitting in shelters.

The roofs would stay.

Crikey things must have been really bad if the best weapon against graffiti back then was thought to be the removal of walls from the train shelters.

The Herald even invented a station:

Tranz Metro will meet contractors today to decide what to do with the shelters. One option is to replace the walls with see-through plastic. It is yet to be decided when the walls will be replaced.

Commuters at two Western Springs shelters were divided about the missing walls yesterday.

Mount Albert Grammar student Lance Baker said seats in the tiny shelters would be soaked by rain. But Auckland University student Gareth Clayton said: “The front bit is normally open anyway, and you’ve got to check before you sit down to make sure it’s not re-painted or graffitied.”

Ummm.. where is Western Springs station?

One wonders what Auckland’s rail network will be like in another 10 years. I’m still hopeful of a 2021 opening date for the City Rail Link project, obviously by then the network will be electrified and have ‘proper’ integrated ticketing, real time information signs and so forth. I wonder whether we will have started on pushing rail to the airport by then – perhaps a first step to Mangere could be a first step to open in conjunction with the City Rail Link?

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32 comments

  1. I’m showing my age here, but in the 1970s I commuted from Kumeu to Mt Albert to for four years to go to high school. The carriage trains used at that time dated, I think, from World War Two, and that’s how things still were in 1993 when the first of the Perth units arrived. I began working for Tranz Rail in 1996, at which point the first glimpses of light at the end of the proverbial tunnel were beginning to appear; and in July 2003 I was on the platform at Britomart as the first train arrived (from memory, fifteen minutes late).

    Whatever things were like in 2001, I can remember it being a lot worse!

    1. I’m quite a bit younger, but I do remember using those trains during the early 90s. I also remember every station being as bad or worse than Otahuhu is now. Literally, every one felt unsafe and was awful and neglected. The Auckland downtown bus station never felt safe at all, but the old railway station was a lovely thing to be in. And remember when trains stopped at about 6.30 at night? Nostalgia…

      1. In the 70s I used to catch the train from Avondale to Boston Road (and back): no platforms there although Avondale had the station building that’s now at Swanston. In winter the station staff lit fires in the waiting room fireplace. Then there was the long hiatus when they were going to rip the whole thing up. Thankfully, I’d left the country by then but coming back on visits one wondered if trains actually ran here they were so infrequent. Mind you I persisted with trains and still have my ticket from the first Western line train into Britomart. Things have improved enormously since the early 2000s, but it seems that every gain, no matter how minor, has had to be fought tooth and nail; I recall the hassle it took even to get basic location signage at train stations. For all that by contrast with rail services in most other countries, we’re still horribly backward.

  2. Oh God, I remember those shelters… the ones at Baldwin Avenue in particular.

    The walls and seat had been graffitied and repainted so many times that it’d all created a kind of rubberised paint skin about half a centimetre thick. If I’d unbolted the bench seat and thrown it down on the platform I think it’d probably have bounced.

  3. It doesn’t say Western Springs Station – it says “Western Springs shelters” which I read as shelters in or around Western Springs.

  4. It was pretty bad… I remember my sister used to catch the train home to Glen Innes but then a girl got raped leaving the train station. So she stopped.

  5. When I compare Auckland to other cities of comparable size around the world, I realise that there was 25 or so years of entire neglect. From the early 80s until the late 2000s the level of investment in the system was pretty poor. We were essentially left with a broken system and no effort was made to change it. Britomart marked the start of a trend of reinvestment, but it was catching up off a very poor base. We’ve done well with what we have.

    And, quite importantly, Auckland had about half its current population 25 years ago. So we were stuck with a neglected broken system based on a much much smaller city with greatly different patterns of activity. If investment continues, we will continue to improve. If National stays in power, we will freeze at these levels again.

  6. On my first holiday to Auckland in the late 90s I travelled to the ends of the suburban system in the carriages mentioned above. It was there that I observed the quaint steam age practice of turning the loco and re-attaching it to the front of the train. Only problem was that the loco was a diesel. Yes, I know it needed to be short end first but what a time waster. Just imagine what the throughput at Britomart would be now with that proceedure in place. With the Airport line, building one station at a time and opening that section could work. It spreads the financial burden whilst progressing towards the ultimate goal and initially it would only be an extra stop on the Onehunga line. This is the way the Brisbane airport to Gold Coast airport line has been built. They still have another one or two sections to go but it is a whole lot closer now than when the first part was built.

  7. in the 80s, 90s and 00s, all the new subway lines in Tokyo and line extentions were done a few stations at a time. it only makes sense to build a bit and then start using it. 2021 is the absolute latest you would want to open the CRL. why not do it like the big road projects, ahead of schedule? and parallel extention of the Onehunga line to Mangere would be ideal.

  8. Another gem from the Herald website:

    http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=220837

    Yes, children, back in the bad old days the newspapers were full of claims that rail was a terrible investment and that private cars were the way to go, because that was the way Aucklanders naturally preferred it, and that just a bit more investment in roads would unlock the economic potential of the region!

    Glad that nonsense is all done with…

    1. Its almost worth e-mailing Roughan with that and attaching figures for patronage… wonder what his comeback to that would be as he’s not far off that crap still.

    2. That’s hilarious! Good work digging that out. I remember Roughan wrote an almost identical article on the busway before it opened, suggesting it would be a flop. Err … John, how about a follow up article?

    3. LOL Broken Record Roughan. You have to admire a man who will believe on Wednesday the same thing he believed on Monday, inspite of what happened on Tuesday.

    4. Wow, what a lack of vision. It will be the backwards facing “let’s pave Auckland with motorways at any cost!” people like John our kids will want to track down in 20 years to give a grilling. His beloved Roads before Rail website (RIP) records the other culprits of the era, most visibly Michael Barnett.

      People will look back and marvel at how close the city’s transport came to collapse, and be very thankful for the work Christine Fletcher, Bob Harvey, etc. did to save the situation. They have created a real turning point for Auckland.

      1. He comments on the Northern Busway being an environmental disaster … while sitting in his car on the Northern Motorway … it’s a while since I’ve read something where the author was so oblivious to the irony of their own stupidity.

  9. Does anyone else find this postcard from the same time a strange choice for promoting building even more motorways in Auckland? Gotta wonder what they were smoking in the Chamber of Commerce/Road Transport Forum/EMA ‘Roads before Rail’ camp.

  10. Poor old John Roughan, he’s stuck in another age and he just can’t see it, never will. He’s so locked into his point of view he’ll still be parroting this stuff when rail patronage is at 20 million plus, which at this rate will be in less than a decade. He’s been beating the same drum for 10 years, willfuly ignoring the inconvienient patronage explosion that’s happened in that time. He wont change, thankfully his point of view is not so wildy dislocated from reality that nobody (outside of nutjobs like Owen Mcshane and Brian Leyland) could possibly take it seriously.

  11. Who wants to add the Herald links above to a “John Roughan is a freakin’ idiot” FB page? We need to start pointing out that the anti-PT lobby has been saying these things forever and they are simply not true.

    1. Yet in 1908, eight years later, the rail line opened. If we open the CBD tunnel in 2019, we’d be stoked.

      Delays in government approval are indeed nothing new – and not fixed to rail either. Otherwise the motorway-dinosaurs wouldn’t be whinging about THEIR precious unfinished projects from the 1960s either.

      And the fact that there’s just not THAT much money, and no way to move THAT quick, is what will save us from Puhoi-Wellsford.

      1. Absolutely right. And there’s actually nothing too bad about working through a process; it’s when pollies dip their pinkies into the process (ie RONs) that things start to get really murky.

  12. From the Roads before Rail website:

    “The rest of New Zealand is laughing at us!”

    No John, Auckland is laughing at you now!

    “The network can be completed by 2007 for $1 billion, but current plans are for many separate projects spread over 10-15 years, with no set completion date”

    Have you seen what they argued could be built for $1 billion in 6 years? Waterview, the Eastern Motorway, Sh20-1, SH16 and SH18…. the costs to build about half of what they show on their little map are already exceeding $5 billion now, and the Eastern Corridor, before it sank John Banks little ship, was costed at $4 billion alone. Talk about lying money-wasters. Even using 2001 dollars, and even if they had done NO environmental mitigation, no tunnels, nothing, the amount of motorway they would have gotten for $1 billion wouldn’t have come close to what they show on the map. Liars.

    1. No, they’re being honest, not lying. What they mean is at a cost of $1billion to the users and truck companies [after being subsidised heavily by everyone else].

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