An article in Thursday’s Herald highlighted an interesting conundrum facing Auckland Transport – do they want the rail network shut down in the week before Christmas, or do they still want it closed on the day of the Big Day Out music festival? As the rail electrification project starts to really do some of its more serious works, it seems that the length of time the network needs to be shut over Christmas is being extended – while the preparatory works for Parnell Station also require an extended track closure between Britomart and Newmarket. I don’t necessarily have a problem with this, as it seems better to get as much done during the times the network can be reasonably closed, compared to either having endless weekend shutdowns or having the project take forever to be completed.
Auckland Transport is rethinking a plan which would disrupt commuter trains in the busy pre-Christmas week, after being challenged about alleged preferential treatment for Big Day Out concert-goers.
The council organisation has approved a month-long closure of the line between Britomart and Newmarket, starting in the week before Christmas, so KiwiRail can lower tracks for a new station to be built at Parnell.
Its timing is to ensure the new duplicate tracks will be in place in time for it to run trains to the annual Big Day Out festival at Mt Smart on Friday, January 20.
But the plan to bring forward the traditional annual rail shutdown by a week has Auckland Council transport chairman Mike Lee questioning the transport subsidiary’s priorities.
I must say that the idea of having the Britomart-Newmarket section of the rail network closed in the week before Christmas makes me rather uncomfortable. This is a pretty busy time of year, certainly busier than you would expect late January to be. Which leaves the issue of the Big Day Out – but I would question whether we should put attendees of an event ahead of regular commuter. Mike Lee thinks so too, and also wonders whether Big Day Out trains could be routed via the Eastern Line, with just a small reverse from Westfield to Penrose:
“It seems to be putting the needs of those who have to get to venues [commuters to their workplaces] below those who just want to get to a venue [for the Big Day Out],” he said.
“We owe loyalty to our regular western line working commuters – they should come first.”
Mr Lee, who is an Auckland Transport board member, said he was all in favour of an early start on preparations for a Parnell railway station.
But he wondered why trains to the Big Day Out could not be re-routed around the eastern railway line via Glen Innes to Westfield, and then double back a short distance to Penrose.
That would allow the Parnell work, and hence the shutdown of the Britomart-Newmarket railway link with its major disruption to services including all western line trains, to be delayed until Christmas.
As we’ve learned from the Rugby World Cup, buses are fairly effective at providing services to events – perhaps more effective than trains in that they have some flexibility to recover if something goes wrong. So I would certainly prefer to see the network remain open until Christmas.
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I think the length of the closure isn’t actually to do with electrification but the need to regrade the tracks around Parnell to accommodate the new station (which will be in the wrong place anyway thanks to Mike Lee). They need to regrade something like 1km of track on an already steep incline which is not something that can be done with a few weekend closures here and there. Most of the actual electrification work seems to be pretty straight forward has actually been happening without network closures as is done overnight.
Here is some info I worked out earlier in the week and have posted as comments in other places”
AT didn’t publish patronage stats for the Oct – Dec period but they did still collect them. Their first board meeting of the year was in the middle of Feb and in the business report they state that a record 33% of the crowd used PT (rail and buses) to get to the event which equated to about 30,000 trips and was a 20% increase over 2010.
As we don’t have December 2010’s results I have had to go back to 2009, in that month the western line alone carried 184k people and the network operated for 24 days so an average of 7666 trips per day including weekends. From 2009 to 2010 patronage increased on average by 13% and from 2010 to 2011 it is about 20%, assuming that trend continues it means we should see the average daily patronage in December at about 10400 and over the course of a week it would equate to about 73000 trips.
So only a portion of the 30k that used PT to get to the game used rail and even less would have come directly from town. By comparison from the Western line alone it appears that closing the network a week early would disrupt about 73k trips and there would also be no/disrupted services for those using the Onehunga or Southern line trains which would push the figure even higher.
To me the solution for the BDO seems simple, run trains direct west to south which will provide services for those areas. Run special buses for all other areas.
This year has been one of shitting all over the regular commuters. Once the RWC is over, I think a lot of people will say “enough is enough, we still have to get to work/school/wherever”.