Battery trains to be approved for Pukekohe
On Wednesday, the council’s Finance Committee is being asked to give urgent funding approval to purchase 17 new battery powered trains, or Independently Powered Electric Multiple Units (IPEMUs) as they’re referred to officially. The council paper and the full business case notes that the urgency is because a deposit needs to be made by September this year to ensure delivery of these new trains in 2019 which is when the capacity constraints really start to bite.…
148 Comments ATAP ASAP’s – Extra Trains
In Part 1 of my series I wrote about the Third Main between Westfield & Wiri as being an ATAP (Auckland Transport Alignment Project) ASAP, a first decade project that in my opinion needed funding straight away, my second post of this series is about the need for extra trains pre-CRL (City Rail Link).…
Guest Post: EMUs Not Much Faster Than Steam
This is a guest post by Robert Finley, a qualified Civil Engineer with a lifelong interest in trains and their operation in both New Zealand and overseas. He has photographed steam trains on most of New Zealand’s rail network in his travels.…
Increasing capacity on our trains
Ridership on Auckland’s trains has experienced fantastic growth over the last few years, increasingly a staggering 70% in just three years to 17.3 million trips as of the end of September. The positive thing is that the growth remains strong at nearly 20% per annum. …
Behind the scenes on the electric trains
Looking at the AT website the other day I noticed that some previously confidential board papers had now been published. One of those was an update on our new trains, diving in to some of the technical issues they’ve faced. They say there’s been a lot of positives from the project including that deliverables were met within the original time, cost plans and budget. …
EMU Faults and CRL Properties
There have been a couple of articles in the Herald in the last few days that are worth talking about. On Friday there was the issue of faults with the new electric trains.
Auckland’s new electric trains are still being bugged by computer software and braking problems, which have brought engineers out from Spain in search of remedies.…
Electric Trains from Manukau from tomorrow
Electric trains start rolling out on the Manukau line from tomorrow however unlike the Onehugna Line not all services will switch over at once with them only starting on off peak services before being introduced over the course of a month to peak services too.…
EMU delays
There’s been comment on it already in my post from this morning on the EMU launch but I just wanted to address the issue of the delays to the Electric train this morning. The herald were quick to jump on it.…
The EMU Launch
Electric train services are finally a part of the city with the first ones running earlier this morning and yesterday I went along to the official launch of the trains. The first thing I noticed was that Auckland Transport had set up stalls and activities for kids including shutting down the central part of Gore St through the Britomart Precinct, a much better use of it in my opinion.…
Photo of the day – EMU Launch
Some great photos from reader Jonty some of our shiny new electric trains plying the line between Britomart and Newmarket.…
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