Updated: Emergency testing on the completed City Rail Link is set to end in the first week of June, but the long-awaited underground line won’t open until beyond July as other tests continue and a notice period to staff takes a further six to eight weeks.
Officials say they are required to provide staff with that amount of notice of the go-live date, once testing is complete.
Auckland Transport has not given a final date for all testing to be wrapped up, but told Newsroom on Wednesday morning that the opening “will not be in July.”
The first paying passengers on the 3.4 km underground line and through its three new stations would therefore be in August at the earliest.
Councillors and those involved in the final handover of the 10-year, $5.5 billion project appear stung by comments by a former CRL chief executive Sean Sweeney. He claimed to the NZ Herald just two weeks ago that it was over-specced, particularly in its elaborate new stations, and should have cost billions less.
Councillor Christine Fletcher said she wouldn’t give airtime to Sweeney, but was perplexed he had sat before the council over the years and failed to answer her questions on cost and specifications.
Her colleague Shane Henderson said: “I think it was extremely unhelpful,” and then addressing the absent Sweeney’s leading of the project: “Mate, it was you. Very disappointing comments there.”
Councillor Richard Hills asked the current project leaders how they had dealt with Sweeney’s comments.
“For someone who was paid $940,000 a year when he left to say he was not experienced and would have saved us $2 billion a year, if only he knew. How do you guys deal with that?
“I mean what he said in that interview was completely the opposite of what he said when he was in your shoes. I feel totally furious that someone could be part of this project for six or seven years and then jump out and… How do you hear that, and know that that’s not true?
“Surely it’s not that we could have magically shaved another $2 billion off when we were told, shown the opposite?”
Sweeney’s successor Pat Brockie, the former chief financial officer for the CRL company since 2019, told councillors on the transport and resilience committee on Tuesday that now was not the time to focus on Sweeney’s comments.
Those now in charge had a duty to Aucklanders to get the job finished and opened. Then there would be a detailed review, with external oversight, of what could have been done better.
Brockie said it was an “exciting and intense phase of the project as we prepare for handover.
“I don’t have time to focus on Sean’s comments, even though I know him well and worked with him for a number of years. But this is not the time and place. Our role is to finish the project. I think Aucklanders wouldn’t want anything else.
“You can sense the finishing line and all the comments we are getting from the public are extremely positive. They just can’t wait for the project to be open and that encourages us and focuses us.”
The transport and infrastructure delivery committee chair, Councillor Andy Baker, told Newsroom the wait for the CRL to open was stretching on. “It’s a slow process, obviously, but the last thing we want to do is rush it. That would not be acceptable to the poor old people of Auckland.”
He wondered if the external review of the whole project might best be done after a year of CRL operating. “I actually said to the minister in December ‘man, we need to have a thorough review of everything, from day one’.
“We probably need to go out another year and it let it operate, let it go and then have a big fulsome review.”
Hills wanted an assurance officials would anticipate any further public criticism of supposed overspending associated with events to open the line. Launching properly and memorably might cost a lot but it was an important city milestone.
He was told there would be up to three open days for Aucklanders to see the new stations at Te Waihorotiu (from Victoria St to Wellesley St in midtown), Karanga-a-hape, and Maungawhau, probably close to opening day and ticketed as big crowds would be expected.
Joel Rowan, communications and engagement executive for CRL Ltd, said the open days would give the public a chance to see the stations and relieve pressure on what was expected to be a “really crunchy day one”.
Organisers were focused on “balancing making it a great event with balancing the costs appropriately.”
Hills urged officials to be proactive to ensure they avoided claims of “several hundred thousand spent on event.”
“Show us it was security not champagne spent on politicians, or whatever. I think the public will understand the first part but they won’t understand flashy stuff for the officials.”
Rowan responded: “The short answer is yes. And the budget for champagne is nil.”
Officials from CRL Ltd, Auckland Transport and KiwiRail outlined the final phases of the project.
Councillor Maurice Williamson demanded to know how a project originally listed in a business case to cost $2.5b could blow out to $5.5b.
Brockie told him the expanded scope of the train capacity (from six to nine carriages) and then stations in 2019 and the effects of the pandemic, delays and sickness in 2023 had been the major factors in budget increases.
Aware of Sweeney’s recent comments, Williamson challenged Brockie, Rowan and two other officials if any of them would also be going public after the project ended to say it was a disaster. He offered them a forum to do so now.
No one answered.
Increasingly the opening of the CRL looks likely to be on a weekend, with mention of launching with off-peak services of four train services on lines each hour, running an average of 15 minutes apart, down from the current 20.
But when the system kicks in for full initial services, the Eastern Line, for example, from Sylvia Park to the city would run every 7.5 minutes on average (rising from the existing six to eight services hourly) and the Western Line would increase from six to eight from Kingsland to the city, with the rest of that line rising in three months.
The briefing to councillors showed journey times falling: Henderson to Waitematā dropping by 10 minutes and commute times from other points of the network to the new stations, Te Waihorotiu and Karanga-a-hape falling between 14 and 24 minutes (when current added bus or walk times are added in).
Conversely, Southern Line commuters now going to downtown via Grafton and Maungawhau rather than the current Parnell station could see journeys extend by a minute or two, but with greater frequency of services.
Auckland’s train network has two more big emergency exercises involving 300-plus volunteers or ‘proxies’ this Saturday May 23 and on June 6, before the extensive test programme draws to a close.
Brockie told the committee the final stanzas involve “emergency response testing, testing various emergency scenarios in the stations and the tunnel, one on Saturday where there was an evacuation on the train with 300 proxy passengers.”
Mark Lambert, Auckland Transport’s group manager of rail services, said trials of the train fleet running to proposed timetables had shown congestion issues back in January but these had since been ironed out.
In April, when the network was closed for three days over a long weekend, “the timetable was demonstrated to be deliverable”.
The network would close for King’s Birthday Weekend’s three days for one final push by KiwiRail to finish line upgrades.
The CRL is set to add $235m in extra operating and depreciationcosts to the council’s 2026/27 Budget being debated and decided on at a workshop on Wednesday and a committee meeting next week.
Mayor Wayne Brown says of the year’s higher than usual rates increase: “The proposed 7.9 percent rates increase is higher than I would have liked, but it is necessary to pay for the largest and most expensive infrastructure project in New Zealand’s history. Other councils and communities in New Zealand are facing the same rates increase, if not higher, and that is without the added expenditure (and benefit) of the CRL”
- An earlier version of this story estimated the opening date at late July, given the 6-8 week notice period following emergency testing finishing June 6. However Auckland Transport says that date is for the emergency simulations only and other testing would go on. It ruled out July for a CRL opening.
