ALL CHANGE: Te Huia makes a step shift

Te Huia has had a significant rest ahead of its January relaunch. Is the Hamilton Auckland train back on track after a stuttering start?

The convenience of being able to work while travelling is one thing, arriving fresher is another. For those taking Te Huia right through to central Auckland, cost – and even speed – may also play a part.

Then there’s the view. Lawyer Malaki Toleafoa was catching the service five days a week to Papakura before Covid restrictions imposed in mid-August saw him working from home.

It was about a 90 minute trip for Toleafoa, who was boarding the train at Rotokauri to get to his job at the Manukau courts. During those 90 minutes, he typically had a table to himself so he could get some serious work done in preparation for the day ahead. Having just started his first job out of law school as a barrister, he tended to carry on working at night and the train made for a safer trip if he was tired.

And he could look out the window as dawn stole in.

‘‘There’s quite a beautiful view on the way up. As you’re heading up to Auckland in the morning, in the middle of winter, there was a lot of fog, and to see the sun coming up, you feel like you’re getting ready for a good day.’’

Farmland gives way for a while to the low-lying bush of the Whangamarino swamp – unseen from the road – with views of hills in the distance, and the sun coming over them.

‘‘As you get close to Papakura it becomes rolling green hills.

‘‘It was a great desk, a great view from my working desk. I did enjoy the ride up and down.’’

Toleafoa will be able to do that again from late January, when the Te Huia service restarts with a significant reset and the promise of a further ‘‘optimised’’ schedule before the end of June, including a prized stop at Puhinui for passengers wanting to get to Auckland Airport.

The full package will be, says Ewan Wilson, Hamilton City Council’s representative on the Waikato rail governance working group, a ‘‘huge step forward’’.

‘‘I think we’ll have a really viable and worthwhile proposition for passengers.’’

They need to. Having finally got the train on the tracks in April this year for a five-year trial, following years of lobbying, passenger numbers were underwhelming (‘‘dreadful,’’ says Wilson) apart from the Saturday service.

The headline January change is that the weekday train will go through to The Strand in Parnell, eliminating the need to switch at Papakura onto the Auckland Transport (AT) network.

Feedback showed the transfer was a major bugbear for passengers. The Strand, disused apart from the Auckland-Wellington train, was working well for the Saturday Te Huia service, and became the solution for weekdays, with Britomart off limits to the diesel train because ventilation systems had been removed during a revamp.

The change to The Strand will suit Trust Waikato chief executive Dennis Turton. He was catching Te Huia to Auckland a couple of times a month for conferences and meetings. With the revamped service, Turton will be able to work on the train throughout his journey. It will leave him at a less convenient stop, about 1.5km from Britomart where the AT train from Papakura used to terminate, but he’s relaxed about that.

Turton says ease, speed, and cost contribute to his choice. Te Huia is quicker than driving, or at least more reliable. ‘‘Normally, my meetings are in the city, anywhere from nine o’clock. So the vagaries of Auckland traffic mean that I was allowing three hours to get up there in the morning. I could get there quicker but I could never guarantee it, so I gave myself a bit of a margin of error.’’

He could work on the train, and avoided the stress of driving. He also avoided the ‘‘horrendous’’ cost of parking in the city.

Turton, a proponent of the train and of public transport, partly for climate change reasons, is also a realist. ‘‘The people that I have talked to that are fans of the train have never used it, which I find quite interesting,’’ he remarks.

Afurther change in January sees the scrapping of the early service, which departed Frankton at 5.46am.

By governance group chair and regional councillor Hugh Vercoe’s admission, it was referred to as a ‘‘ghost train’’, proving too early for most and occasionally dipping below 20 users on a service with capacity for 147. The immediate solution is to replace two early morning commuter services with one, departing Frankton at 6.15am, and arriving at The Strand at 8.42am. Te Huia then squeezes in a return Hamilton trip for Aucklanders, before finally returning from The Strand at 5.52pm, arriving at Frankton at 7.47pm.

So in the short term, there will be one train plying the track, but that is set to change before the end of June, with a second train added to increase frequency – and shorten the more than 13 hour commuting day. The second train is likely to leave Hamilton around 7.30am, with a train also returning from The Strand around 3pm.

At the same time Puhinui will be added as a stop, opening up Auckland Airport a quarter-hour bus drive away.

The full timetable goes well beyond the originating impetus, which was to offer a commuting service from Hamilton, based, Vercoe says, on feedback from the DHB, Fonterra and other corporates saying they regularly had staff going to Auckland.

Wilson says a ‘‘critical weakness’’ with the original service was that it didn’t enable Aucklanders a return trip in the same day. From January, they will be able to do that, spending about 21⁄2 hours in Hamilton in the middle of the day.

‘‘Currently, if you were to measure Te Huia’s performance, it’s dreadful,’’ Wilson says.

‘‘It could only provide Hamilton-originating traffic to Auckland, return trips, at totally commuter focused times, so it wasn’t even catering for the Auckland market. I mean, that’s madness.’’

The complete ‘‘optimised’’ service, as Wilson describes it, will also offer leisure opportunities, whether for tourism or to visit friends and family.

‘‘These improvements are incredibly important and critical to the success of Te Huia.’’

The number of interlocking parts and level of detail required to get a train on a track and running to a schedule is forbidding, made all the more so when starting up a regional service to get a ‘‘slow diesel train’’ into the country’s biggest city with its own rail needs. Those on the Te Huia governance group appear to relish the challenge.

‘‘Remember that Auckland Transport run a network of tracks, they’ve got to do the City Rail Link, the underground,’’ says Vercoe.

‘‘Do they really want a slowmoving diesel train coming into that network? The answer is no they don’t.’’

AT are already taking KiwiRail’s freight trains, running to and from the port.

‘‘So you’ve got your three competing parties of which Te Huia is the smallest,’’ Vercoe says. ‘‘You’ve got to go through the timetable committee, and that committee is Auckland Transport and the KiwiRail and others that use the network, to try and get a time slot when you can actually get in without disrupting all their freight and passenger transport and everything else.’’

Further pressure on the ‘‘very congested’’ Auckland network comes, Wilson says, from AT wanting to gear up to offer a service every 10 minutes.

‘‘Connectivity between Auckland and the Waikato is essential; this is a part of that picture, the expressway’s the other part of that picture.’’ Hamish Bell Te Waka chairman

Take Puhinui, as one small example of the detail required. Vercoe says they could only be given a slot of less than a minute and there is a height gap between the train and the platform, necessitating a ramp for those passengers in wheelchairs or with other mobility issues. How can you deploy a ramp in that short time frame? The Puhinui station setup also meant dismounting Te Huia passengers could step onto AT trains without paying – so a new ticket machine is required.

Transponder technology is set to play a major role in the Auckland network, enabling greater safety in the management of trains and the gaps between them, particularly if there has been a disruption. That technology will be required for Te Huia before the final pieces of the puzzle can be put in place by June. More detail.

Wilson remembers thrashing out a problem at one meeting with KiwiRail over access to The Strand. ‘‘I recall KiwiRail kept saying to us, you can’t go through to The Strand or offer services to Puhinui before the technology is added to the train.’’

The enhanced technology creates the ability for the locomotive to push the carriages. Currently, on arrival at The Strand, the locomotive has to be detached and brought back to the other end of the carriages and reconnected, ready to pull them back to Hamilton.

‘‘So I just happened to point out, but don’t we have a couple of spare locomotives? Couldn’t we put a locomotive in the front and at the back for the next however many months it takes us to put the technology in?’’

The wheeze was made possible because Te Huia has three locomotives, one for backup and, until now, one per train.

‘‘They said, ‘I guess you could do that.’ And I said, ‘Well, I think we should.’ And that immediately got us the ability to operate to The Strand.’’

Wilson acknowledges he enjoys the geopolitics. Both he and Vercoe are largely positive about the roles played by KiwiRail and AT, but Wilson says their siloed nature presents a challenge.

‘‘AT with their silos, KiwiRail with their silos, the Government that was caught in this embarrassing situation, having inherited multiple decades of underfunding in rail infrastructure. And it all sort of coming to a head and us trying to work our way around in negotiations with all of these parties, how we actually get a slot, get the plan operating when we want, delivering into the destination we want.’’

There is a lot that is out of Te Huia’s hands. The service has been held up twice by maintenance, once pushing back its start date and now delaying its restart day, with KiwiRail working on the Auckland tracks during summer. It is the legacy of long-term neglect from governments of all political stripes, says Wilson.

Any service on a Sunday is also ruled out because of track maintenance.

That is one minor disappointment to Hamilton & Waikato Tourism chief executive Jason Dawson, who is otherwise enthusiastic about the pending changes.

His organisation made submissions to Te Huia at the beginning of the service around scheduling and train stops, but leisure was not considered, he says.

‘‘That’s fine, the subsidy was initially to cover a commuter service. But we know that commuter services will stay heavily subsidised, and the idea is, to make them sustainable, you then introduce a leisure service because that will actually fund the growth and hopefully the long-term viability of the service.’’

The off peak services are a game changer, he says. Waikato has a big transitional population of exAucklanders, and the train will help friends and family reunite.

‘‘It’s what I would call uniting the two cities.’’

Those services also suit older people, giving the flexibility to travel at off-peak times.

‘‘It’s a start, and I think we’ll be able to prove the viability of the service again, because we will see the growth.’’

Fonterra’s regional manager, engagement, Philippa Fourie, says her company got involved when the train was first proposed in the Waikato regional land transport plan. They have conducted two surveys of their staff, the most recent in December 2020, indicating that 181 staff were travelling regularly from Waikato to Auckland, including two doing the trip daily.

All respondents said they would consider taking the train.

‘‘What we have found from the survey is that people love the idea of the train. They like that it means that they can spend the time working in comfort as opposed to driving through peak traffic. And, of course, for the environmental benefits around reduction of emissions.’’

But she says they also commented on the length of the day, and some asked if it could be possible to do a half day.

Both Wilson and Vercoe are confident about the longterm future for the rail link, based on the size of the two cities, and future growth in the corridor between them, though the confidence comes with a qualification. There’s geopolitics, and then there’s party politics.

A change of Government is, Wilson says, a clear and present danger.

‘‘National and their ideology could unravel this in a single signature. And I think that would put New Zealand back a very long way. And I’m not pro-Labour, I’m just pro-efficiency.

‘‘There are a lot of National policies that I agree with and there are some Labour policies I agree with, but the one I don’t like about National is they’re anti-rail, and I think it’s dumb. You can’t take a country like New Zealand and say the only solution is roads and highways. Just look everywhere in the world.

‘‘I’m not a greeny, I don’t have a bicycle. I’m just saying that we need all options.’’

Wilson says in a recent stint overseas he got used to using rail, and realised New Zealand needed to shift from reliance on the motor car.

‘‘I became pretty passionate about the effectiveness of good public transport. We’re not there yet. And until we can deliver it, I’m ignoring the critics. And then measure us on the system when it’s up and running, optimised, and we’re getting close.

‘‘I can’t believe that I’m about to say it, but I’ll say it. It wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been a Labour Government. I’ve said it. It wouldn’t have happened.’’

Despite the improvements, Te Huia is, to use Vercoe’s words, still a ‘‘slow diesel train’’, taking 21⁄2 hours for the full trip.

He sees future electrification as essential. That’s where the costs seriously escalate, requiring double tracking all the way – currently the line is single tracked through the Whangamarino swamp, ‘‘like a single lane bridge in the middle of a state highway,’’ as Vercoe puts it.

The route would also have to change; no longer is it considered viable to fill part of a swamp for a rail track.

The Government released an interim business case in August, which suggests costs in excess of $14 billion for a fast train that could get to Auckland in just over an hour – of an exponentially different order from the $98 million for Te Huia.

Hamish Bell, chair of regional economic development agency Te Waka, says a fast commuter service taking an hour or less from Hamilton to Britomart would make a ‘‘massive difference’’.

‘‘The removal of the stop in Papakura has removed what I think’s been a critical blockage. But a limited stop service or high speed service over time will be what makes the real difference because then you can genuinely have people working in downtown Auckland or other parts of Auckland and daily commuting.’’

Bell says the timetable should also take into account a growing number of Aucklanders commuting to work in Waikato. ‘‘Connectivity between Auckland and the Waikato is essential; this is a part of that picture, the expressway’s the other part of that picture.’’

Wilson expects the optimised Te Huia will provide environmentally positive outcomes and reduce road congestion and road toll. While he acknowledges the service will always require public funding, he thinks the economic benefit will surpass the cash cost. But he also sees it as a precursor to a faster service.

‘‘You start with what can be feasible – what we’ve launched is feasible. And then you have incremental improvements.

‘‘Eventually, people will start thinking in 10 or 15 years, ‘God, this train thing is quite comfortable. You get on it, you work, you can surf the net, you can send emails, you can have a coffee and it delivers you to the heart of the city.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could speed it up?’ So then you’re not just talking about the paradigm shift of getting people out of their cars. They’re committed to the train. They just now want it faster.’’

Toleafoa is unsure how well the revamped timetable will work for him – he had been catching the 4.42pm service from Papakura, much earlier than the new offering. He thinks he may drive one day a week for the sake of that earlier return.

He will be in for a different experience come January, with the frosts gone and the sun rising about 6.20am. It seems unlikely the cows that used to stand on a particular hill and watch as the train went by will still be there.

He has a small criticism of the train.

‘‘I do wish they had more vegan options for food, other than fruit salad and a bag of salted peanuts. What’s good though is that they don’t charge extra for soy milk in my coffee unlike at other cafes.’’

Quibbles aside, he’s a fan. ‘‘There is a short section of the track that goes alongside the main highway and you see people in their cars making the same commute. I imagine those in their cars don’t even know what they are missing out on, not being stressed about traffic and having a relaxing train ride and sipping on a barista coffee as we head up to Auckland.’’