One man’s desperate and slightly unhinged search for an answer to the question on every Aucklander’s mind.
Patrick Brockie is refusing to engage in a game of word association. “What feelings come to mind when I say the word May?” I ask. There’s a long silence. “May open?” he finally says. “No, we’re definitely going to open.” It’s a joke, but I won’t be deflected. “What about June? July?” The City Rail Link chief executive finally cracks under the barrage of journalism. “I appreciate you asking, mate, but unfortunately, look, it is truly complex,” he says. “We’ll be opening as soon as we can.”
The $5.5 billion CRL is the biggest transport infrastructure project New Zealand has ever built, and if you walk Auckland’s streets right now, it looks tantalisingly close to completion. A couple of weeks ago, crowds gathered at a market in the newly opened Beresford Square off Karangahape Road. The Karanga-a-hape CRL station loomed sullenly over them, metal grating cutting off its clearly fully built entranceway. Maungawhau Station is similarly tempting and unobtainable, its gleaming new platforms locked off from passersby behind a weird moat of dirt.
LET THEM IN (Photo: Scott Caldwell)
The signs are everywhere. Britomart is officially Waitematā Station. The shed they used to hide the giant shaft down the bottom of Mercury Lane is being dismantled. CRL test trains can regularly be seen along the southern and western lines, and in August, Simeon Brown took selfies on a special ride through the new tunnels for government ministers and local officials. The thing looks 99.7% done, and yet when you ask anyone when the CRL will open, you’ll get the same response.
“Next year,” says transport minister Chris Bishop, repeatedly, when confronted with a list of specific dates and times.
“Next year,” says Auckland council’s transport committee chair Shane Henderson.
“The strong messaging is ‘next year’,” says a spokesperson for Auckland mayor Wayne Brown, who last month told The Post he “suspected” the opening would be later in the year, just after two of his councillors strongly messaged, perhaps accidentally, that it would open smack bang in the middle of the year.
LET US TAKE SELFIES IN THE TUNNELS.
“Next year,” says AT’s rail services manager Mark Lambert. He’s even tougher to break than Brockie. “How do you feel when I say the word April?” I ask. “I feel it’s in 2026,” he replies. It’s possible authorities are wary of getting specific because they’ve got the CRL opening date wrong before. It was initially meant to be completed in 2022. That got pushed out to 2024 when the project was given extra funding in 2019, then in 2023 it was delayed another two years, partly due to a minor hiccup with a global pandemic. The CRL website still says completion of the infrastructure, if not actual opening, is set for December 2025, but according to one of its spokespeople, that may have been an “aspirational” goal from a while back. The actual opening is now an indeterminate time within the year of our lord, 2026, and if officials don’t get more specific than that, they may technically get the date right for the first time.
It also seems that, despite appearances, there’s still heaps to do to finish the CRL, and lots of uncertainty about how long that stuff will take. Lambert rattles off a list. Just this weekend, they checked its newly built tunnels could handle a frequency of 18 trains per hour in each direction. They still need to import five more trains to get to the 95 they’ll need on day one. Then there are more tests. So many tests. They have to test the new train timetable. The comms systems. The public announcement systems. The way all of these systems interact when dozens of trains filled with bleary-eyed commuters are criss-crossing the city. “This is always a period of a project which is arguably the most complicated and the most difficult to get through,” says Lambert. “Because you can design everything to perfection, but ultimately you’re testing in real time.”
It’ll be systems up the wazoo for months, but there’s physical stuff they have to check as well. Brockie and his staff are in charge there. Importantly, they have to ensure the sprinklers, ventilation and other emergency management equipment is up to scratch, as burning people to a crisp on your new train network is notoriously bad for PR.
It all sounds pretty taxing, but it’s still hard to shake the suspicion all this could be done more quickly. The CRL was recently used in a Bank of China presentation as an example of how inefficient non-Chinese contractors are compared to Chinese ones. The presentation pointedly noted that in roughly the same length of time as the CRL has taken to build, a Chinese contractor has laid 142km of track in Indonesia for a fraction of the cost per kilometre.
It doesn’t look good when you put it like that.
Brockie, perhaps predictably, doesn’t think it’s fair to say the project has been slow. He says the CRL poses unique challenges. It’s our first underground railway, the Karanga-a-hape Station is the deepest we’ve ever built, and Te Waihorotiu Station in midtown will be the busiest in the country. “We want to do it as quickly as we can,” he says. “On most contracts, you tend to make more money the quicker you finish so there’s definitely incentives to finish as early as possible. But it does take time, unfortunately, and it’s just the way it is, and we’re trying to open it safely and reliably.”
When that takes place is anyone’s guess, and if Brockie has suspicions, he’s not letting on. Late in our interview though, I hit on a way of eking out a sliver of extra information. “What about August?” I ask, desperately. “My birthday is in August so I hope to have good news by then,” he says. It’s the best clue I can get. The CRL will open in 2026, before September. My money’s on July, just in time for a general election campaign.