{"id":560091,"date":"2026-08-05T20:12:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T20:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/560091\/"},"modified":"2026-08-05T20:12:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T20:12:10","slug":"billboard-gaffe-accidentally-reveals-city-rail-link-opening-date-as-13-september","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/560091\/","title":{"rendered":"Billboard gaffe accidentally reveals City Rail Link opening date as 13 September"},"content":{"rendered":"

Billboards announcing the City Rail Link’s<\/a> opening date have been put up in error.<\/p>\n

Early on Thursday morning, Auckland Transport billboards were seen in Auckland city announcing the $5.5 billion project would open on Sunday, 13 September.<\/p>\n

An AT spokesperson has told RNZ they were put up in error and only supposed to be displayed after an official announcement at 9am.<\/p>\n

“It was a mistake by the billboard provider,” they said.<\/p>\n

Auckland mayor Wayne Brown and Transport Minister Chris Bishop will be speaking at the announcement.<\/p>\n

CRL is New Zealand’s largest transportation infrastructure project, and construction has been going on for the past 10 years.<\/p>\n

Until now, its opening date had been kept tightly under wraps, with Auckland councillor Richard Hills earlier saying people were getting frustrated.<\/p>\n

“Is there any way in the next couple of days that it can be announced what month? Because there are a lot of people getting upset, concerned. There’s a lot of businesses who just want hope.”<\/p>\n

Auckland Transport, City Rail Link Limited and KiwiRail will be opening the new stations to the public<\/a> through a series of ‘First Look’ events. These will be free, ticketed sessions, but numbers will be limited.<\/p>\n

They will be held over consecutive Saturdays in August: 8 August – First Look at Maungawhau, 15 August – First Look at Karanga-a-Hape, 22 August – First Look at Te Waihorotiu.<\/p>\n

The free tickets for these will be available one week ahead of each event.<\/p>\n

At peak, trains will run every five minutes through the city centre and on average around 10 minutes elsewhere on the network. At off-peak the new lines will operate every 15 minutes throughout the day, including weekends, compared with every 20 minutes at present.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Billboards announcing the City Rail Link’s opening date have been put up in error. Early on Thursday morning,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":560092,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-560091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=560091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560091\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/560092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=560091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=560091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=560091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}