KiwiRail Archive

  • Gareth Hughes

    Rail petition makes tracks to Beehive - by Gareth Hughes



    As a Gissy-boy and rail-fan I passionately believe that we can’t afford to lose this community asset and we need to stand up to protect it. Kiwirail has announced the lines possible closure in 2012 if further customers can’t be found. The Government has given Kiwirail ten years to ‘turn itself around,’ but Kiwirail is [...] read more
    May 5, 2011 5:09 pm - 5 Comments
  • Gareth Hughes

    Will Auckland ever get new trains? - by Gareth Hughes



    While Auckland’s public transport systems are getting seriously overcrowded, we are still waiting to find out which company has been awarded the $500 million contract to build the new Auckland electric rail cars (aka Electric Multiple Units or EMUs). The trains, themselves, won’t be operational until 2014 at the earliest. As motorway, after motorway, finishes 6 months [...] read more
    April 19, 2011 5:00 pm - 28 Comments
  • David Clendon

    Behind the scenes at Kiwirail - by David Clendon



    It has been a busy and interesting ‘day one’ of my week’s secondment to Kiwirail, organised by the NZ Business and Parliament Trust.  The idea of the Trust is to give MPs an up close appreciation of the workings of a selected business, and for the business people to get better acquainted not only with [...] read more
    July 12, 2010 5:06 pm - 4 Comments
  • Gareth Hughes

    Holiday highway or a new rail link for Northport? - by Gareth Hughes



    I had an awesome trip to Whangarei on Monday. I drove up there for 2 reasons. First, I wanted to look at the part of State Highway 1, from Puhoi to Wellsford, which the government is keen to spend $1.4 billion on upgrading. Second, I was keen to promote the idea of a new rail [...] read more
    May 19, 2010 9:54 am - 9 Comments
  • frog

    Covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish - by frog



    KiwiRail toys with idea of moving people from A to B (and sometimes C) with trains. Why has this never been tried before? Which reminds me of this quote from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: “The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically one of them not being worth [...] read more
    April 6, 2010 9:06 am - 56 Comments
  • frog

    The End of KiwiRail? - by frog



    I recently attended an ISCR seminar on the future of rail. According to the speaker, Dave Heatley, there’s basically no future for rail. Rail is unfixable in its present form, he argued, without making some “heroic assumptions” about how we measure externalities and the opportunity cost of keeping rail. Heatley’s damning report (available soon on the [...] read more
    February 19, 2009 4:49 pm - 106 Comments
  • frog

    The railway pincer movement - by frog



    Heh, maybe we’ll finally get national railway connected back together by attacking it from the ends rather than the middle?  Down in Dunedin the Otago Daily Times says today: Organisers of rail excursions to and from Dunedin today hope they will promote suburban rail as a transport option for Dunedin commuters. Taieri Gorge Railway chief [...] read more
    July 16, 2008 4:44 pm - 34 Comments
  • frog

    Electrifying the Rails – a Peak Oil Silver BB? - by frog



    Everyone agrees that there is no single technology, no single silver bullet to solve the challenges we face because of peak oil. However, across the bigger ditch in the US, a very relevant debate is brewing about a key technology plank in the response to peak oil – electrified rail. This topic is particularly pertinent [...] read more
    July 15, 2008 3:10 pm - 62 Comments