Auckland rail network closed as underground CRL loop gets last push to finish line

Auckland's rail network is closed once again as agencies run a final dress rehearsal for the long anticipated City Rail Link.

Auckland Transport and KiwiRail remain tight lipped on when the underground loop will open to commuters, but promise the 4-day Matariki weekend closure will be its last push to the finish line.

AT chief executive Stacey van der Putten said a date would be given soon, but not today.

"We have to do those final testings... There's a timeline for us to follow, one of the integral pieces of that is making sure Auckland One Rail and KiwiRail have their safety cases approved," she explained.

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"Once we have the surety of that, we'll then provide a recommendation, there'll be an announcement on opening, and that'll give a six week timeline for the doors to open to the general public."

Pressed for her best guess, van der Putten was firm.

"I think we all have a date in mind, but it would be presumptuous at this point. Next week we'll be better informed to understand what that may look like."

Until then, the enormous subterranean platforms of Karanga-a-Hape Station would stay bare and untrodden by the public.

The underground station 33 metres below Karangahape Road was one of two entirely new train stations opening alongside the CRL, and the deepest.

Commuters would venture far underground on a series of escalators, including New Zealand's longest, a 43-metre behemoth with 210 steps that took an entire minute to traverse.

During a simulation of the morning peak, mostly-empty trains arrived every two minutes carrying staff armed with clipboards.

"Today is the final rehearsal for our full timetable. It gives all of our train crew, our station crew, our controllers in the operations centre [the opportunity] to have a final practise," Auckland One Rail's Louise Pengelly explained.

"So far, so good."

Braced for growing pains, Pengelly said the CRL would run a reduced timetable for the first few months.

"When we open there will be 14 trains an hour through the tunnel part of the network, out on the outer routes the frequency will still be about once every ten minutes," she said.

"Once we see that timetable working safely and reliably we'll increase the frequency.

This is a major timetable change, the biggest Auckland rail has seen in generations, so it's probably expected that we'll have a few bedding-in issues, but that's exactly why we're starting out slow."

Thursday's network-wide rehearsal would flow into a scheduled Matariki weekend closure, which KiwiRail's Bevan Assink promised would be the last of its kind.

"We're just completing some of the final touches on the network, we've got works on the Southern Line and the Western Line, and it's the last time we'll be doing a full network closure [before the CRL opens]," he said.

He acknowledged that the repeated disruptions had been frustrating for an increasingly impatient Auckland public, but said network-wide closures would soon be a thing of the past.

"The Auckland network was built for a freight network back in the 1800's, so we've really had to lift the whole standard and rebuild the network up to a standard where it can cope with a modern metro system," he explained.

"The second bit is how to maintain that in the future. What we're now looking to move towards is to be able to sectionalise it, so we'll only need to do small closures every now and then, no different to what you see on the motorways."

Though the network would be closed for maintenance during the Christmas holidays.

"We do have a closure in Christmas, we still need to do some of our normal maintenance work... But in terms of disruptions it'll really come down, we're really in a good spot now."