Remember it was only designed to take two heavy rail lines, i.e. just the Southern and Eastern plus perhaps an Overlander each day. The western line and any new routes were to be light rail that would not use the throat tunnel, so the capacity as originally invisioned was appropriate.

Also bear in mind that the tunnel was actually built by the Auckland City Council before they had any indication that any station or upgrade was going to take place, you can forgive them for not making it four tracks when it might not have been used at all!

However, I think it is a debatable point about whether Britomart was the right CBD station to build. Perhaps it might have been better to have kept the Beach Road station and then tunnelled from there to the Midtown station, then to K Rd and on to Mt Eden.

But it was hard enough getting Britomart built, let alone something five times its cost, when you only had 1000 rail passengers a day.

Yes, much like the fact that you couldn’t take an Auckland suburban train to the centre of Auckland.

I’ll qualify my above statement, there were two things that saved Auckland rail. Before Britomart the introduction of the ex-perth DMUs brough the system back from the brink of oblivion with some (relatively) comfortable and reliable trains suited to urban services. But at that point they were still only carrying a little over a thousand people a day because of the station location. The fact that once Britomart was built it meant that people could catch a train to the CBD, that is what really kicked things off. That is why patronage has been growing by 3-40% per annum over the last five years. They would never have contemplated electrification if the ‘central’ station wasn’t in the CBD for example, why would you when it only carried about a thousand people each day?!