Auckland Transport have released some new photos of the first of our new electric trains being built in Spain. Here is the press release:
The countdown is on for new electric trains to commence passenger service in Auckland.
The first train is about to roll off the production line at Construcciones y Auxillair Ferrocarriles (CAF) in Spain. CAF is building a fleet of 57 three-car high-speed train sets to carry passengers on the Auckland suburban rail network. These new state of the art trains have been designed to meet the specific needs of Aucklanders and feature the latest in terms of safety, comfort and reliability.
The first train is expected to leave Spain in June, arriving here in early September. Between September and April the new trains will be thoroughly tested and used for driver training before going into operation once there is a sufficient number to run a commercial service.
And for the first time we can reveal the seating layout for the trains. This comes after Auckland Transport consulted with user groups (including the mobility impaired and cyclists) on what they need from the trains.
Auckland Transport Chief Executive David Warburton says, “The input of various interest groups has helped with the final layout. These trains are designed specifically for the needs of Aucklanders.
The three-car trains carry up to 375 passengers, around 100 more than the current trains or an increase of over 35 per cent.
All cars will have a variety of seating arrangements. The longitudinal seating will be Priority Seating for people with mobility issues, seniors and parents with children as well as those travelling with large items like bikes and cases. There will be four sets of flip up Priority Seats inside the middle (or trailer) car where bicycles and wheelchairs can be secured for travel.
Dr Warburton says, “Passengers will be able to walk the full length of a three car train via the connection between the motor cars and central trailer car, making it easier to find a seat and meaning increased safety.”
And here are the images. The first shows what appears to be an almost completed motor car (there are two in each three car set)
While the second image shows the interior which is still being fitted out however is already looking very nice
I can’t wait till these are on the tracks and carrying passengers.
Over the last few weeks there has been a renewed media focus on Auckland’s transport issues. This has been spurred on by two main events the first was the Green Party launching their Reconnect Auckland campaign and the second was the announcement of alternative funding options to help pay for future transport projects. Along with that it has seen a resurgence of an annoying myth that members of the government like to perpetrate. In an effort to try and make their transport policy sound more balanced than it actually is they love to state that the government has invested $1.6 billion into the rail network. Government MPs talk about it on social networks or at meetings, Gerry Brownlee mentioned it in his recent interview on Campbell live and Steven Joyce, repeated it this morning on The Nation (on TV3).
Now $1.6 billion certainly sounds like a lot of money and of course it is. It is also true that it the amount of money that central government has, or will be spend on rail up until the electrification project has been completed. The issue I have is that a decent proportion of the money was approved or spent before the current government even came into office. So let’s look at the figure a bit more closely, the $1.6 billion can be boiled down into three key areas:
$600 million for Project DART
$500 million for the electrification infrastructure
$500 million for the new electric trains
As the government are using the total figure to suggest that they are investing in a more balanced transport system, the question becomes whether the money was invested by the current government or not, so lets have a look.
Project Dart
Amongst other improvements it included double tracking the western line, various station upgrades, the Newmarket Station and changes to the junction, the New Lynn trench and station, reinstating the Onehunga Line, building the Manukau branch line. Kiwirails page on the project also states:
The 2006 Budget included funding of up to $600 million for rail infrastructure improvements to speed development of the Auckland network.
So yes this was paid for by central government but as you can see, funding started before the current government came to power which was late in 2008. Of course not all funding is spent in one year and as Brownlee said the other day, they didn’t cancel it. But even if they wanted to, how much could they have cancelled anyway? Well probably not much.
Interestingly the funding for this project was kept out of the normal transport budget and instead is listed under the finance budget. The government’s budget documents for the 2006/2007 financial year shows that the money was to be spent over a four year period and it was only the fourth year that National had any control over the budget. By then pretty much all of the various aspects to the project were either already completed or well under way meaning it was probably impossible to cancel anyway.
To me there is no way that the current government can claim the $600 million spent on Project DART as their spending or that they had anything to with it.
Electrification
This includes new signalling, modifying existing infrastructure like bridges and of course the wires themselves. Funding for electrification was initially included in the 2007 budget and was separate to the funding allocated for Project DART.
Now from memory the government intended to pay for the Auckland work via a regional fuel tax which would work in conjunction with one the region would also impose to fund other projects, including new trains. When National came to power they stopped the regional fuel tax and put a hold on the electrification project. They eventually agreed to let it go ahead and paid for it out of the nationwide fuel tax increase. It is however quite clear that funding for the project was initiated in 2007, over a year before National came to power.
Electric Trains
There is obviously not much point in paying $500 million for electrification without trains to run under the wires. As mentioned, the original electrification proposal was to see Auckland pay for the trains out of a regional fuel tax imposed by the regional council. The national governments cancelling of that fuel tax took that funding option off the table. When they finally agreed to let the project go ahead it was announced that the trains would be paid for by way of a loan that Auckland would have to pay back (without the extra source of funding). Worse still was that even after paying back the loan the proposal meant that Auckland still wouldn’t own the trains, Kiwirail would, however this has now changed and Auckland will own the trains directly.
Since then there has been some positive news, it was announced that Auckland would end up getting more electric trains that first proposed, that was partly possible due to better than originally expected exchange rates along with the government kicking in an extra $90 million. The NZTA are also going to contribute to the loan payments in the same way they provide money for PT operating costs however oddly it turns out that the government appears to be clipping the ticket on the loan by charging a margin on top of their cost of funding.
The first EMU will be here in a few months time
So when the government states that they have invested $1.6 billion in to rail in Auckland, it is frankly untrue. In fact the only new funding they seem to have provided is the extra $90 million they provided to buy extra EMUs and the 50% share of funding for loan repayments. Other than that all of the funding is the same as what was agreed to before they came to office.
The first of what I’m sure will be our superb new electric trains is under construction in Spain. The body shell for the first of the carriages has been completed and have already taken a trip to the paint shop to get its colours with details like logo added later in the process. The train is now in the assembly process to get fitted out with all of its components which is expected to be finished in late April. It will then spend a few months in Spain going though initial testing before being loaded onto a ship to be transported here and will be delivered by late August.
I am really looking forward to the arrival of this train. It will take some months to go though testing over here before going into service, likely early in the new year. Thanks to AT for providing the photos. If you want a reminder of what the final version is expected to look like, check out this post of the mock-up that we looked at last year. The mock-up is now in Motat where you can view it.
Yesterday Patrick and I had an opportunity to have a look around the progress at the EMU depot at Wiri. This was my first look around here but the second for Patrick who first got a look a few months ago and since that time a lot has changed, for starter the building now has a roof and most of its walls in place. Here is the depot and some of the stabling yard that will eventually have space for 28 EMUs. One thing that I learnt is that the automatic gates that control entry and exit to the depot will be linked into the system that controls the points within the depot and the gates won’t open until everything is lined up and a train is ready to depart.
Inside the depot building many of the various work spaces are starting to become fairly defined. In the next photo the platform on the upper left will give maintenance workers access to the roof of the trains while the fence on the upper right is designed to prevent people from falling off the other side of the roof. Just to the right of the shot is a fairly large pit that will house the wheel lathe.
This area is what will be known as the heavy lift road and will include lifting jacks capable of lifting an entire EMU and an overhead crane.
This circle will eventually become a bogie turntable. Bogies will be taken off the train and spun around to be taken to a little room just to the left of the picture. There they will be able to be given a deep clean up before being reattached to the EMU.
And looking south back down the depot at where we were earlier.
And here is the Northern side of the depot (the side that can be seen from SH20).
Lastly a view out the window at the vast Wiri quary which is where a lot of the excavated material from Waterview is likely to end up.
All up I found it really interesting and it was great to see so much progress.
This year the first of our new electric trains will arrive and one of big benefits of them will be that they have faster acceleration than the clunky diesel trains we have now but the question is just how much faster they will be. For some reason it is something that Auckland Transport have been pretty reluctant to actually talk much about which I am guessing is due to them not wanting to get peoples expectations up. We however are not AT and are free to talk and speculate all we like so with that in mind, some time ago I built a model to try and work things out. I actually blogged about it back then but at the time I had only showed the western line, with this post I thought I would look at the whole network. Before I go into the results, for those that are interested, here is an explanation as to how I have worked the times out:
First I have worked out the distance between each station and for each leg of the journey I have assigned a maximum speed that the trains can travel and I have kept most of the network at 80kph with the inner sections at 60kph. When the EMUs were announced AT said that they would be able accelerate and brake at 1m/s². Based on that I then worked out how long, both in time and distance it would take to reach the top speed and slow back down again for each section of track. For those interested it takes 22 seconds and 247 metres to reach, or slow down from 80kph based on that acceleration of 1m/s². The next step was to work out how long the train would travel at top speed. To do that I subtracted the acceleration and braking distance off the distance between stations and worked long it would take. For each station I then added in a dwell time to represent how long it would spend on the platform. To be conservative i generally used 45 second however for busier stations I used 1 minute. I then added the time spent accelerating, braking, at top speed and the dwell time together. Lastly to try and be conservative I added in a multiplier of an extra 20% to account for things like slow drivers, corners and junctions which that then gave me an overall result for each station.
Here are the results verses the current times for each line, I have left out Te Mahia and Westfield as based on the draft RPTP they are likely to close, I have however added in the Parnell station. For the Western line I have added in the time allocated for the driver to change ends at Newmarket together with the travel time. You may also notice some of the times look longer than current. That is because AT obviously round the times up or down to get to an exact minute.
As for how much time is saved, well the western line ends up being 3-4 minutes quicker for a trip to Swanson, the Southern a massive 7 minutes quicker out to Papakura, its 3-4 minutes quicker to both Manukau and Onehunga. The big reason the western line doesn’t gain much compared to the other lines is that it has a lot of really closely spaced stops which continue to slow things down, there also aren’t any plans to drop any stations along the route like is expected to happen down south.
Edit: Here is an image I was working on to show the cumulative time from Britomart which also highlights just how close many of the inner western line stations are to each other
The Herald today has an article on the rail shutdown, mainly just talking about similar stuff we mentioned in this post. However at the bottom of the article are some interesting comments by Mike Lee around the CRL and in particular what we do around rolling stock.
Mr Lee said it took a concerted campaign by the former Auckland Regional Council, which he chaired, to convince Labour Finance Minister Michael Cullen in 2008 to support electrification on the basis that “rail would go onwards and upwards forever in Auckland”.
It was ironic that the “kicker” argument for electric trains was that the underground rail extension could not be built without them, yet Auckland was now having trouble convincing the Government of that project’s merits.
But Mr Lee believes an extension of the electrification project to include electric locomotives could boost the economic case for a rail tunnel, by enabling Auckland to retain some of its rolling stock without having to buy a second fleet of new trains in addition to the 57 on order.
He is annoyed Auckland Transport has included more than $300 million of extra trains in an inflation-adjusted cost estimate of $2.86 billion, resulting in a predicted return of only 90c for every dollar invested in a new rail tunnel, and says that without them the project would more than break even.
That could be achieved by using electric locomotives to haul existing passenger carriages by day, and freight to and from the port at night, reducing emissions and noise through residential suburbs.
Mike seems to have a fascination with retaining the existing SA trains and hauling them around with electric locomotives as this isn’t the first time he has mentioned it. I wonder if it is purely as a result of him trying to do everything possible to get the CRL built by reducing part of the cost like the article suggests or if it is perhaps because the ARC had to fight hard to get the money to buy and upgrade the trains in the first place. In fact the original plans for electrification were to buy 38 EMUs and then an additional 13 electric locomotives to pull around the SA fleet. In 2011 Auckland Transport did the sums and found that long term it was actually cheaper just to buy the extra EMUs we needed due to things like simpler and less maintenance costs along with the fact the SA trains would have needed another refurbishment or replacement in a number of years. But there was another kicker as well, as part of the original CRL business case said:
KiwiRail has advised that the fire rating of the existing SA/SD carriage trains is not compatible with extended operation in tunnels. Therefore, the assumption used in the CBD Rail Link study is that all services will be operated using Electric Multiple Units (EMUs), either those currently being procured by KiwiRail or those bought in subsequent batches. It is understood that KiwiRail‟s current technical specification for the Auckland EMU‟s requires that these trains must be compatible with the CBD Rail Link.
So in reality the suggestion by Mike isn’t really a valid one although I guess at least he managed to get across the point that the $2.86b cost is not the tunnel alone but includes a whole host of other costs, a break down of which is below.
It does still leave the question open about what will happen with the SA trains post electrification. They aren’t really suited to long distance travel due to their door configuration and lack of toilets. There also doesn’t appear to be any other cities in NZ even considering using rail for passengers that could use them to get started. My guess is they will be sold overseas, perhaps to a developing country in Africa to be used there although just how much we would get for them is unknown.
As a side note, I actually thought it was a shame that it didn’t seem to be considered as part of the Christchurch rebuild. The rail network travels through quite a few neighbourhoods and satellite towns so with a short Britomart type extension could have seen the network extended closer to the CBD but I guess Gerry would never have approved of that.
People seem to love to compare us to Sydney, it is after all the closest international to Auckland and one of the things that is frequently commented on is the their public transport system, in particular their train system. But there is one area where Sydney has been behind us and that is in integrated ticketing (and I’m not suggesting that we are the model system). Like Auckland, Sydney has had a number of false starts but they are now starting to roll a system out. But this post isn’t about Sydney’s integrated ticketing but about the cartoon below which accompanied an article in the Sydney Morning Herald and which seems eerily accurate for Auckland.
This is something I have been thinking about for a little while and it seems I wasn’t the only one. A letter to Mike Lee that was included in the transport committee agenda suggests that a public competition be held to come up with a name for the our new electric trains (EMUs). Here is what the letter said:
A mock up of what the new trains will look like
As mentioned, having a little naming competition is something I have been thinking about for a while myself so with that in mind so what do think, should we give them a name and if so what should call them? (and no comments about the colour schemes please)
On Wednesday is the next meeting for the Auckland Transport Board and as usual there are a couple of interesting items worth looking at. I will cover the main business report in a separate post as there is lots in there but there was one separate item I felt deserved its own post which is an update on our new electric trains (EMUs) that are being built by CAF in Spain. The report to the board says that the design is 70% complete and that the current work being undertaken is to finalise all of the details. As many of the key parts of the design have already been finished, work has already started to actually build the first unit with construction on the chassis, body shell and bogies under way. Work has also started by a subsidiary of CAF to build a simulator that will be used to train all of the drivers and they will video the entire Auckland rail network to make it as realistic as possible. Over the next few months the design will be finalised, as will the first body shell which will then be painted before assembly starts early next year. What is really positive is that overall everything is still on schedule.
What is the most interesting thing about the document though is that we are starting to get some firm dates for when things will happen. Below is a list of the key milestones for the project and as you can see it appears that we can expect the first train to arrive at the end of August next year. Of course both it and the rail network will then need to undergo some pretty extensive testing so it is not expected that we will see it regular service until some time in 2014.
And here is a more detailed summary of the milestones including dates for the first 5 EMUs.
What is perhaps most interesting is the date of the last EMU. It is due to arrive in mid 2015 which is about 1 year earlier than previously announced and my understanding is that due to AT getting an additional production line. This is great as it means we will be able to get the trains arriving faster and therefore see the benefits of the entire fleet sooner. I really can’t wait to see these new trains as they are going to be such a significant improvement in every way to what we have today.
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