While it will soon be time to put away the heavy machinery, there’s still a long road to travel before Aucklanders will be using the City Rail Link
The architects of Auckland’s City Rail Link plan have met with important stakeholders like Auckland Council to announce an imminent end to the civil construction phase of the work.
But although it’s an important milestone in the delivery of the project, City Rail Link Limited representatives warned councillors there’s still a way to go and the next phase presents a whole new bevy of risks.
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While in the construction phase, issues came in the form of geotechnical survey results and procurement, now attention shifts to fitting out stations, testing rails and ironing out the creases in how organisations like Auckland Transport and KiwiRail will work together.
It marks the end of nearly a decade of loud noises coming from mysterious holes in the concrete around Albert Street.
For the span of a young child’s life there have been cones cordoning off secret spots in the CBD, where teams of workers hollowed out the insides of the city to create the fluorescent-lit caverns that will one day form the centrepiece of the city’s public transport system.
Those same cones also acted as a visible scapegoat for the city’s problems in the campaign of Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown.
But while some of those cones will now presumably be put to use elsewhere as the digging and the welding and the hammering comes to a close, the work is far from over.
City Rail Link Limited's team was keen to manage expectations from Aucklanders of riding a train to the 15m deep Te Wai Horotiu Station anytime soon, saying this could represent the halfway mark of the entire process.
“While the visible infrastructure will appear substantially complete to the public, the experience of rail projects overseas has demonstrated that the project is still probably at around the halfway stage in terms of what remains to deliver an operational railway that meets customer expectations. Management of expectations around the opening date and project status will be important.”
According to documents provided by City Rail Link Limited to Auckland Council’s governing body, the end of the construction phase is the beginning of a long list of other jobs.
“Practical completion of the defined scope of project infrastructure is not the point at which the upgraded railway can be opened for public use,” it reads. “To achieve this, a range of processes need to be completed.”
These jobs include testing the trains and new infrastructure, training drivers, working out safety procedures, and linking the new systems into those that already exist.
“In the same way that a railway like Crossrail in London integrated new infrastructure with existing lines, City Rail Link will provide challenges of linking existing systems with the new environment. This interface represents a major risk to delivery of the project.”
What that means for Aucklanders is that although the long-awaited project may be nearing a visibly finished stage, there’s still much to do. And the latter phases of preparation, including Auckland Transport moving into its new HQ and kitting it out, have not yet been added to the public receipt.
That’s liable to add some costs to the already $5.493 billion project, which had its cost jump up by around $1 billion earlier this year, with chief executive Dr Sean Sweeney saying Covid impacts made the entire process more expensive than expected.
“People need to remember that in Auckland we endured two Level 4 lockdowns, a further 280 days of restricted working conditions… and we lost 3.2 million hours through illness among staff, with 800-plus workers infected,” he said.
In a meeting earlier this month with project sponsors, City Rail Link laid out the risks of this final stage, as well as how it hoped to avoid them.
Among these are the risk of the service being inadequate on day one – for which the company suggested creating a common risk register to work as an early warning system for problems that might arise at handover.
Another fear is inadequate oversight from sponsors and delivery partners – CRL Limited, Auckland Transport and KiwiRail. The three groups agreed to meet three to four times per year to discuss how the interdependency of the operation is getting on.
