City Rail Link is going to change the way you travel on trains around Auckland.
Check out this video.
At the moment, if you use trains, the last stop into downtown Auckland is at Waitematā Station (Britomart). Trains stop there and can go no further. If you want to travel on a different line, you have to get off and wait for a train at another platform.
Britomart is the only stop in the central city.
With City Rail Link, we built two tunnels at Waitematā Station (Britomart) that will go all the way up to the Maungawhau Station.
That means you can stay on the train at Waitematā Station (Britomart) and keep going. There will be two new stations that will be handy to other parts of the inner city.
One station will be at Wellesley and Victoria Streets- Te Waihorotiu Station.
Another will be Karanga-a-Hape Station, near Karangahape Road with two entrances - one in a side street called Mercury Lane and another at Beresford Square on the other side of Karangahape Road.
We have been gifted names by mana whenua for the new stations.These have been approved. You can read about that and see the designs of the new stations.
The tunnels are 3.45km long and up to 42 metres deep.
The trains will also be up to nine carriages long which means more people can get a seat. Travel times will improve.
The route for the tunnels will be: From Waitematā Station (Britomart) to Albert, Vincent and Pitt Streets, and then cross beneath Karangahape Road and the Central Motorway Junction to Symonds Street before rising to join the western line at Eden Terrace where the Maungawhau Station is located.
Big machines are needed to do this work. This is New Zealand’s biggest transport infrastructure project. One was a tunnel boring machine that excavated the tunnels under the ground.
It’s a tradition that a tunnel boring machine can’t start work until it has a woman’s name to honour St Barbara, the patron saint of underground workers, as a sign of good luck for the project ahead. We have called the machine after an inspiring New Zealand - the late Dame Whina Cooper who fought for Māori rights and was the inspirational leader of the Māori land march on Parliament in 1975.
We finished building the tunnels in September 2022.
Now we’re putting in the rail tracks and systems into the tunnels.
And we’re building the new stations that will look like this.
Politicians talked about building an underground rail in Auckland for almost 100 years before it was decided to do it!
Now it is happening. Construction of the stations and supporting rail infrastructure is now expected to be completed by our contractors the Link Alliance by November 2025.
Following the end of the construction programme, CRL Ltd will hand over the completed infrastructure to KiwiRail and Auckland Transport, who will then carry out the additional work required to open the CRL to its first passengers.
There are brochures you can read and download here.
If you have any questions, let us know.