Opinion: A year's delay in Capital Connection carriage upgrade

Penny Gaylor.

Weekly column by Kāpiti's Greater Wellington Regional Council representative Penny Gaylor.

As we enter the re-election season, this is my last column for this term, so I'd like to say a big thank you to Kapiti News for the opportunity to write my column every week.

By a rough calculation, having served six years on GWRC, times that by 45 weeks of columns and that would equate to about 270 columns in Kapiti News, sharing with you the issues, the thoughts, the solutions, and the action we've taken as a progressive council during the past two terms.

Having received lots of feedback about my weekly column during my six years so far on the Wellington Regional Council, I know how well read Kapiti News is.

And I'm hoping to be re-elected and will of course be keen to continue to write about the progress for the Kāpiti Coast environment and public transport challenges, and in particular the progress that continues to get made to secure funding to replace the Capital Connection with our bid to the Government for four trains.

Following up on some recent comments on social media about the interruptions to the Capital Connection service over the past few months, I've checked things out with KiwiRail, which runs the service.

KiwiRail is refurbishing 11 carriages for the Capital Connection, funded through the Government's NZ Upgrade Programme (NZUP), to the tune of $28 million.

When NZUP was announced in January 2020, the carriages had been expected to be completed in mid-2022.

However, KiwiRail is now expecting the upgraded carriages to be in operation by mid-2023.

Kiwirail has confirmed the delay is due to a number of factors, principally the supply of critical components and resourcing challenges as a result of the Covid pandemic. The carriage refurbishment is making good progress, with eight carriages now in production.

The NZUP reset in May last year included funding to keep the existing carriages working until the refurbished carriages replace them, so the situation has changed since our February 2021 briefing to the minister, in that the carriages will be able to be kept in operation beyond June 30 this year.

As part of the NZUP reset, the project was also extended to upgrade station platforms at Palmerston North, Levin, Ōtaki and Shannon - which are being raised to improve safety.

The disruptions to Capital Connection services are for a range of reasons; for example, a spate of wheel surface damage, which can happen due to skidding in wet weather and requires the carriages to be taken out of action while the train wheels are re-lathed. There was also a small fire around the exhaust of a generator carriage, while its spare was being upgraded.

We understand from reports provided by KiwiRail that during May, four services needed to be replaced by buses due to the generator fire, and mechanical work on the spare generator, and a separate locomotive failure. During June we understand six services were replaced by buses due to mechanical issues (the wheel damage referred to above).

GWRC has been working with KiwiRail to support the Capital Connection service, by letting it borrow our Wairarapa Service spare generator on several occasions over the past couple of months. Without the use of our spare generator, the service impact to Capital Connection customers would have been substantially larger.

And in closing off this column - let's call it No.270 - I'm already thinking about topic ideas for column 271 if I'm re-elected in October, and I want to add a big thank you to you for reading them, that's really appreciated.