Brian Rudman: Underground plans around for 80 years

How many times does Auckland City Council have to reinvent the wheel - or in this case the underground rail loop up Queen St to meet the western rail line in Kingsland?

Last week, the council revealed that engineering consultants had been brought in and declared a $400 million rail tunnel was technically feasible. They would, wouldn't they?

If only transport committee chairman Greg McKeown had come to me first I would have suggested he save a bundle of ratepayers' money and buy a nice feather duster instead.

Then he could have descended into the council archives and dusted off shelf after shelf of expert reports and plans on the matter dating back at least to 1923.

I would have also sent him off down Queen St from the Town Hall to the old Auckland Savings Bank building at the corner of Wellesley St for the thrill of standing for a moment above the rail station that never was.

In April 1969, when that building opened, hopes for an underground train service were so high that the basement of the new ASB skyscraper was future-proofed by incorporating access routes to the proposed rail link.

"We have designed the building so that the escalators and stairs from Queen St to the tube station will all be on the bank's land," said architect Geoffry Rix-Trott in a celebratory newspaper supplement.

Escalators were to be protected from the weather by the entrance overhang. Building the link would be a "quick-change" job, said the architect, requiring only alterations to a ground-floor shop and to the staff cafeteria's basement locker-room.

But it wasn't to be, not for any engineering reasons, just lack of political will.

Historian Graham Bush has chronicled the sorry saga of the underground line from the bottom of town to Morningside in his two-volume city council history.

He goes back to October 1923 with Minister of Railways Gordon Coates giving his support for a city-to-Morningside underground rail link. It was to be part of a railway upgrade in the city that included a new central station and the Tamaki-Westfield diversion.

The $1.23 million tube line was to have a station near the Town Hall. The rest of the grand plan was constructed but the Government, despite Auckland prompting, never got round to building the underground link. In 1937 it was briefly raised as a way of relieving unemployment, but the war intervened.

In 1949, with an election pending, the Government tried to placate Auckland demands for the underground route by promising electrification "as soon as practicable" and engaging two British consultants to report on Auckland suburban rail.

The Halcrow-Thomas report proposed electrification and the building of the Morningside underground link and that road building be restricted until the results of the rail improvements came clear. The incoming Holland Government agreed.

In March 1951 the city council pressed the Government for quick action. But while the politicians pushed for rail, there was rebellion below stairs with city bureaucrats - much to the Herald's disgust - beginning to champion a "roads first" policy.

By the mid-1950s, the politicians had joined the bureaucrats in favour of motorways. Ten years on, San Francisco engineering consultancy De Leuw Cather was commissioned to report on Auckland roads and public transport.

It recommended that a fast, safe and efficient public transport system have priority over new roads. Local politicians were moved to dust down the underground rail plans yet again.

The 1972-75 Labour Government initially expressed support for the underground loop and even commissioned test borings. But despite - or perhaps because of - controversial Mayor Sir Dove-Myer Robinson's strong support for rapid-rail proposals, Auckland local politicians became hopelessly divided on the issue. The most ardent opponent was councillor Jim Anderton, then leader of the council's two-member Labour opposition.

In 1976 the new National Government said it would never put money into a rapid-transit scheme and that was the end, until now, of talk of an Auckland underground.

Will councillor McKeown be able to breathe life into this 80-year-old dream when all others have failed? The big problem, as it always has been, is where's the money coming from?

Even if you say $400 million fast, it's still a lot of money - a lot more than Infrastructure Auckland, the region's banker, can afford.

Even the city's windfall from the sale of its airport shares would cover only about half the likely bill. That just leaves the Government - or private enterprise. If the past is anything to go by, a dream it is likely to remain.

Herald feature: Getting Auckland moving