Newmarket train station upgrade runs late

Cameron Brewer says the old station buildings deserve pride of place elsewhere in Newmarket. Picture / Martin Sykes

Newmarket businesses say their "back-of-beyond" train station should have received a proposed $40 million upgrade well ahead of a looming boost to rail services.

Passengers lining up for 25 per cent more rail services in a fortnight, including trains running on Sundays for the first time in 40 years and until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, will have to wait until 2008 for improvements to Auckland's second-busiest station.

In the meantime they will have to put up with the most basic facilities, without even a public toilet - the Auckland City Council has just demolished the old one on nearby land to make way for a seven-storey private development of up to 500 apartments.

Newmarket Business Association general manager Cameron Brewer said yesterday that he welcomed Sunday trains, but was not interested in promoting them as a way of reaching "upmarket Newmarket" until they started running on time to better facilities.

"This is where people come for the best fashion, the best shopping, but unfortunately we have infrastructure which parallels Whangamomona," he said, referring to a Taranaki railway ghost town he called New Zealand's Timbuktu.

But the Auckland Regional Transport Authority says it has been working to upgrade the long-neglected rail network as fast as possible since being set up late last year.

It says the new timetables are needed to lay a framework for added expansion as more trains become available, and track duplication is extended further west.

Mr Brewer questioned the choice of "peripheral" stations such as Glen Innes and Ranui for upgrades ahead of Newmarket, on which the authority is consulting the local community on a $40 million redevelopment of its station and rail junction.

Authority project manager Roger Mace said the decision to develop other stations was taken before his team began work, but it was keen to get on with Newmarket to make the most of a planned $140 million duplication of the western line.

Services arriving at Newmarket will more than double to 31 an hour by 2016, unloading about 4200 passengers, five times existing numbers.

Consultants have produced several options for remodelling the station round a second platform and reconfiguring the junction of the southern and western rail lines, which will, among other things, remove a clumsy backwards shunt for trains to Waitakere.

Ideas yet to be confirmed in detailed design work include the possibility of a new retail street leading to the station from Remuera Rd, and pedestrian links to Broadway and elsewhere through to a 2300sq m public plaza that the apartment developers are required to build.

Groundwork for the apartments is at an early stage and the city council has apologised for the "inconvenience" of its sudden removal of public toilets that the developers must replace when the project is complete in two to three years.

Tough decisions include what to do with the station's main building and signals box, which were both opened in 1909 and are deemed to have heritage value.

The signals box still operates, but the other building stands marred by graffiti and roped off from passengers, who gain limited shelter from a far smaller structure.

Mr Brewer said it was disappointing that the consultants appeared to favour removing the buildings because of limited space, but the community might accept this as long as they gained pride of place elsewhere in Newmarket.

But one fixture his organisation wants to banish is a massage parlour that has operated for 37 years on the corner of Broadway and an alleyway likely to be upgraded as a covered entrance to the station.

The association is opposing a dispensation that the New Oriental, also known as the Oriental on Broadway, needs under the council's new brothels bylaw to operate within 250m of a major public transport interchange, residential-zoned sites and educational facility.

Mr Brewer said the association was not making moral judgments about brothels, but believed they were unsuitable at street level in retail areas and should be confined to designated red-light districts.

"We are trying to make Newmarket a premier shopping district and a brothel is not part of it - and neither are Whangamomona-esque railway facilities."