Auckland City Rail Link: Covid-19 delays put 2024 completion date back months

Wednesday, 22 December 2021

The Dame Whina Cooper City Rail Link tunnel boring machine breaks through at Aotea station site

Auckland’s City Rail Link (CRL) project – the country’s largest infrastructure build – will be set back by months because of Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions.

CRL chief executive Sean Sweeney said it was “highly unlikely” the $4.4 billion project would meet its December 2024 completion date.

“Recently, the project was shut down for six weeks. There are other more subtle delay effects to Covid, some of them you only find out about three months later.

Covid-19 will set Auckland City Rail Link back by months, its CEO says.

“At the moment, we're talking months. But by how many, we still have to work that through.”

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Tunnel boring machine Dame Whina Cooper breaks through into Aotea Station.

He said every major construction project in the world was being affected by Covid-19, and cited labour shortages, disruptions to global supply chains and lockdowns all impacting CRL works.

“Covid is going to have a major impact on the cost of the job. At the moment the heavy construction industry is experiencing about a 25 percent cost increase in materials. That’s unheard of in New Zealand,” Sweeney said.

The project involves constructing two new underground stations, a 3.45km twin-tunnel underground rail link and redeveloping Mt Eden station.

CRL chief executive Sean Sweeney says every major construction project in the world is being affected by Covid-19.

Sweeney had not told Transport Minister of Transport Michael Wood or Auckland mayor Phil Goff of the delays until speaking to the media Wednesday morning.

Wood said it was important to note “mega-projects of the scale” take around 10 years to build.

“You then have a major impact like Covid in the middle of that, it's highly likely that you'll need to work through carefully.

“So a few months, potentially, in a 10-year project that will deliver benefits to the city for 100 years. I think it's something that people will understand [given] the circumstances,” Wood said.

Sweeney said a “strong indication” of the real completion date would be given at the end of next year once the tunnelling was completed and construction on the rail system had started.

The news of the delay came on the same morning the tunnel boring machine Dame Whina Cooper reached a major milestone by breaking through into Aotea Station ahead of schedule.

Goff said it wasn't surprising Covid-19 had caused delays given the project had to close down for several months.

“What is surprising is that they've finished this part of the project several months ahead of time, and that's a real credit to the team working on it,” he said.

To reach the station, the 130-metre-long 910-tonne machine excavated more than 1600 metres from Mt Eden Station and removed over 147,000 tonnes of soil.

From Aotea, the cutter head and shield of the boring machine will be dismantled, lifted out of the breakthrough zone and returned in sections to the Mt Eden construction site.

It will then be reassembled to mine the second CRL tunnel next year.