City Rail Link: Halfway through New Zealand's largest infrastructure build

Thursday, 16 July 2020

In July 2020, The CRL project had reached the halfway point, on time and on budget

Auckland’s City Rail Link (CRL) is “on schedule and on budget” as the eight-year, multi billion-dollar project, officially ticks past its halfway point.

The $4.4 billion CRL is the largest transport infrastructure project in New Zealand.

Then-Auckland mayor Len Brown, then-Transport Minister Simon Bridges and then Prime Minister John Key formally marked the start of construction at the downtown Britomart Train Station, in 2016.

Four years on and the site looks a lot different, with tunnels cut right the way under the CBD looping Britomart with three major central stations.

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Drone footage of the City Rail Link’s Aotea Station site in central Auckland.

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Chief executive Dr Sean Sweeney said to date, about $1.4b had been spent, with major works still to complete.

City Rail Link CEO Dr Sean Sweeney stands in the CRL tunnels, beneath Britomart train station

“We are on track, we've just resolved our last two major contract packages, so we are good to go,” he said.

“We are probably a third of the way through in terms of expenditure. There were the early packages, and then a bit of a hiatus while we waited for Crown funding and procured the rest of the job.”

The 3.45km, 42m deep tunnels will be completed by 2023, and it would take a year thereafter to instal the rail infrastructure.

Once completed CRL will, at its peek, ferry an estimated 54,000 passengers an hour through the stations.

That’s the rail equivalent of an additional 16 lanes of traffic, or three Harbour Bridges, Sweeney said.

The project has spent “roughly a third” of the $4.4b budget so far.

The coronavirus-enforced lockdown stalled the busy construction site for five weeks, but Sweeney said the project was on schedule nonetheless.

“Overall the CRL sites did very well, we came out of lockdown very fast,” he said.

“At the moment we are tracking to finish the job within that budget envelope ($4.4b). But of course the big caveat for everyone is the effects of covid-19.

“We got through the (alert) levels fine, but we are an international project. We source people and equipment from all over the world and that is proving to be a huge challenge given the border restrictions.

The busy Britomart site took some time to resume work after lockdown, given the close working conditions.

“That will play out for sometime.”

As impressive as the twin-tunnels beneath Britomart are, there was still plenty of heavy lifting to go before CRL was scheduled to be competed, in late 2024.

Mt Eden station has closed for four years, during the construction of the “portal”.

Major work was also underway building the new Aotea station and connecting the loop through Karangahape Road.

“It’s coming along great. The really big work still to be done is obviously at Mt Eden, where we are building the portal,' Sweeney said.

'At K-Road we are doing some very deep mine shafts there at the moment, those have almost reached the bottom point where we will begin mining out horizontally which will form where the station will be.”

'And at Aotea, the major work at the moment is relocating services.

“Obviously Albert Street, Victoria Street and Wellesley Street are major roads and every service that major civilisation has is buried underneath them. It's our job to find them and relocate them, so we can start building that station.”

The 3.45km, 42m deep tunnels will be completed by 2023, and it would take about another year to instal the rail infrastructure, Sweeney said.

Even after the completion of all that, there was still “quite a long' testing and commissioning process before CRL is opened to the public.