Timetable test: What's taking the CRL so long?
Tuesday, 14 April 2026
Auckland’s City Rail Link has hit another milestone, with crews testing out its new timetable, but senior staff from the council’s transport agency remain tight lipped about when the underground metro itself will arrive.
“Second half of this year,” is all Auckland Transport’s group manager rail services Mark Lambert would say.
“Trial operation starts next week, and then we do emergency services testing over the next two months,” he said.
On Tuesday, media were the first non-engineers to see trains operating in the brand new Te Waihorotiu Station on Albert Street for the network test.
A reporter in the media scrum asked: “How do you feel when I say the month September?”
“It's not my birthday,” returned Lambert, giving nothing away.
There have been various predictions for the opening of the supercity’s $5.5 billion train set. Auckland Council has budgeted for July, a local councillor has said AT was aiming for April, while some media report unnamed “official sources” picking September.
Lambert told The Post that AT was working to multiple different opening dates - with each having percentage odds associated with them, and even he didn’t know which it would be.
He said it would be “narrowed down” within a couple of months.
When the big day comes, there’s one thing that won’t feature in the celebrations - helium balloons, which are banned from the station.
That’s because they could float up and hit 25,000 volt overhead power lines, shorting them out, said Lambert.
We’re even told not to step past the yellow line at the platform, otherwise alarms will start going off: it’s a new feature that detects if passengers have fallen on tracks.
It’s scenarios like that, including evacuations, which AT is having test for along with “stress testing” the network by running it at its full capacity before it can open.
“Everybody wants and needs this to be a huge success. So we need to test it first,” said One Rail chief executive Martin Kearney.
“Part of it is, how do we manage from disruptions? We know things happen on railways. We had a dog on the line yesterday. Delays happen,” said Kearney.
Lambert maintains that the opening, when it does come, will be a “game changer” for the city.
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The Post asked what AT thought of comments previously made by Port of Auckland boss Roger Gray that it was going to be “a disaster”.
“It is not going to be a game-changer, but when you’ve sunk as much money as politicians and council have, they have to say it’s amazing,” Gray told a community event late last year.
Kearney said it was “not even worth responding to those comments”, adding he thinks it will be “phenomenal”.
KiwiRail’s Bevan Assink said he thought it would be a “revival” akin to the opening of Britomart in 2003.
Lambert said he was “conscious” that before the Covid-19 pandemic, 22 million passengers a year were riding the train, whereas now it was about 14 million.
“It gives us a great opportunity to attract people back and offer the best service we can.”
He said that AT had increased its fleet of trains from 72 to 95 in preparation for CRL. On Tuesday, 82 of them were running on the network across 45 services.
Lambert said the first capacity test in January “could have gone better”.
“We tried to stress test it,” he said. “The congestion was just too much, so we’ve scaled it back to what we’re testing now.”
When CRL opens, Lambert said that it would operating with six services an hour. But within six months AT intended to increase that to eight services or about one every seven and a half minutes.
“The frequency won’t dramatically increase on day one,” said Lambert. “It’ll be a soft launch.”
Lambert said that the network currently had three lines - east, west and south - but with the opening of the CRL, the east and west were joining to become one contiguous line while the southern line would effectively become a loop.
“You can get from Sylvia Park to Eden Park in one ride,” he said.
There will also be no more “dog legs” at Newmarket where trains services have to reverse out.
Lambert said that during the morning peak hour the train network was currently able to bring 12,500 passenger into the city. The CRL’s added capacity would increase that to around 19,000.
He said that it would reduce travel time significantly, especially on the western line, with journey times to midtown improving by 10 to 24 minutes.