saving the North Auckland Railway

Two DA's with North Auckland freight pass through Henderson, February 1976 (Mike Tollich)

According to wikipedia.org "the North Auckland Line is a major railway line in New Zealand's national rail network."  But Steven Joyce via his state-owned KiwiRail operator wants to close it (among others).  KiwiRail says that freight traffic "needs to increase considerably" to retain it.

In the Bloomberg article referred to in our 2 October post, there was this: “Truck is more expensive than rail already,” Jeff Kauffman, a Sterne Agee & Leach Inc. analyst in New York who follows truck and railroad stocks, said in an interview. “If it was purely a decision based on price, I probably already have moved to rail. But the flip side is, there’s a service difference favoring truckers because of their greater speed."

That is what you expect.  Sending something all the way from one place to another door to door by a truck rather than using rail for a large part of the journey is like sending somebody to the airport by taxi, rather than getting them to catch the bus: the taxi will cost significantly more but it will be quicker.

But what if the taxi was cheaper than the bus?  You'd think there was something drastically wrong with costs and pricing.  And that is exactly the situation that KiwiRail is in.

No-one expects that the so-called "mothballing" of major railway lines by Steven Joyce through KiwiRail will be anything other than permanent closure.  Track and facilities will deteriorate away; "oh dear, it's going to cost too much to restore them."

Here is what the Northland Save Our Rail campaign, presenting a petition to Parliament today, have to say on the issue: website