Tracking the changes

KiwiRail has agreed to present a proposal to Hamilton City within weeks on a trial daily passenger service to and from Auckland...

"We are refining a proposal to run a service using the Silver Fern railcars between Hamilton and Auckland on a trial basis," spokesman Kevin Ramshaw said last night.

His comment followed discussions KiwiRail chief executive Jim Quinn and his passenger services general manager Ross Hayward held in Hamilton yesterday with city representatives.

City transport committee chairman David Macpherson said KiwiRail had offered to work on a proposal over the next couple of weeks to present various cost and timing possibilities to his council, which had allocated $250,000 in its budget towards a rail service.

He said the proposal would be based on two return services daily which, combined with the long-distance Overlander, would offer Waikato residents three trains a day to Auckland.

Mr Macpherson said that if KiwiRail could produce a scheme the council could afford, the trial could begin late this year or early in 2010, with trains possibly stopping at Huntly, Te Kauwhata, and Papatoetoe (for a bus connection to Auckland Airport) en route to Britomart or Newmarket.

Although the Environment Waikato regional council failed to include a rail service in its list of three-yearly funding applications to the Transport Agency, 85 per cent of about 700 Hamilton residents told a city-sponsored survey they believed it would be a good idea and 43 per cent expected to use it.

Source: www.nzherald.co.nz