City Rail Link is going to change the way you travel on trains around Auckland.
Check out this video.
At the moment, if you use trains, the last stop into downtown Auckland is at Britomart Transport Centre. Trains stop there and can go no further. If you want to travel on a different line, you have to get off and wait for a train at another platform.
Britomart is the only stop in the central city.
With City Rail Link, we are building two tunnels at Britomart that will go all the way up to the Mt Eden train station. That means you can stay on the train at Britomart and keep going. There will be two new stations that will be handy to other parts of the inner city.
One station will be at Wellesley and Victoria Streets- at the moment, we are calling that Aotea.
Another will be near Karangahape Road with two entrances - one in a side street called Mercury Lane and another at Beresford Square on the other side of Karangahape Road.
The tunnels will be 3.45km long and up to 42 metres deep.
The trains will also be up to nine carriages long which means more people can get a seat. Travel times will improve.
The route for the tunnels will be: From Britomart, to Albert, Vincent and Pitt Streets, and then cross beneath Karangahape Road and the Central Motorway Junction to Symonds Street before rising to join the western line at Eden Terrace where the Mount Eden Station is located.
Big machines are needed to do this work. This is New Zealand’s biggest transport infrastructure project. One is a tunnel boring machine that will have to excavate the tunnels under the ground. It will look like the machine on the right.
It’s a tradition that a tunnel boring machine can’t start work until it has a woman’s name to honour St Barbara, the patron saint of underground workers, as a sign of good luck for the project ahead. We have called the machine after an inspiring New Zealand - the late Dame Whina Cooper who fought for Māori rights and was the inspirational leader of the Māori land march on Parliament in 1975.
Politicians talked about building an underground rail in Auckland for almost 100 years before it was decided to do it!
Now it is happening and construction is due to finish in 2024.
There are brochures you can read and download here.
If you have any questions, let us know.
CRL is calling on all primary school-aged kids from across New Zealand to paint and draw images that will then be fired onto ceramic tiles and used to decorate our new CRL Aotea underground station.
If you’re between the ages of five and 11 and live in New Zealand we need your help! Details in the link below.
