Almost nine years after the first jackhammers and spades dug into rock and dirt, heavy construction for New Zealand’s largest transport infrastructure project, Auckland’s City Rail Link, is nearly over.
The City Rail Link (CRL) project team has made the switch to the final phase of work – testing and commissioning – which has begun to gather momentum.
‘While there is still complex and challenging work ahead, the finish line is clearly in sight for a project that is a win-win for Auckland and for New Zealand, too’, says CRL Limited’s Chief Executive, Patrick Brockie.
‘Certainly, Auckland rail passengers will benefit when a world-class CRL opens in 2026, but the bar we have set higher for innovation, job skills, worker health and safety, protecting the environment, and our partnership with Māori are legacies that will endure for generations.’
Despite CRL’s length – 3.45 kilometres below Auckland CBD – the scope, complexities and challenges underpinning its construction, together with the sweeping benefits it will bring to a wider city, are enormous.
‘Make no mistake; in 2026, CRL will be the catalyst for rail changes on the largest scale – changes with as profound an impact on the way people get around their city as the Auckland Harbour Bridge delivered back in 1959,’ says Brockie.
‘Back in the 1950s, the harbour bridge was the missing link that transformed Auckland’s roads and now, 65 years later, CRL is the missing link unblocking the full potential of the city’s rail network.’
Auckland’s rail network saw around 22 million passenger trips at its peak in 2019. Transport planners predict that number will ramp up significantly when a completed CRL allows more frequent, faster and more reliable train journeys, doubling the number of people living within 30 minutes of Auckland’s city centre, with journey times cut and easier connections by train to more places.
CRL is ambitious and visionary. Construction of the twin rail tunnels connect the current dead-end terminus, Waitematā Station (Britomart), with a redeveloped Maungawhau Station in Mount Eden on the Western Line – a short rail journey up to 44 metres below busy streets that will improve rail’s capacity and efficiency. The project includes two new central city underground stations: Karanga-a-Hape will become Aotearoa New Zealand’s deepest station at 33 metres below city streets, and Te Waihorotiu, in the heart of the city centre, will become the country’s busiest.
The ambition and the vision are not new. Putting Auckland rail underground was first suggested around 100 years ago. Decades of missed opportunities at national and local government levels, usually in favour of building motorways across Auckland’s narrow geographic sliver of an isthmus, were put aside when Auckland Council and its transport arm, Auckland Transport, began CRL’s initial construction in 2016. The government stepped in as a joint funder of the project with Auckland Council. The two organisations established City Rail Link Limited, a Crown entity with an independent chair and board, to deliver the project.
CRL is a $5.493-billion project. Since City Rail Link Limited was established in 2017, it has undergone two cost reviews – each of about $1 billion dollars. They reflected a rigorous and independent review of the project’s original cost; changes to the project’s scope to build for longer, nine-car trains and CRL-related improvements to stations on the wider network; and the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on lost hours of work, and the project’s domestic and international supply chain.
Six major contracts were signed to deliver the project and the construction of the CRL tunnels, using both cut‑and‑cover trenching and a tunnel-boring machine (TBM).
The first two contracts allowed initial works to start in downtown Auckland. Contractors Soletanche Bachy International and Downer NZ built the tunnels under Waitematā Station, and the city’s heritage-listed Chief Post Office (CPO) building. Downer NZ and McConnell Dowell delivered an adjoining 350 metres of trenching and tunnelling along Albert Street to Te Waihorotiu Station.
The largest contract, C3, is being delivered by the Link Alliance, which includes City Rail Link Limited, and six New Zealand and international design and construction companies: VINCI Construction Grands Projets, Downer NZ, Soletanche Bachy International, WSP, AECOM and Tonkin + Taylor. Link Alliance was formed to bore the remaining sections of tunnel, design and construct Te Waihorotiu and Karanga-a-Hape stations, and redevelop a third – Maungawhau (previously Mount Eden Station), where CRL connects with Auckland’s Western Line – and also lead the installation of the many systems needed to operate a completed CRL safely.
Excluding those employed on CRL-related work off site, Link Alliance employed, at peak construction, more than 2000 people, representing 65 nationalities. More than 12,000 people – staff and subcontractors – have been inducted onto its sites, completing in excess of 20 million hours of work, and still counting.
Underpinning Link Alliance’s program of work was its Herrenknecht AG–built TBM. Following mining tradition, the TBM was named after a prominent woman – a nationwide search for an appropriate name landed on the Māori lands and social welfare champion, Dame Whina Cooper. In two separate drives, Dame Whina Cooper excavated the twin tunnels from Maungawhau to Te Waihorotiu. Not even pandemic lockdowns could stop progress – a skeleton crew kept Dame Whina Cooper and its 7.15-metre-wide cutterhead moving forward slowly to prevent the earth from settling and trapping the TBM below ground.
Link Alliance Project Director Francois Dudouit has worked on several large tunnelling and rail projects, but CRL is his first delivered by an alliance.
‘With the partners sitting in the room at the same time, the alliance structure has provided essential scaffolding to deliver significant benefits, particularly for a complex and challenging project like CRL,’ he says. ‘Its value was demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic, where we had the flexibility to reset programs of work and change hours of work, enabling us to quickly regain construction momentum after the lockdowns.
‘Our first objective has always been health and safety – for our team during construction, our neighbours and for CRL’s future passengers. We are also aware of the quality, value and legacy of our work – what we want to see for Auckland once we have finished our work and departed.’
Both Dudouit and Brockie agree on CRL’s commitment to being an exemplar project on many fronts.
‘One objective,’ they say, ‘is to leave Auckland, when our work is done, a better place than it was when we started – the other is that we will set new benchmarks for others in the infrastructure industry to follow.’
Health and safety
Five principles guide CRL’s health and safety strategy at toolbox and safety meetings. The first, ‘Mahia te mahi, hei painga hei oranga mo tātou katoa’, means ‘to do the work for the good of everyone’. The remaining four are drawn from the alliance charter: ‘hui ē tāiki ē, pono tauutuutu, aroha tauutuutu, marohi te tū’ (‘we are one team, we are accountable, we care, we inspire’).
Safety requirements evolve proactively, staying in front of risk management as the project’s stages have shifted from demolition, utilities upgrades, civil works, tunnelling, working under mining regulations, constructing buildings and streetscapes, to fitting the project out with architectural and rail systems, multiple energisations in the stations and tunnels, and testing and commissioning.
With the aim of keeping everyone on site safe and getting workers home safely to family and friends at the end of a shift, initiatives range from the basics – from insisting that hard-hats and other personal protective gear are worn at all times – to strict COVID-19 guidelines to keep sites open, and training exercises with emergency services that reflect CRL’s march towards testing trains before the end of 2025.
City Rail Link Limited and Link Alliance believe strong leadership, and embedding the right structures and processes, has paid off. With more than 20 million work hours recorded, the C3 contract reports only two serious accidents requiring stays in hospital.
Mana whenua partnership
Before turning the first sod, the project established a groundbreaking relationship with Māori in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
Eight iwi (tribes) are represented on City Rail Link Limited’s Mana Whenua Forum. The forum meets monthly, and its proactive collaboration is bringing many rewards to CRL’s design, environment and sustainability goals, procurement policies, and worker support and wellbeing, including the following:
CRL made an early mark on the world stage in 2019 ahead of 70 other countries when judges at an international architectural competition recognised the project’s ‘powerful expressions’ of Indigenous cultural identity in its station designs.
With forum support, the project has awarded $135 million in contracts to Māori and Pasifika businesses – seven per cent of Link Alliance’s total spend.
Forty-three young Māori and Pasifika graduated from an onsite program opening employment opportunities, boosting the pool of qualified workers for the wider industry and a further 66 university summer interns.
The forum gifted the names of the four CRL stations, which better reflect the cultural and historical ties of their locations.
The forum supported vaccination initiatives for workers and families during the COVID-19 pandemic, and leads tikanga at onsite events – marking beginnings, endings and other milestones.
Innovation
Auckland’s heritage-listed CPO was at the centre of work to set new boundaries for the way that complicated construction is completed successfully.
The building is the main entrance to the Waitematā Station. In an operation on a scale and complexity not seen in this country before, 14,000 tonnes of CPO concrete and masonry had to be shifted onto temporary foundations, without so much as a crack, to build the CRL tunnels in the basement.
Two years of planning was supported by technical innovation that included the design of a low-headroom hydrofraise (reverse-circulation rig) able to work in the cramped basement, and 50-millimetre, high-strength steel‑reinforcing bars required for new foundations manufactured in New Zealand for the first time.
The CPO is now supported securely on new foundations that include diaphragm walls sunk 20 metres below ground, new foundation columns, crossbeams and the tunnel boxes themselves.
‘Shifting the CPO reflects a bold and extraordinary “can do” attitude that gives the country’s wider infrastructure industry confidence to tackle complex challenges,’ Brockie says. (The C3 contract was signed in the CPO while it was suspended on temporary supports.)
Sustainability and environment
CRL is targeting zero waste and resource efficiency with the Infrastructure Sustainability Council verifying performance on the main contracts. On the C3 contract:
Ninety-five per cent of construction and demolition waste has been diverted from landfill.
A 10 per cent reduction in embodied carbon emissions has been achieved.
More than a 20 per cent reduction has been achieved in operational carbon energy emissions over the 100-year life of the stations and tunnels, which will save a projected 296 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per annum.
Materials stripped out of commercial buildings demolished for the CRL stations were reused both in New Zealand and to help cyclone-ravaged Tonga rebuild, and one building was shipped to Niue.
Another environmental dividend will come, too, when CRL opens and better train reliability will encourage people to leave their cars at home, reducing carbon emissions and easing pressure on roads for those who need to use them.
Brockie acknowledges, however, that along with the gains, CRL has had to manage many challenges.
‘Aside from the COVID-19 pandemic and its lockdowns, the biggest one is building a huge project of this size in the bustling heart of the country’s largest city – something on this scale has never been done here before,’ he says.
Impacts caused by the pandemic, the weather, and other organisations taking advantage of CRL work for their own benefit all contributed to criticism being levelled at the project by commercial neighbours, who were concerned that their incomes were adversely affected by construction delay.
‘Importantly, it was critical to keep communication channels open so our neighbours could plan ahead for our work, and to access the business and limited financial support we could give through Link Alliance’s Small Business Support Programme,’ Brockie says. ‘In early 2021, CRL, together with TSA Advisory, began administering the $12-million Targeted Hardship Fund established by CRL’s sponsors, the government and Auckland Council, to support those small businesses materially impacted financially by the works.’
With the long-term construction constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic shrugged off, CRL is working at pace to complete the build.
In the past few months, both sets of tracks were laid in the twin tunnels and the three new stations have all been energised – 22,000 volts of permanent power surging through the stations gives CRL the electricity resilience and independence to plan ahead for another critical milestone – testing trains and the stations’ facilities.
One more important power-up remains. Traction power (which provides energy to the trains) has already been connected at either end of the CRL project, and will be commissioned before testing trains can begin.
Reaching the finish line, however, is work neither City Rail Link Limited nor Link Alliance can do on their own.
With heavy engineering all but complete, the project’s focus now is working collaboratively with the combined expertise of Auckland Transport and KiwiRail on the installation and commissioning of systems to ensure CRL merges successfully, and safely, into Auckland’s wider rail network.
‘Lessons learnt from overseas tell us that the risks, challenges, and complexities around testing and commissioning stay with us as we progress further, but together we are ticking off milestone after milestone,’ Brockie says.
Mid year, CRL’s ‘traffic lights’ – the signalling system for trains – were successfully integrated into the wider network. Signalling is but one component of a massive testing and commissioning program that will take months to complete. The list is long: there are 31 different test plans to complete successfully before CRL is safe to make its transport impact on Auckland in 2026.
Those plans also cover track work, overhead powerlines, lighting, station lifts and escalators – New Zealand’s longest escalator is being installed at Karanga-a-Hape Station – fire detection and suppression systems, ventilation, security cameras, communications, and station ticket machines and gates.
Drivers are the first of scores of train and station staff being trained to use CRL ahead of the first test runs of trains under controlled conditions commencing. Test trains will also give CRL’s operators, and the city’s emergency services, the opportunity to test and evaluate their responses to a wide range of emergency scenarios below ground – New Zealand has never built an underground railway before, so this is another new dimension that CRL will bring to Auckland.
‘All those systems will have to be tested and tested again to make sure they mesh completely with the rest of Auckland’s rail network to do the job they are designed for – keeping everyone safe,’ Brockie says.
It does not stop there. The countdown to practical completion and the end of physical works is well underway. Nevertheless, maximising CRL’s opportunities demands programs of work on a huge scale across all 200-plus kilometres of the city’s rail network.
The aging network is getting a modern makeover from top to bottom and everything in between – upgrades, renewals, improvements and extensions, and new trains – to ensure it will be up to the task of operating more trains at faster speeds when CRL opens in 2026.
Rejuvenation, however, is not confined to rail. CRL and a modern rail network will encourage growth in jobs, and promote commercial and residential development.
Auckland Council and Auckland Transport are leading streetscape upgrades and improving bus connections to maximise the benefits CRL, and the increased number of passengers that the two new stations, will bring to the city centre.
The project, too, has an extensive program of urban realm works around the stations. A pedestrian square – Te Komititanga (meaning ‘to mix’ or ‘merge’) – replaces a busy street in front of the CPO and has quickly become a focal point downtown for Aucklanders.
A completed CRL is projected to deliver total economic benefits – including increased productivity, travel gains and a cleaner, healthier environment – of $11.928 billion.
‘CRL will do so much for Aucklanders and their city, and it is already demonstrating the very best in outstanding teamwork, innovation and design, and those are values to be shared and built on right across New Zealand,’ Brockie says. ‘The job’s not done yet, but already there is much to be proud of.’