Easing road pressure

Last week I supported the leader of New Zealand First and the Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters when he announced an end to 50 years of neglect of rail transport in Northland.

The almost $95m from the Provincial Growth Fund Kiwirail will spend on long deferred maintenance to the 181 km of track, the 13 tunnels, 950 culverts and 88 bridges that make up the Northland Line will make rail freight a much more attractive option for businesses in Northland to get their products to customers.

Not so long ago rail in Northland was transporting one million tonnes of freight a year but this dropped to 300,000 tonnes by 2008 after Whangarei Port moved to Marsden Point in 2007. Unbelievably, the port project did not include a rail connection with the Northland line.

The continuing lack of maintenance also reduced the freight service Kiwirail has been able to offer and, as a result, the freight carried by the line in 2018 had fallen to 116,000 tonnes.

Yet businesses in Northland generate about 18 million tonnes of freight annually, with 95 per cent moved by road.

As Northland residents we all know how crowded this makes our roads, especially the main road into the region from Auckland. Our dairy products, meat, logs and timber could all be shifted by rail, as they are in the rest of the country.

To make this happen we need to do more than just catch up with 50 years of deferred maintenance. The next step will be to upgrade the tunnels on the Northland line which can’t currently handle modern freight containers.

And the final step will be to construct the rail link between the Northland Line and Marsden Point port. Both these moves would drive a much more significant shift to rail freight and ease the pressure on our roads dramatically.

Neither project has yet been supported by the government but my leader and I will work unceasingly to convince our coalition partners they need to be funded.

The next step in this process will happen with the release of the study that looks at how freight moves in the Upper North Island. This study is being led by Wayne Brown the former Mayor of the Far North.

Their interim report showed how rail in the North had been subject to “managed decline”. In other words the people who funded rail in this country – the politicians – knew exactly what they were doing when rail in our region was starved of funding.

Our funding will begin the long journey back to a rail line that companies will see as their first option for moving freight, moving trucks off the roads and making road journeys safer for all of us.

"Businesses in Northland generate about 18 million tonnes of freight annually, with 95 per cent moved by road"