KiwiRail

🎄 During the Christmas rail closure, our team are set to replace 130 metres of ballasted track in the Britomart Tunnel with Low Vibration Track System (LVT) concrete slab track. This type of track needs less ongoing maintenance and also cuts down how far track noise travels, making it ideal for the City Rail Link Tunnel and station approaches. 🚆 The work is crucial to prepare the Britomart Tunnel’s eastern approaches for when the City Rail Link opens and Waitematā becomes a through station. 🛤 To prepare for this work, the team recently gathered for a hands-on demonstration session at the Total Rail Solutions yard in Ramarama. It involved a mock-up installation of practising installing a 12-metre section of concrete slab track and LVT Blocks system. Giovan, KiwiRail Project Engineer for CRL projects, says "It was really helpful for the team to come together, have an open discussion, and get familiar with this new track system. It’s not commonly used across the network, so this was a great chance to understand the challenges and tackle them hands-on". 🤝 This is a great example of the work our teams are doing to prepare the Auckland rail network for more services when the City Rail Link opens, ensuring a more reliable network moving forward

Ever heard of Manapouri Street Station? It’s a station along Jarrod Hodson’s very own 25-metre-long railway that spans his backyard in Ravensbourne, Dunedin! This remarkable piece of history was built entirely by Jarrod and currently features two locomotive fronts—a DC and a DG. He’s gradually building the DG, seen above in the before and after pictures, to its full length of 13.8 meters. His setup even includes his own jigger. Jarrod often welcomes visitors to look around, and the local fire brigade has even used it to train new recruits in a safe, contained railway environment. Thanks, Jarrod, for sharing this incredible piece of KiwiRail history with us. For those interested in learning more, check out the Trainboy Crazy Garden Railway NZ, Facebook page

✨ We were honoured earlier this month to host around 50 members of the public at Wellington Station for an event featuring Sarah Dugdale, one of the consultant archaeologists on the Wellington Station Re-signalling Project. 🏺👩🏫️ Sarah delivered a captivating talk titled "The Archaeology of Wellington Station", in which she described how the team had uncovered many pieces of Wellington’s early rail history, including drainage systems, a weigh station and pieces of New Zealand Railways crockery. They also uncovered the foundations of Wellington's earliest engine shed, which was part of Pipitea Station, the city's first station built in 1874. 👀 You can just make out the engine shed in this historic photo of Thorndon.   🎉 The event formed part of the Wellington Heritage Festival, a volunteer-led, community-sourced festival that celebrates the rich heritage and culture of our region. Thanks to Sarah and the attendees for making it such a wonderful event.   Read more about the Wellington Station Re-signalling Project here: https://lnkd.in/gHGZcqBu

Meet one of our track inspection machines, the EM80, as it travels through the CRL tunnels for the first time!

🎉 Welcome to our KiwiRail Summer Interns!     👋 This week, we welcomed a group of talented engineering students into our teams. As part of their degree requirements, these students are completing their compulsory industry hours, and we are delighted to support them on this journey.     📝 We’ll be providing hands-on learning opportunities, sharing valuable industry insights, and helping  them gain practical experience that will set them up for success.     🧠 We look forward to seeing the impact they’ll make and the skills they’ll develop during their time with us.     #KiwiRail #Internship #EngineeringStudents #FutureEngineers #LearningAndDevelopment 

🤝 Meet Paul Marris, our Assurance and Audit Manager here at KiwiRail. 📝 Paul and his team ensure that our internal audit assessments are carried out correctly and that we meet our regulatory requirements. Right now he's implementing a new auditing programme across the country, and he can also be seen out and about championing rail safety. 🌊 Based on the mighty West Coast, Paul is a South Islander through and through (though he did leave for a few years to work in the mines in Australia). He stepped into his current role earlier this year after a stint serving as the KiwiRail South Island lead for Infrastructure Safety Health and Wellbeing. 🦺 Paul began his journey into the world of health and safety when he was a production supervisor at a cement works. It was there he saw businesses start to prioritise risk awareness to keep staff safe. He then held various roles within the dairy and mining industries. Paul continues to emphasise the importance of health, safety, and wellbeing, believing it's crucial to help people change their safety behaviours so we all get home safe. Paul is also a huge advocate of prioritising your mental health. “Every day in rail is an RUOK day. Mentally, a lot of people suffer in silence and it’s important to speak up,” he says. 🎉 Paul loves to stay active and is an avid cyclist, saying it helps keep him mentally and physically sharp. You can also often find him as his two teenage children’s number-one fan at their various sporting events, alongside his wife. 🧩 Reflecting on his time with KiwiRail, Paul says “the great thing about KiwiRail is the people. You get to meet everyone from all across the country, and it’s awesome to see all the moving parts and business units that come together and make it all work”.

The rail corridor is normally strictly off-limits but last week we made it possible for Pukekohe High School Art students, along with their teacher Catherine Tamihere, to get access at Pukekohe Station so they could paint a mural on a KiwiRail depot building.     The building will become visible to all passengers travelling from Pukekohe when the station reopens in early 2025 with its extended platforms, so we were excited the local students wanted to brighten up the area and leave their mark in their community.     The project was funded by the Franklin Local Board, with support from other generous sponsors including Beautification Trust, Pukekohe Business Association, Eke Panuku Development Auckland and Counties Energy. This has been a great community-led project and one we are proud to have played a part in it.   This section of track was made impassible to trains while the project was underway, and was under constant supervision by a Rail Protection Officer. That meant minimal PPE was required.

This summer David and the crew will be doing the big job of completely replacing 70-year-old track inside the Remutaka Tunnel. At nearly 9 kilometres long it’s deep and dark in there, and the team needs specially designed equipment to lift and shift thousands of sleepers and kilometres of steel rail. They’ve been working on the methodology for the main event and can’t wait to complete this massive project. Meet David.

KiwiRail’s C9 project teams are busy working on the Eastern approaches to Waitematā (Britomart Station), preparing to support more rail traffic at higher speeds and enabling us to install nine-car train lengths on all four platforms in the future. We’re currently on stages 4-6, which include final track and overhead line realignments, as well as signalling improvements. As part of this work, teams are replacing the ballasted track with concrete slab track, which is more resilient. This work involves removing existing ballast, exposing the tunnel base slab, prepping surfaces, and installing low-vibration track blocks alongside specialist equipment to ensure the rail is precisely aligned to design specifications. Finally, teams complete the slab by setting up formwork and pouring the final layer of concrete. These upgrades are all in preparation for Auckland’s City Rail Link Ltd (CRL) and a faster, more connected rail network!

Our train control room north of Wellington, and our cutting-edge sensor system on a slip-prone stretch of rail, were both recognised at the ACE New Zealand (Association of Consulting and Engineering) Awards in October. WSP revolutionised our national train control facility in Upper Hutt with a new room layout inspired by human factors and behavioural science. A co-design approach involving workshops, interviews, and eye tracking techniques was used to create a modern pod layout, replacing the operations centre's old classroom-style setup. The design addresses privacy, noise, and lighting concerns, enhancing operational efficiency and comfort. ACE judges commented on the project's real-life, user-driven design, noting the combining of human factors, science, engineering, and architecture. And following a severe slip in 2021, WSP developed a real-time slope monitoring system for us that won silver at the awards. The system gives us accurate, real-time slope movement data on a 25km-long stretch of Wellington’s rail corridor, meaning it can maintain safe and efficient rail services on one of the country's most slip-prone sections of track. Thank you and congratulations to WSP for our award-winning train control room and slope monitoring system. #ACEAwards #WSP #KiwiRail #traincontrol #UpperHutt #NZrail #awardwinningrail