KEY POINTS:
The Government will be subsidising an Australian-owned company if it decides to invest $60 million a year in the rail network, says the road transport industry lobby group.
Rail operator Toll NZ has spoken for the first time about how much it thinks the Government needs to invest annually in the rail network to ensure it will survive.
"A $60 million annual government investment in rail will achieve a significantly improved national rail network and infrastructure," chief executive David Jackson said last week.
Road Transport Forum chief executive Tony Friedlander said he did not know how that figure had been calculated, but if the Government was to invest any money in the rail network it would need to be in a position to closely monitor Toll NZ's finances.
"You can't simply provide Government money as a subsidy to a company for them to effectively be ripping the money out of New Zealand."
Toll NZ has a monopoly on freight trains and it also owns trucks and Cook Strait ferries.
"New Zealand companies need to know they can access rail services with the same standard of service and same prices that Toll provides to their own company," Friedlander said.
Road transport operators would prefer to have open access to rail with more than one freight operator. If they couldn't get that they wanted transparency.
That transparency would be difficult as Toll NZ, the former Tranz Rail, is set to become a wholly owned subsidiary of Toll Holdings of Australia this year.
Access fees paid by freight and passenger rail operators are supposed to fund the rail network after the $200 million the Government has already pledged is spent.
The system is not acceptable to Toll even though it signed up to it, and talks about a long-term deal have been protracted.
There is speculation in the transport industry that talks on a new agreement have the Government putting in funding of as much as $500 million.
Jackson called for a new approach to policy that looked at the entire transport system and did not trade one mode off against another when making decisions.
He also said there was a push to introduce 50-tonne trucks to New Zealand. The introduction of "road trains", common in many Australian states, is seen as a threat to rail.
Friedlander said there had been talks with the Government about increasing the weight trucks could carry from the current 44-tonne limit.
But he said that was not a move to road trains. In Australia B-double road trains, a cab carrying two trailers, can carry 62 tonnes and B-triples, towing three trailers also exist.
New Zealand has B-trains, a cab carrying two trailers, but they are shorter than Australia's B-doubles and the permitted weight is lower.
"This is increasing the payload. There is no increase in the size of trucks," Friedlander said.
Large road trains carry up to 200 tonnes in Australia but most are between 80 and 120 tonnes. They are banned in some states.
Since the 1980s, 337km of rail track has been closed and removed in New Zealand and 79km has been closed with track remaining.
- NZPA
