Deborah Hill Cone: Trapped on the train to nowhere

I'm a trainspotter. I have become a regular at Motat because my daughter is mad keen on locomotives.

She used to say, "When I grow up I want to be a space train driver and go to the moon and back", but now she is older she is more pragmatic: she just wants to be a normal train driver.

I don't have the heart to tell her even driving normal trains is not exactly a growth industry. Maybe when she is older she will watch that episode of Sex and the City where Carrie and Samantha take the train from New York to LA and arrive at the station glamorously attired in the manner of old Hollywood, fancying themselves in the golden age of travel, all bellboys and monogrammed cases.

Instead, their cabin is made of moulded plastic, the dining car is full of rednecks and Samantha develops a large zit and can't even flirt with the Midwest hicks.

I wonder if Michael Cullen had the same kind of glamorous travel fantasies when he bought KiwiRail for $690 million odd in 2008? The weird thing is that since he bought it for this astronomical sum we have heard next to nothing about its performance and how much more of our money is going to be poured into its ageing tracks.

We have our own train set but as owners we don't really play with it. Like my daughter, we have very short attention spans.

A Google News search on KiwiRail turns up three pages of gripes about train schedules but not a lot else. "Rail passengers sick of walking" , "Wellington trains repaired but commuters delayed", "Sevens fans outraged at train failure", "Train goes wrong way". But I could not find anything else that recognised that, as taxpayers, we own the thing.

KiwiRail's 2009 annual report is a very downbeat document. "You only have to think about what transport in New Zealand would be like without rail to understand its contribution to the economy.

Imagine 2000 more trucks a day on the roads between Auckland and Tauranga." Persuasive. A third of the country's exports travel by rail, but freight was down by 13 per cent in the 2009 financial year and KiwiRail lost $167 million. How long is the taxpayer going to fund this?

Not sure, says the fat controller, Jim Bolger. We are apparently still waiting for some sort of plan. "The board expects that it will provide to the Government during the current financial year a long-term plan to support further investment being made in the business. The plan will identify a case to enable the business to deliver future benefits by way of specific investment strategies and initiatives."

New chief executive Jim Quinn, who joined KiwiRail less than a year ago, says rail is not a sunset industry and the Chinese commitment to rail is inspiring. Yes, but we're not China. "Significant progress has been made but there remains a substantial amount of work to be done to determine the optimal structure and funding arrangements."

My daughter could translate this. Everyone loves trains but they don't make any money and you are going to have to keep paying for this toy.

dhc@deborahhillcone.com