KEY POINTS:
National rail provider Ontrack said it was embarrassed by ongoing faults in the Auckland railway system which caused chaos for commuters today.
Operations manager Carl Mills said Aucklanders travelling on peak-hour trains tonight were likely to face delays.
A points failure at Newmarket this morning delayed services on the western and southern lines, and was followed by another power failure in the New Lynn area in the afternoon.
"The result has been services banking up at Newmarket and other services needing to be cancelled while we manually operate the points.
"We had hoped to be able to fix the problem relatively quickly, but unfortunately the points received more damage as we sought to get them back into service ."
The faults caused signals to stop working, and crossing barriers to go down even though no trains were going past.
Mr Mills said it had been "one of those days".
"We're conscious that we've had a number of issues on the network in recent weeks. We understand the anxiety it causes when services are held up and we apologise for it."
The Auckland network was "not very resilient" and was undergoing an upgrade, but when it was under pressure it was prone to failures, he said.
- NZPA
