Faulty start as Wellington trains return to normal schedule

Commuters at Wellington Railway Station. Photo / Azaria Howell

Wellington’s trains are back and running to schedule – but some commuters still can’t see their service.

Kapiti and Hutt Valley line services are not being live-tracked on screens at the station, or on the Metlink website, due to a technical error.

The latest fault comes after KiwiRail announced last week all Wellington trains would have to operate on a 70km/h speed limit – effectively slicing services in half.

One commuter who had travelled into Wellington this morning sais her commute was “not too bad today”.

She said the previous few days of travel had been “worse than I could have imagined”.

“Just waiting at the station for ages, packed into the carriages like sardines...it was terrible.”

However, with the speed limit lifted, and schedule back to normal she said this morning’s commute had been easy with just a couple of people at the last stop who hadn’t managed to get a seat on the train.

The chaos was due to a fault with the only specialist track evaluation car, which measures tracks across the country so trains can operate safely, out of service.

This meant the tracks on Wellington’s Kāpiti line could not be inspected by April 30 to remain compliant and avoid speed restrictions – but KiwiRail chief executive Peter Reidy also admitted there was a scheduling issue with staff which contributed to the fault.

The tracks on the Kāpiti line weren’t scheduled to be assessed until May anyway - outside of the compliance period and irrespective of the broken evaluation car.

Thousands of passengers were affected by the error, and today KiwiRail officials will front a select committee to answer questions from the Government, which has launched a rapid review into KiwiRail.

The state-owned organisation has also ordered its own external review.

Reidy has previously said there had been obvious system failures within the enterprise and changes will be made.

“When leaders learned of the issue last week, we immediately launched a recovery programme to minimise what we recognise is an unacceptable level of disruption for Wellington commuters.”