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A mini-train designed to haul steel into the belly of Auckland's main Harbour Bridge risked falling foul of Government railway regulators if its tracks were much wider.
Officials of the Transport Agency's highways division [formerly Transit NZ] are understood to have been gobsmacked when colleagues from another branch of the new Government bureaucracy queried the legality of the electric train, which was purpose-built for a $45 million bridge-strengthening project.
The division's northern operations manager, Joseph Flanagan, said yesterday he was able to assure the regulators that the train's designers had built it small enough not to need a railway licence to run it inside the bridge's box-girder clip-ons.
Although the train is about 10 metres long and capable of carrying a tonne of steel at a time, it runs on tracks with a gauge of just 480mm - below a threshold of 550mm at which railways must obtain operating licences.
But it is understood an approach last month from Land Transport NZ, which has since merged with Transit into the Transport Agency, came as a shock to the bridge's custodians.
Transport Agency spokesman Bob Nettleton confirmed the approach from the regulators after they read a report in the Herald about the small train, which was built for the project by Pakuranga inventor Dave Giles.
He said that on investigation, the agency was satisfied the invention did not fall within the legal definition of a railway and did not therefore require a licence.
