KEY POINTS:
Extra buses have been pressed into service to replace Auckland trains which faced more disruption than feared yesterday from an ambitious rail construction and maintenance programme.
In an emergency adjustment to a special holiday-period timetable, the Auckland Regional Transport Authority confirmed last night it had approved bus replacements for every second peak-time train until December 31 on the eastern railway line between Otahuhu and Britomart, via Glen Innes and the waterfront.
The authority had previously notified passengers of replacement buses during a complete holiday shutdown of the western railway line until New Year's Eve, to allow track construction work at four sites from Newmarket to Swanson.
That caused confusion enough for some passengers uncertain where to catch buses on their first day back to work from the Christmas break.
Eden-Albert Community Board deputy chairman Phil Chase said there were no clear signs at the Mt Albert railway station yesterday morning to give his daughter any idea of where to catch a bus to her job in Newmarket.
The only signs visible to him advised passengers to contact the transport authority's Maxx call-centre for information, but he said a receptionist there had no details of bus departure points, referring him instead to rail operator Veolia.
Mr Chase said a call to Veolia proved equally frustrating, as a representative told him buses left from a busy road-side location where it was both illegal for vehicles to stop and impossible for pedestrians to get beyond a protective barrier.
But there was more trouble on the eastern line, which has been reduced to one of its duplicate sets of tracks to allow maintenance work in the Purewa tunnel and the reconstruction of a rail bridge across Hobson Bay.
A holiday timetable providing for peak-period services to run every half an hour proved too tight for commuter trains, especially when freight services were added to the mix, meaning extra buses had to be brought in at short notice.
The transport authority confirmed last night that peak-time trains would run every hour today and on Monday, leaving buses to fill in the half-hourly gaps.
One passenger said he and about 100 others were asked to leave their citybound train at Panmure yesterday morning and get aboard buses, which made him half an hour late for work.
The man, who did not want to be named, questioned the transport authority's planning abilities given that the 16 minutes it had allowed for trains using the eastern line's remaining track was two minutes less than provided by its normal timetable for double-track operations.
Given that there were no track "crossovers" north of Pt England, he questioned how his interrupted citybound train would have been able to leave Glen Innes at 8.38am, just a minute after an outbound service was due through the same station.
"Those two trains are timetabled to meet head-on at Glen Innes!" he wrote on the transport authority's Maxx website.
Veolia general manager Nick French said the holiday timetable was theoretically "achievable" except for extra factors such as freight movements along the eastern line and temporary speed limits around the two work sites.
His company had invited extra staff back from holidays to ride on buses to ensure passengers knew where to go and would check the adequacy of signs at stations.
