Brian Rudman: All aboard please, we're tired of waiting

Aucklanders aren't too fussed where their trains are built - 100 years on, they just want a service. Photo / Supplied

Talk about trying to board the train after it leaves the station. For nigh on 100 years, efforts to build a commuter train service in Auckland have been stalled by squabbling politicians, local and national.

Yet now, with the politicians all strapped into their seats and facing the same direction and the lights green, what happens?

The horny-handed workers from the Dunedin Hillside railway workshops have thrown themselves across the tracks and demanded the right to build the trains themselves. Keeping them company are the mayor and councillors of Dunedin, the Labour Party and Berl Economics.

If Auckland's reaction to this kind offer has been rather muted, I ask our Dunedin cousins to forgive us.

It's just that we don't want to risk this exercise stretching out another 100 years. Or even the 18 months to the next general election, when a new minister might, like the present one, delay everything another year or more while he puts his own personal twist on to the scheme.

Even Auckland Regional Council chairman Mike Lee who, I'd wager, is one of the few politicians able to warble a verse of the Red Flag from memory, finds it hard to back his brother workers in this cause.

"We would love maximum New Zealand input to our electric trains," he told me, "but Auckland has been waiting since the 1920s. So while maximum New Zealand input would be ideal, what we really want is electric trains. We don't really care where they've come from, we've waited long enough."

He noted there hadn't been any fuss about Wellington's electric trains being bought from Korea. He could have thrown in KiwiRail's purchase of 20 locomotives from China last September which was heralded in the China Daily as "the largest rail transport deal made by New Zealand in the last 30 years".

Labour's transport spokesman, Darren Hughes, is campaigning for the trains to be built locally. In a March press release he claimed "the last Labour Government highlighted the ability of Woburn (Hutt Valley) and Hillside (Dunedin) to build or assemble rail units as a critical part of our economic stimulus plan if we were re-elected".

Yet they showed no signs of doing this in the nine years they were in office. Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Michael Cullen, who was from Dunedin, stalled the Auckland rail project for several years then belatedly and reluctantly drove it.

Why didn't he decide to build Auckland's new trains in his old stamping grounds when he could?

Berl Economics' "Business case for building rolling stock in New Zealand" is a good read - as far as it goes - to my untutored eye.

As a sucker for the New Zealand-made cause, I'd like to believe that building Auckland's 114 carriages and 13 electric locomotives locally would bolster the GDP and create "an average of 1270 full-time equivalent" jobs "over a period of 45 months".

I'm sure it would bring some of the other economic benefits listed, such as "developing and maintaining skills in New Zealand".

But the sceptic in me whispers that expert reports are produced to support the campaigns of those who pay for them, and need to be handled, shall we say, with care.

Only last weekend, Herald on Sunday reporter Matt Nippert managed to smear egg all over the face of international report writer Deloitte's efforts to boost the upcoming Rugby World Cup.

Deloitte's claimed that more than four billion television viewers in 238 countries watched the last world cup. It was pointed out that the United Nations recognises only 192 nations in the world.

What the Berl report skirts around is whether the local workshops are able to produce this order on time and of the quality specified.

Transport Minister Steven Joyce was surely right when he told the Otago Daily Times KiwiRail had never done anything similar before, and would be up against international companies with a lot of experience.

"It would be a bit like saying we need a fleet of high-end cars, let's go and get our mechanics to build them instead of buying them off Audi or BMW or somebody who does this sort of stuff for a living."

The closest Berl gets to discussing this is when it says KiwiRail could produce trains cheaper than "quality Western suppliers" and at a price "close to" that of Asian suppliers.

"However, the quality and expected life [of Asian trains] could be less than those from Europe and North America, and we suspect from New Zealand."

Now we'd all like to "suspect" that these as yet undesigned and untested Kiwi trains were going to be the best, the cheapest and the most reliable in the world. But after waiting nearly 100 years, haven't we Aucklanders earned the right to a bit of certainty?