Stop-go slog for city's workers

A signals failure hampered hundreds of Auckland rail commuters yesterday morning - and some faced more hardship on their way home along the western line.

About a dozen train services were delayed, both on the western and southern lines, after an electrical fault hit an elderly signals box at the Newmarket railway junction just after 8am.

One passenger who waited almost 30 minutes for a train to turn up at New Lynn then faced an hour-long trip to Britomart after services backed up from Newmarket.

The trip went well until his train passed Mt Eden, but progress was delayed for several minutes every few hundred metres from there, including in the Britomart tunnel.

Passengers began standing up with their bags, pleased finally to be reaching journey's end, only to face one last hold-up.

Connex rail company spokeswoman Tessa Marjoram said it was the first major problem on the Auckland network for about six weeks - except when a rugby fan made several hundred people late for the Lions v Auckland game by pushing an emergency button.

She said the electrical fault was fixed by 10am, although a more minor intermittent points signal failure which struck yesterday morning between Henderson and Swanson re-emerged in the afternoon. That was not related to the Newmarket fault but meant slower trips at the western end of the line.

Because the reason for the Newmarket failure was not known at first, train staff had no useful information to give to passengers.

A regular rail commuter who took a car for a change yesterday morning from west of Waitakere said heavy traffic on the Northwestern Motorway made her journey 25 minutes longer than her normal hour-long train trip.

"I had to apologise for being late, saying it was because I had driven to work - people were laughing because it was so ironic."

A spokesman for the track-owning Railways Corporation, Kevin Ramshaw, said his organisation and the Auckland Regional Transport Authority were considering replacing the old signals box.