It’s a bad week to be a fan of trains and trams. This week the government announced it’s plan for not 1 but 2 trams in Auckland and the NZ Super Fund said it’s keen to be part of the development. So proponents of the plan would have been hoping for positive news about the place of rolling stock in public transport. But they didn’t get it. Instead in a piece of negative karma we heard about trains failing and failing in the worst way.

Today a train stopped dead in it’s tracks. It’s described as a train crew matter and witnesses describe the train just stopping and the driver just hopping out and walking away. Goodness knows why but the worst thing was where it stopped. Smack bang in the middle of a busy arterial route intersection. So not only did we get stranded train passengers but also irate motorists.

Don’t even start me about the continuing hazard of level rail crossings in the Auckland rail network. To not separate the tracks from roads was a cheap stopgap decision made years ago and never rectified. It’s a major hazard and a risk to life, but who cares. No-one it seems. But the worst incident where trains let down the public transport team was the derailment of a train in a tunnel at Auckland’s central underground station. Derailments shouldn’t happen but they do but the worst failure was the train operators failure to deal with it.

The location of the derailment was in the very heart of system and awkwardly it was in a tunnel. That meant a delay of days to fix the problem. Why? They didn’t have the gear to get the train back on the tracks and out of the tunnel. They had to fly the jacks in from Wellington. Now what the hell was that about. If you’re running a train system surely you prepare for the rare moments when things go wrong. If you’ve got a system that has tunnels then surely you must prepare for any possibility that things may go wrong. Why does Wellington have jacks that work in tunnels but Auckland doesn’t? It’s a cut price, short sighted planning failure.

To add insult to injury train haters gloated over the fact that this 9.30am train had only 33 people on it. Yep the trains did public transport no favours this week. The real problems with the trains are not the trains or the tracks themselves but the muppet's who run them. AT on numerous occasions including the Rugby World Cup have shown they have no idea.
Despite AT's best efforts the Auckland trains have been a surprising success story over the past 10 years. Passenger numbers have far exceeded expectations. They even forced a National Government to bring forward the plans to complete the system with a central city tunnel.

But despite this success there are a sizeable number of people who think they’re a waste of space. They’re running a concerted campaign to prevent any more construction. They’ve even stooped to accusations that train supporters want to force you out of your car. Which is a wild exaggeration. They’re actually just wanting more choice so that those who choose to use a car have more road to use. Trains and trams have a 200 year history of being great public transport all around the world. Surely we can employ someone who actually knows how to run them properly.