Wednesday, 12 February 2025 will go down in Auckland’s history books as the day the first City Rail Link test train, EMU AM836, was driven through the city’s underground tunnels.
The train was driven by Operational Readiness Lead/Locomotive Engineer Grant Dowie, supported by other members of AOR’s CRL team including CRL Project Scheduler and Controls Marcel Thompson, Train Operations Specialist, CRL Paul James, Driver Trainer Joel O’Dea, CRL Testing and Commissioning Operations Manager Mark Jones, and Director CRL Operations Louise Pengelly.
CEO Martin Kearney congratulated AOR’s CRL project team for reaching this important milestone: “It’s been a huge amount of work to get to this point and I am sure everyone involved is very proud”.
The speed of this first trip was deliberately slow – around 5km/hour, allowing technicians to complete their first round of underground checks and balances relating to tunnel clearance, power supply and signalling.
The 3.45-kilometre-long journey ran south from Waitematā under central Auckland to Maungawhau Station on the Western/North Auckland Line.
With safety being the No.1 priority, exhaustive safety checks were carried out before the train could run on the 25,000 volts of electricity needed to power it.
Testing will continue and when safety approvals are given, speeds will increase to over 40 km/h to check tunnel clearance, then to full speed (up to 70km/h), after which hands-on driver training will get underway.
Check out the YouTube video of the first test train journey by clicking on this link.
