Commuter Train Banned - WTF

ran 2 red lights

that's the kind of casual incompetence/ignorance that kills hundreds every year in train collisions overseas

Hopefully this will focus the minds of the drivers

I'm fairly sure Auckland commuter trains are controlled from Wellington. I recall all Auckland commuter trains stuck on the track cause there was a power outage in somewhere like Petone.
What I don't understand is Te Huia uses the same locomotives as all the freight trains. They run on the same tracks all the way down to the port and back, so are they running red lights as well?

Reading up on it, they are needing to install a system that automatically slows the train when it approaches a red signal. All I can think is Te Huia can't stop fast enough? Or it is travelling faster than freight trains do, so takes longer to stop? But being substantially lighter I can't see how that is an issue.

I wonder where the "Restore Passenger Rail" protestors are now? The ones that go and glue themselves to motorways to make us all take the train. Headline "SoE Kiwirail can't organise a root in a whore house, or run a scheduled commuter train". Mind you, that comment could drift us into the state of the Cook Straight ferries.

I've been used to a train every 6 minutes. If I was walking to the station and a train was pulling in, I wouldn't bother running, cause by the time I casually strolled up the the platform, another one would be pulling in. That was Greenwich, London. Was basically the same when I was living in Reading, wanting to get into London, but there were more platforms at Reading so further to walk to the one I needed.

And you could set your watch by the trains in Europe. But there are several factors affecting this in NZ. Landscape, almost all of England and Europe are flat to dead flat. NZ is predominantly hilly, oh, and slip prone. That and the population density. You need the population density to pay for it.

On the Fungarei question, it is beyound me why they wont run a train from Huapai. There is an existing station and track. There is HUGE housing development surrounding the station, and the road links into the city are shit. If they can't run a train from Huapai, good luck getting one going from Fungarei (same line isn't it?)

Something else that concerns me greatly is ongoing threats to run trains up the North Shore. They sight the success of the busway and say we need trains. Really? Trains need flat grade. The North shore has ridgelines everywhere with valleys and bays, about the worse possible landscape to lay train tracks on. But for some reason they want to blow another billion on a harbour rail crossing, I think to serve Takapuna. Not sure why they can't use longer buses, like the Aussie road-trains, but for people instead of cattle. And use the billion dollar cost of the rail harbour crossing to pay the bus drivers properly.

When I was a kid growing up on north shore I Remember some of the concrete roads from Milford through takapuna to Devonport and also from highbury down to Birkenhead wharf . Apparently they had trams linking to the ferries prior to the harbour bridge opening . Shame they didn’t keep that network …imagine gliding down lake road at 9 O’clock in the morning down the centre of the cluster that’s there now .