Future of Taieri Gorge rail corridor

The train arrives at Deep Stream to collect walkers. PHOTO: PETER DOWDEN
The train arrives at Deep Stream to collect walkers. PHOTO: PETER DOWDEN
The Taieri Gorge Railway needs to be fundamentally rethought, Andrew Simms writes.

The week before last, the DCC released a media statement regarding the future of the Taieri Gorge Railway. This included the report provided to councillors by DCC staff on the future of Dunedin Railways Ltd.

Unfortunately the report is heavily redacted, apparently for "commercial reasons". This prevents the ratepayers of Dunedin from participating in an informed debate about the future of Dunedin Railways.

Specifically, the expert engineering report commissioned by the DCC into the condition of the aged rail infrastructure and the cost of making that infrastructure safe again has been completely redacted. This is the crucial piece of information that the Dunedin media and community needs to form an educated view on the future of the railway, which is probably why it has been redacted.

The report on the future of Dunedin Railways is also completely devoid of an economic business case for the expenditure of tens of millions of unbudgeted ratepayers’ money, rumoured to be as much as $25 million, on restoring the Taieri Gorge rail infrastructure. The expenditure of this ratepayers’ money on a perpetually loss-making venture equates to hard-working Dunedin ratepayers being asked to subsidise cruise ship passengers to go for a train ride.

Those same ratepayers might be struggling to make ends meet and may not be able to afford to take their own family on the train, yet they will be subsidising visitors to do so. This is a social injustice.

Dunedin Railways has, over decades, run the Taieri Gorge assets into the ground. The beautiful historic carriages are no longer used because there is no revenue to maintain them or make them safe. The train stopped going to Middlemarch years ago because there is no revenue to maintain that part of the line. The train has now stopped going to Pukerangi and terminates at Hindon because there is no revenue to perform essential repairs on that part of the line, the best part of the trip.

For years, the true performance of Dunedin Railways has been hidden behind undisclosed deferred maintenance amounting to tens of millions of dollars, which is why we find ourselves as a community where we are today.

In fairness to Dunedin Railways, there could never be enough revenue generated by an infrequent tourist train to maintain historic carriages and maintain 42km of railway built in difficult terrain more than 140 years ago. This is not a matter of poor management — the business model simply doesn’t work. Not without the ratepayers of Dunedin being prepared to tip in millions and millions, forever.

There is an alternative which must be considered by the DCC, by our elected members and by the ratepaying community.

We could retain the train, upgrade the historic carriages and run the train on KiwiRail maintained lines to Waitati and through to the Victorian quarter of Oamaru. In particular, the Victorian trip to Oamaru always sells out, and crucially it operates on the main trunk line, which Dunedin Railways do not need to maintain.

We could transform the Taieri Gorge rail corridor into a world class extension of the Central Otago rail trail, bringing tens of thousands of low-impact visitors through to the Taieri and then on to Dunedin via the already approved Tunnel Trail.

We have all seen the transformation of Clyde resulting from cycle tourism. New shops, new restaurants, new accommodation and numerous new support businesses, all fuelled by cycle visitors. Cycle tourism is now second only to skiing in respect to economic importance to the Central Otago and Queenstown Lakes district. Dunedin is out of the loop and is missing out.

In doing so, we could create an unsurpassed, low-impact, low-cost, walking, cycling and recreational amenity for the people of Dunedin as well as for visitors.

E-bikes have transformed the accessibility of cycle trails to almost everyone. The transformation would open up the magnificent Taieri Gorge as a low-cost amenity for everyone in Dunedin, as well as attracting tens of thousands of visitors. The amenity value to the ratepayers of Dunedin cannot be ignored.

The balance of the DCC report into Dunedin Railways, which talks about economic sustainability, increased access to the Taieri Gorge, environmental sustainability and contributing to the carbon-zero goals of Dunedin City, reads more like an argument to create a cycle trail than an argument to retain the railway.

The economic, business and environmental case for converting the Taieri Gorge rail corridor into a world-class cycle trail must be laid down next the business case for retaining the railway. Then and only then can the whole community make an informed choice.

The ratepayers of Dunedin and the media should be howling for the heavily redacted parts of the Dunedin Railways report to be released. We are being deliberately kept in the dark.

— Andrew Simms is an elected member of the Mosgiel Taieri Community Board, but these views are his own.