National road freight association, Ia Ara Aotearoa Transporting New Zealand, says the upcoming decision about replacement Cook Strait ferries will provide welcome certainty for the freight sector. They go on to say that it will make State Highway One secure for freight. 

However, there is still great uncertainty about the New Zealand Main Trunk Railway which the government decision could seriously affect. We agree with Transporting New Zealand that there needs to be a safe and resilient connection between the islands but we do take exception to the assertion that, “The iReX project would have also bucked the international trend away from rail enabled ferries”. 

This is a disingenuous and misleading statement as those rail enabled ferries that have gone have usually been replaced with expensive rail bridges or tunnels or a combination of the two, which is impractical in New Zealand due to the geography of Cook Strait, and there are many other rail ferries in use throughout the world.

TRAC national coordinator Niall Robertson says, “KiwiRail currently have 23% of the market share of the Cook Strait freight, with the lion’s share of that on the one rail enabled ferry. This would have increased with the iReX programme creating more rail capacity” Robertson adds that rail has a lot of upsides beyond the Cook Strait, such as creating safer roads, less congestion, less road damage, less CO2 production and less particulate matter production, but road only options exacerbates all of these major challenges! The large NZ logistic firm, Mainfreight have stated that they would produce 5700 more truck journeys per year without rail enabled ferries.

TRAC certainly did not support the total cancellation of the iReX deal for two large high productivity, low emissions modern ships at a great price without a plan B, and know that KiwiRail were blindsided by world supply chain problems, new seismic and climate change legislation and government and port decisions about the location of the terminal in Wellington.

TRAC chair,Guy Wellwood says, “There needed to be a pause, for sure, and other on shore facilities needed to be looked at, especially in Wellington, but they still should have included the new iReX ships. However, the government did not seem to understand the importance of that, nor the very poor options available at that time before they made a foolish and impulsive decision”.

Robertson adds that it has taken a year of uncertainty and the final decision will likely be very sub-optimal if there is no ability to bring more rail enabled ferries to the Cook Strait as soon as possible

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