KiwiRail is investigating a series of failures that resulted in a specialist track machine being unable to assess the Wellington rail network in time – causing major disruption for commuters across the city.

KiwiRail Chief Executive Peter Reidy says a combination of factors led to the Wellington disruption, including a mechanical fault with the Track Evaluation Car and scheduling problems.

“Again, we apologise to the people of the Wellington region, and we are working as quickly as possible to fix this situation.

“When leaders learned of the issue last week, we immediately launched a recovery programme to minimise what we recognise is an unacceptable level of disruption for Wellington commuters. Urgent priority was given to repairing our Track Evaluation Car (TEC) and getting it down from Auckland.

“We expect it to complete work on the Kāpiti Line tonight (2 May), allowing the blanket speed restriction to be lifted and for commuter services to return to normal on Thursday (4 May) morning.

“I do want to thank my team, whose hard work over recent days has managed to reduce the disruption in Wellington from a worst-case scenario of lasting for weeks to a matter of days.”

“We take full responsibility for what has happened. We are commissioning an external review to understand how we ended up in this situation and ensure that it is never repeated.”

KiwiRail’s and the separate Government review, announced yesterday, will look into this in detail. However, we currently understand:

• The Track Evaluation Car (TEC) needed repair work for it to operate, which was scheduled in early May. This was after the compliance period ended for the Kāpiti Line on 30 April.
• TEC’s operating schedule, going back at least to mid-March, had it scheduled to assess the Wellington metro network in May - also outside of the Kāpiti Line compliance period. The fact that the implications of this were not recognised in March appears to be a critical systems failure, which will be a focus of our review.
• The issue with the TEC not being available to assess the Kāpiti Line within the compliance period was only raised with KiwiRail’s senior managers on Wednesday evening (26 April).
• After our engineers looked at options to stay within our safe operating licence (imposing a 70km/h speed restriction), we contacted Metlink/Transdev Wellington on Thursday (27 April) about the situation.

Mr Reidy says there are a number of elements that need to be aligned to ensure effective scheduling of our TEC - including maintenance, operations and rostering.

“The TEC has worked in Wellington three times a year for decades without issue but a combination of a mechanical fault and maintenance/operational schedule issues has resulted in major disruptions to passengers.

“There have been obvious system failures within KiwiRail and we will be making changes.”

KiwiRail has gone to market for a replacement TEC, given the current one is 41 years old, and expect to enter a contract later this year. The new TEC will require less maintenance, have less downtime, and will therefore achieve higher productivity rates. Given this, KiwiRail has concluded one new TEC will be able to meet work requirements on rail lines across New Zealand - allied with good schedule management.

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