Auckland’s new central city rail stations were the ground for a recent series of live emergency training exercises to test a coordinated multi-agency response.

The City Rail Link (CRL) is New Zealand’s first underground train system. It is touted as the country’s largest and most complex infrastructure project which, once complete, will transform how people get around the Auckland CBD.

The largest of the new ‘mid-town’ stations at Te Waihorotiu, or Aotea, has been built to accommodate up to 45,000 people per hour. There will be upwards of 14 trains per hour heading into the CBD, bringing a lot more people into the area.

Three live training exercises were carried out over a series of days as part of an ongoing safety review, simulating emergency responses to different risks at the City Rail Link stations and in the tunnel – a fire on the platform, a derailment in the tunnel and an armed intruder hostage situation at the live construction site.

Inspector Jason Homan is the Police CRL Project Lead, working with City Rail Link, Auckland Transport, Link Alliance, Kiwi One Rail, FENZ and Hato Hone St Johns on this $5.4 billion project.

“The purpose of the exercises was to test our police processes and response to attending an incident at CRL and working with our partners to ensure we are all in sync with effective coordination of our plans and communication," says Jason.

“This has also served to satisfy CRL, Link Alliance and Kiwi One Rail that effective plans are in place, and they can now move on to the next phase of testing trains.”

The multi-billion-dollar project will soon move into a new phase of live testing of trains through the tunnels, alongside the complex construction sites where the new stations are being built. Much of the construction should wrap up at the start of November. The CRL is scheduled to be open to the public in early 2026.

The drills proved invaluable for all agencies involved.

“There were some learnings adopted for our process but overall it was very beneficial to be training with our partners and having staff down in the CRL, and it will make our process around attending in the future a lot more robust and safer for all,” says Jason.

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