Thursday, June 19, 2008

CBD Rail Routes

Old picture of possible rail routes for the Wellington CBD (hence some stray cosmic rays have corrupted the middle of it).

A1 - Under the station, down Featherston St to a station sitting in the middle between Willis St and Boulcott St. Ideally a full terminus Britomart style for the EMUs and for loco-hauled services such as the Wairarapa line. I'd envisioned a big development for the station incorporating the demolishing of Airways Corp house, and providing a nice connection through the station from Willis up to Boulcott in line with Chews Lane and Harris St. This is feasible at the moment, but wont be after all the proposed development for that area. Which is exactly why long term plans are good if this were a preferred route.

A2 - Future extension to Courtenay Place for the EMUs only.

B1/B2 - Self Explanatory routes around the waterfront. The B2 route with a terminus was lightly looked at by Opus for some particular study. In this case you'd ideally want to reserve some space here for 4 platforms so some services (e.g. Wairarapa) can stand for a while. This may mean that developments such as the recently proposed one next to Les Mills should be designed to cater for it (again this is why you should have a plan so you can mandate things like that).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Erentz, didn't you move to Adelaide? Are you back now?

I really like the work you're doing on mass transport thinking. Not sure what you do for a job, but you seem to have some good skills and knowledge of roading and mass transport. Its a shame that your blog is so relatively unknown.

I've been thinking for a while that what Wellington needs is a decent proposal for a light rail system - an underground, overground, or above ground system - i don't really mind, but I am amazed that nobody seems to have done one. Perhaps the GWRC have - you alude to an Opus one - someone must have, but its buried. Maybe it can't happen now ie today, but we should be planning it out for the future - allowing rail corridors etc. Or at least talking about it. Have you done any work on such a thing? Perhaps you would like to publish it here, or somewhere where it would get possibly better press? Maybe contact eye of the fish ?

Erentz said...

Moved to Perth, but now back in WLG to enjoy our more benign summer. :)

My day job is completely unrelated to this. It's just a field of interest. Note the sporadic frequency of the posts.

I agree with you. I've wanted to see a dedicated group and a firm proposal for light rail in Wellington for a while. At the moment the push for light rail comes from a few different people and groups, some have been campaigning for quite some time on the issue.

I have a bit of spare time at the moment though, so I may look into putting something together, and sharing it around with the other groups to see if some agreement can be reached, and perhaps something can be kick started. If I do, I'll announce something somewhere. It'd need people with different skills (legal, design, illustrators, etc.) to get involved.