Waitematā railway station

Britomart Transport Centre
MAXX Urban rail
The Britomart building, with the railway station located underground and behind.
General information
Location	Queen Elizabeth Square, Queen Street, Auckland City
Owned by	ARTA
Line(s)	Western Line Eastern Line Southern Line
Platforms	3
Tracks	5
Construction
Platform levels	2
Parking	Yes
Bicycle facilities	Yes
Other information
Station code	BTC
History
Opened	July 2003
Electrified	No
Passengers
5.7 million
Services

General Post Office building in 1911, the entrance to the Queen Street Railway Station to the right.

Britomart Transport Centre (often simply Britomart), is the CBD public transport hub of Auckland, New Zealand. It combines a bus interchange and railway station in an Edwardian former post office (extended with expansive post-modernist architectural elements), with the main ferry terminal being just across Quay Street. It is located at the foot of Queen Street, the main commercial thoroughfare of the Auckland CBD.

At the time of its inception, the centre was Auckland's largest transport project ever and is also one of the few underground railways stations in the world where diesel motive power is used. It is the northern terminus of the North Island Main Trunk line. The centre was built to move rail access closer to the city's CBD and thereby help boost Auckland's low usage of public transport.

History

Cost over-runs and differing tastes made Britomart politically controversial, the design often being described as a large hole in the ground, both literally and figuratively. Despite this and a NZ$204 million price tag, it has won numerous design awards and is internationally recognised for its innovative but heritage-sympathetic architecture. The main source of contention was the relatively great expense of this public transport development in the Auckland Region which is traditionally very focused on the private car (like all of New Zealand).

Earlier stations

Britomart is on reclaimed land in the middle of what was once Commercial Bay. It is named after Point Britomart, a former headland at Commercial Bay's eastern end. In the 1870s and 1880s the headland was levelled in order to extend the railway line to the bottom of Queen Street, and was used to fill in Commercial Bay.

The original railway station moved west to the Britomart site in 1885, and remained there after the Post Office was built on the Queen St frontage in 1911. In 1930 it was relocated 1.2 km east to Beach Road, to the Auckland Railway Station, and for the rest of the 20th century the Britomart site was a bus terminal (from 1937) and carpark (from 1958).

Many proposals were made to relocate the station back to the CBD, most notably in 1973 and 1987, with the 1970s proposal of the Mayor of Auckland, Dove-Myer Robinson, envisaging an underground station at the Britomart site as well as a tunnel loop. This was however stopped by the Muldoon National Government as being too costly and unjustified. In 1995, Auckland City Council purchased the old Post Office (which had closed in 1988) and proposed to develop the area as a transit centre. Early designs called for both the bus terminal and the railway to be underground, but these plans were scrapped as consultation showed that buses were preferred above ground by both users and operators, and as projected costs soared.

In 1998 a more cost-effective solution was found that used part of Queen Elizabeth II Square and surrounding streets as a bus terminal, with the existing dilapidated bus terminal redeveloped to incorporate both bus services and a pedestrianised area. When nearby Quay St was realigned in the late 1990s, a tunnel was built (completed in 2000) to provide the underground railway link to Britomart. Bus services using the old bus terminal were diverted to other locations in June 2001.

Construction

Designed by California architect Mario Madayag in collaboration with local Auckland architects Jasmax, construction of Britomart commenced in October 2001. It involved 14 km of piling, some of the piles being as long as 40 m and driven as far as 16 m into the underlying bedrock, mainly to provide good earthquake protection, and to futureproof the area for potential later construction of buildings on top of the station. 200,000 cubic metres were excavated for the station, and 40,000 cubic metres of concrete poured.

The new station was opened in July 2003 by Sir Edmund Hillary and several government ministers.. Services to the old station ceased, except for some peak-time commuter services and excursion trains, using the former Platform 4, renamed 'The Strand'. The commuter services ceased after a few months.

Capacity and rail connections

The station is designed to carry up to 10,500 passengers during the peak hour in the current configuration, i.e. as a terminus station. Further increases, considered necessary to increase frequencies in the long term, will likely not be possible without turning Britomart into a through station (as opposed to the current terminus configuration) for which in turn, a tunnel underneath parts of the Auckland CBD will be required (see below).

Increased services

In its early days, Britomart received a lot of criticism due to its being built on a scale that was well in excess of the capacity and patronage of the rail network in Auckland at the time. Auckland Regional Council transport committee chairwoman Catherine Harland acknowledged that "Britomart opened ahead of its time", raising public expectations that the state of the rail network could not yet fulfil.

An ADL class MAXX train at Platform 4 at Britomart.

However, in recent years rail patronage has increased greatly, from 2.5 million journeys in 2003 to 5.7 million in the year ending June 2007, and more frequent services have been introduced by the Auckland Regional Transport Authority (ARTA) and its rail operator Veolia Transport to accommodate these greater numbers. This has led to concerns that the station will soon be at maximum capacity. During the peak, only 18 suburban trains an hour can enter and exit.

The foresight of council planners in constructing such an iconic investment in Auckland's public transport has already spurred further development. The $600 million Project DART (Developing Auckland's Rail Transport) is underway, with the state-owned enterprise ONTRACK undertaking the ‘below rail’ construction (i.e. platforms, tracks and signals) and ARTA providing the passenger services and facilities at stations (i.e. lighting, shelters and access), with funding from the Auckland Regional Council and Land Transport New Zealand.

Electrification

With the announcement on May 17, 2007, that electrification of Auckland's rail network would proceed, further changes will be seen at Britomart to cater for the necessary overhead wires that will be part of the electrification project. The project timeframe is from May 2007 with a projected completion in 2013. With this announcement, the diesel trains which currently have adverse effects on the air quality in the Britomart station, will eventually be phased out, being replaced by the expected new electric trains that ARTA will purchase in the near future.

A view of Britomart's underground train terminus

City underground loop

Plans for an underground loop, to be built from the Britomart area, running southward underneath the CBD to the general Mt Eden area have been debated for many decades. The route would possibly go via underground stations at midtown near Wellesley St and one at uptown servicing the Karangahape Rd area, to a new station at Mt Eden. This loop would allow trains to run through the station, rather than having to reverse, thus increasing capacity. Governments have so far been unwilling to provide funding for this project, and it is unlikely to proceed in the near future, though the major investments into public rail transport as decided on in 2007 have put it back on the drawing board. Current estimates for the cost of the loop are at around NZ$ 1 billion with a 12-16 year plan-and-build duration.

Pedestrian underpasses

Initial plans included an underground pedestrian walkway connecting Britomart to Queen Elizabeth II Square, the nearby downtown ferry terminal and the main shopping street of Queen St. Due to cost over-runs only the short link to the square was built, the remainder replaced with a sizeable but less effective canopy over the footpath outside the station.

Services

Platforms of the underground station.

One of the futuristic dome-shaped skylights connecting to a public square above. The domes are supposed to represent Auckland's volcanic heritage.

Trains

Suburban services are provided by Veolia on behalf of ARTA, under the MAXX brand name. Most services either commence from or terminate at Britomart. The suburban network extends to Pukekohe in the south and Waitakere in the north-west.

The Overlander, a daily (high summer) or thrice-weekly (off-season) long-distance train between Britomart and Wellington via the North Island Main Trunk is operated by Tranz Scenic, part of Toll NZ. The service was threatened with closure in 2006 and its future remained uncertain even after Toll reversed its decision to suspend services after public comments on the closure were strongly negative .

Discussions have recently begun to re-establish a twice-daily return service to Hamilton, approximately two hours south of Auckland by rail. This service will most likely begin in 2008 or 2009 as an extension of the current service to Pukekohe to the south of metropolitan Auckland. A previous service, the Waikato Connection, operated this route briefly during 2000 - 2001.

Buses and ferries

Britomart is a major interchange where passengers can transfer between train, bus and ferry services. It is the terminus for many bus routes, and the free City Circuit and Stagecoach The Link buses go past on their loops around the city. Buses depart from various places in front and around the centre. While the bus stations in the square directly in frnt of the building are the most obvious, the large number of bus routes has forced some to be located up to a block away.

Just across Quay Street from Britomart is the Auckland Ferry Terminal, serving coastal suburbs like Devonport or further destinations like Waiheke Island.

Awards

Awards that Britomart Transport Centre has received:

• 2004 Property Council of New Zealand - Merit Award, Special Purposes Category
• 2004 American Institute of Architecture - Architectural Record / Business Week International Winner
• 2004 New Zealand Institute of Architects - Resene Award, Community and Cultural
• 2004 New Zealand Institute of Architects - Resene Award, Heritage and Conservation
• 2004 Illuminating Engineering Society of Australia and New Zealand - Lighting Award
• 2004 New Zealand Concrete Society - Concrete Award
• 2005 New Zealand Institute of Architects - Resene New Zealand Award for Architecture, Community & Cultural
• 2007 Kenneth F. Brown Asia Pacific Culture and Architecture Design Award - Honorable mention

See also

• Public transport in Auckland
• Transport in Auckland

External links

• Britomart Project (from the Auckland City Council website)
• Britomart Transport Centre (BTC official website)

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