City Rail Link Is Really About Workers

Plenty of politicians will seek credit when it opens, but none of them will have lifted a spade. The reason New Zealand’s largest infrastructure project exists is because over 1700 workers actually built it.

After many years of planning, designing and funding arrangements were locked in place, work started before Christmas 2015 with two contracts simply called C1 and C2. The entirety of the old Downtown Shopping Centre had to be demolished. Britomart PLace and its old bus shelters had to go, and then pull all of the utility lines out of the way and re-route them. C1 also meant hollowing out the entire basement of the old Auckland Post Office, constructing two trenches for the new rail lines at about 16m deep, and then turning those two tunnels 90 degrees up so that they met the Albert Street-Customs Street intersection.

This is a CRL-supplied shot framed by one of the new tunnels. The entire mass of the old Post Office had to be suspended and rebuilt without it collapsing. It didn’t move thanks to the specialist piling, jhacking, and surveying temporary works teams.

C1 ‘s tracks threaded a needle going 90 degrees and uphill at the same time, and pulling together the two separate tunnels into C2’s single divided box so that it could be built up Albret Street – and all the while two new towers were being built right beside both tunnels by Precinct Properties.It was tight and it was mathematically precise.

The C2 contract then took those two tunnels and cut right through Albert Street to Victoria Street, deepening to about 20 metres to enable the grade to work for heavy rail.

But before the C2 team could complete those two tunnel boxes, they had to form a massive new stormwater line parallel with Albert Street all the way up to Mayoral Drive, and coming down Victoria Street they had to lower the city’s main sewer line underneath the future boxes of the rail tunnels, to about 24m deep, and then bring that sewer line to reconnect further down the hill.

The little railcar in the picture is to ferry men in to the Minehead, and ferry material out. The mined material was then lifted out in giant skips to the surface and carted away. It was tough, unrelenting, high pressure work and far better if you were short. Oxygen had to be pumped in and heavy extractor fans took fumes away. 

Mining up Albert Street involved forming the deep boxes down the sides, jacking the sides with horizontal steel so that they didn’t collapse, and then very carefully digging out the whole thing layer after layer.

It would be a who’s who of construction teams and subcontractors to list them all  – their time will come in the industry prizegivings. Most of the workers are so specialist that they have long since departed overseas since we can’t support them here.

Suffice to say that those two initial contracts evolved into the Link Alliance whose millions of hours worked ensured that it was delivered. Those headline players are Vinci, Soletanche Bachy, WSP, AECOM, and T&T, together with the client CRL Ltd.

There were over a dozen individual head contracts demanding many specialist subcontractors, the likes of whom we are not likely to see acting on this scale again in New Zealand. To give just a sniff of how hard the work was: C1 and C2 both took 4 years of dedicated work to complete, in the mud and concrete, with the local public and media and politicians generally hating the disruption which took a decade.

There will be many reviews that will include how to do such major projects better in New Zealand. One of those elements will be early calculation and payment of compensation to directly affected businesses whose survival relied on foot traffic that the project nearly smothered.

Another element will be: can we not organise our infrastructure project demand so that one major tunnelling job comes after another? Starting Watercare’s Central interceptor tunnel in parallel with the City Rail Link project was not smart given how scarce A-Gade tunnellers are in New Zealand and how highly they are sought elsewhere in the world.

But improvements are for another day. It’s done, and it’s the hundreds and hundreds of workers who achieved it.

When City Rail Link opens, a few hundred people will be able to say: I helped build that with my hands, putting my body on the line in hard conditions for years. In major project delivery there are always injuries, and this project had its share. There are also people who could do it for a few years and either burn out or got pulled to the other mega-projects their home organisations needed them for.

 For all those who worked on it, it’s likely that they will only say that, with a quiet and unpraised pride, to themselves, their family and friends, and the occasional reunion of those who really did it: we did this.