Otago Regional Council urged to fund passenger rail studies

A group calling for the restoration of passenger rail in Otago wants feasibility studies into its proposals funded.

Save Our Trains Ōtepoti wants the Otago Regional Council to fund studies into a commuter service between Mosgiel and Port Chalmers and a passenger service between Christchurch and Dunedin.

Spokesperson Dave Macpherson told the council's Public and Active Transport Committee that rail would be important in mitigating the effects of climate change.

"We are particularly supportive of rail because it does address some of the issues - such as social isolation, carbon emissions and resilience - that aren't addressed by having too few options, for instance just road travel," he said.

"It is an important part of climate change mitigation action and it does provide resilience in times of weather outages of the road service."

It would also improve the safety of road travel as well, he said.

"Less cars on our roads actually improves safety, both for the people that aren't in the cars and are in trains, but also for the remaining people that do need to be on roads."

Save Our Trains Ōtepoti wanted a medium-term trial - lasting more than six months - to demonstrate the long-term feasibility of its proposed services.

"Local and inter-regional rail is making a big comeback overseas, not just in Europe," Macpherson said, "but in places like Australia and North America which traditionally have car cultures, and even in the North Island of New Zealand."

He believed rail services could compete in terms of price and time compared to air travel and road travel.

The group wanted the regional council to fund the studies in its long-term plan and to investigate alternative funding, such as Waka Kotahi contributions and central government funding.

Committee co-chairperson Andrew Noone said it had given councillors something to think about.

Macpherson said the council was very supportive of the presentation.

"They haven't given us an answer yet but they've responded really well to some of the points we made.

"Particularly they responded well to the point about giving regional communities much better accesses to services than they have at the moment.

"We were pretty chuffed really with the sort of response that we got from them."

Macpherson told Checkpoint that the cost of expanding rail travel was very affordable.

"One of the things about passenger rail in New Zealand including between Dunedin and Christchurch is the tracks are already there. So we're only looking at rolling stock and the costs of fuel to run those services. We're not looking at building a whole new railway track.

"We believe that it's quite affordable, it's been managed elsewhere in the country.

"It's just that it's only been in the North Island the last few decades. It's really the South Island's turn for some good transport infrastructure to be put into place."