Extended month-long rail closures will not be required in Auckland once the city's rail networks have been modernised, says KiwiRail's chief infrastructure officer.
Auckland's Rail Network Rebuild started in January 2023, and is in its final stages as residents face 96 days of train closures through to January 2026, ahead of the City Rail Link (CRL) opening in 2026.
The current month-long shutdown began just after Christmas, and people have been asked to take rail replacement buses instead.
Many commuters returning to work on Monday told RNZ they were frustrated at the increased travel times, and the summer rail closures over many years.
KiwiRail chief infrastructure officer Andre Lovatt said the current work was critical to convert the existing network - which was designed for freight trains - to one that has capacity to carry faster and more frequent trains, about 16 an hour, when the CRL opens.
Lovatt said there would be a big shift in the approach towards maintenance after the rebuild had been completed.
"A lot of the really long term problems with it will have been fixed, so that enables us to focus on preventative maintenance,
"What we're doing is also bringing in different machines and different techniques, and we're also getting access to the network in a different way," he said.
"Those long periods of closure will not be required in the future," he added.
Lovatt said the maintenance closures will be planned around long weekends and overnight in the future. He said four to six week-long closures was not "part of the future" KiwiRail was planning for.
Transport commentator Matt Lowrie said he had little confidence that KiwiRail could keep on top of future maintenance of the rail network.
"I don't have a lot of confidence that KiwiRail will be able to keep the network maintained, given that it's been so many years of public disruption and they keep finding new issues, I'm not convinced that we're not going to continue to see these long periods of shutdowns over the summer holidays," he said.
"And that's really disappointing, we don't see these sorts of things happen on most other metro networks around the world,
"And we're unfortunately at the mercy of KiwiRail, what they're saying around - that this is gonna get the network fixed," he said.
Lowrie said while he was also frustrated at the shutdown as a user of public transport, the work currently undertaken was "desperately needed", given the state of the network.
"The Auckland network had been completely run down and not maintained properly by KiwiRail, despite many years of these sorts of shutdowns occurring for the last 20 years or so," he said.
Lowrie said the lack of reliability of the train services will put people of public transport.
"It's going to take many years, I think, to recover the trust in then network that has been lost over the last four years or so," he said.
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