Source: New Zealand Government
Thank you all for joining us here today. Can I acknowledge Mayor of Auckland Wayne Brown, and Deputy Mayor Desley Simpson.
We are thrilled to announce that Auckland’s City Rail Link will officially open to passengers on 13 September.
This is a turning point for Auckland.
In five and a half weeks’ time, for the first time, a train will run all the way through the middle of this city instead of winding around the outskirts.
Aucklanders will have faster journeys, more frequent train services and a rail system that can support the city’s future growth
The rail network stops being a handful of lines that die downtown and becomes what it should always have been – a network, with trains every few minutes.
Auckland is about to get what Londoners, New Yorkers and Sydneysiders take for granted – you never worry about missing a train, because the next one is only minutes away.
City Rail link is 3.45 kilometres of twin tunnels, three new stations, and has cost $5.5 billion dollars.
But this is a story bigger than those numbers that will grab the headlines.
This is a story about the thousands of New Zealanders: tunnellers, engineers, electricians, specialists and planners, who made this project possible.
This is about the apprentices who came onto this project as school leavers and will walk off it as qualified tradespeople – ready to build the next thing, and the next thing.
This is about the people who will sit on a train, heading to a first day at a new job, going to the doctors, heading to school, or to shop, or to catch up with friends.
This is about the new homes that will be built, and the the new jobs created.
This is not simply another piece of infrastructure.
This is bigger than that.
Good infrastructure binds cities, and the people who live in them, together. The real value isn’t in the tunnels themselves – it’s what’s outside those doors.
Thousands of people a day riding up the escalators into streets full of shops, offices, students, and somewhere decent to eat afterwards – all thriving because of this project.
New apartment buildings, homes and townhouses popping up, made possible because of this project.
City Rail Link is a symbol of our ambition for Auckland, and our ambition for New Zealand. Our country, at the bottom of the world, can choose to be wealthy, and modern, and prosperous.
But that comes with trade-offs – the ones Aucklanders have lived with on this project for a decade. Businesses disrupted. Roads closed. And communities that won’t look the way they once did.
None of that is easy. But they are the inevitable costs when a country decides the future is worth the inconvenience of building it.
Once people jump on the first train, it will be clear it has been worth it.
Have there been mistakes along the way? Of course. Are there lessons we must learn? Absolutely.
But of all the Aucklanders who will come to rely on this every day, not one of them will be thinking about the construction challenges, or the funding agreements, or the arguments that have been had along the way.
And that’s the point.
Good infrastructure sits quietly as the backdrop of an ordinary day, quietly, for decades, making our lives a little better than they would otherwise have been.
I am proud to be the Minister of Transport that gets to see this project completed.
I am proud to be a part of the National Party got this project off the ground.
We built this. And we can build more.
Thank you. This is a great day.
Original source: https://nz.mil-osi.com/2026/08/07/announcement-of-crl-opening-date/