A string of pearls: Why where Kiwis live is ideal for reviving passenger rail

As Nicolas Reid has observed, New Zealand’s towns and cities are like a string of pearls – connected, in most places, with existing railway lines.

Yet, unlike most advanced economies throughout the world, Aotearoa New Zealand no longer has a network of frequent, affordable regional and inter-regional passenger trains. The government, and many other rail sceptics, think they know why. They say it is heavily influenced by population size and density

“New Zealand’s geography and population distribution have contributed to a dependence on fossil fuel-powered transport"

This myth has been repeated many times. The above example is on page 16 of New Zealand's just published, very unambitious, second Nationally Determined Contribution: Submission under the Paris Agreement.

But over recent years a number of research-based articles have busted this myth. In fact, New Zealand’s geography and location of most of its population centres would support the revival of passenger rail. Two recent articles point this out clearly.

Michael van Drogenbroek and “Nobody lives here”

The first analysis is by rail, freight and public transport consultant Michael van Drogenbroek.

In a Linkedin post in 2024 Michael states:

“A comment often made by detractors of the National freight and passenger railway network in New Zealand in the recent interisland rail ferry debate, is that rail doesn’t work here because our population density by World standards is too low for rail to be economic relative to other countries. Whilst at first pass this may appear to be a reasonable conclusion (our overall population density is low at 20 people per sq km) it doesn’t bear close scrutiny as a valid metric and therefore this type of gross over simplified analysis results in demonstrably untrue conclusions as to rails viability.

The map below shows where basically next to no one lives in New Zealand. In a nutshell shell 78.21% of NZ is uninhabited. NZ is actually one of the more urbanised countries in the World relatively speaking as the white areas show - higher than the United Kingdon, USA, Germany and many other countries we like to compare ourselves to. We are about number 46 in a list of about 200 countries actually almost exactly the same as the UAE where they have just built a new national freight and rail network - see here https://lnkd.in/gWK-M5CD.

This is actually good for rail as it flourishes where urbanised densities are higher. So. we are not hugely disadvantaged. In fact, when you adjust the denominator correctly for where people live and realise where the rail lines actually exist in NZ relative to that - hint mostly they are where people live - you actually find our ratio of railways to corrected population density is actually closer to that of countries such as Ukraine - a country very well known for its very successful railways. This is ideal for rail as it means generally people and key economic activities are located on key trunk rail corridors - especially when compared to areas of countries with otherwise lower population density where this is no rail.”

Nicolas Reid and “The string of pearls”

A 2025 article explores population size and population density and location in more detail. Again, it was published on Linkedin and was written by Nicolas Reid, Principal Public Transport Planner at MRCagney Pty Ltd.

It is recommended that readers access the whole article with its detailed maps. But here are some excerpts.

“I was lamenting the lack of intercity train options in Aotearoa recently and was hit by an all-too-common retort: the idea that New Zealand doesn’t have much of a rail system and trains can’t go where people want to go. This truthy little number is often backed up by the suggestion that New Zealand was designed for roads and it’s too late to try and do anything better with the rail network.

So I wondered, how much of this is actually true? It felt wrong to me, knowing that there are train tracks all over the country that pass through just about every city and town in the country. The rail network should be able to serve a whole lot of people and places very well. But I didn’t have any hard data on the topic to confirm that feeling, so naturally I needed to do some analysis.

There’re two things to work out to answer how many kiwis live on the rail network: firstly, where to people actually live in New Zealand, and secondly where does the rail network actually go to?”

Like Micheal, Nicholas looked at where most people live.

“New Zealanders overwhelmingly live clustered in small proportion of the land area of our country. We live in cities and towns or close to them, we live mostly near the coast or on plains, and we don’t live in mountainous areas. The main centres stick out clearly, with smaller cities and towns dotted between them like pearls on a string. Even when you zoom in to the low-density rural living, it’s still clustered along a relatively small number of roads branching out from nearby towns.

While we live in settlements right across the country from cape Reinga to the Bluff, we’re certainly not evenly spread out across the country. New Zealanders are highly urbanised and centralised in where they live. If you take a step back, this looks like near perfect conditions for intercity rail: population located in clusters of cities and towns dotted along a fairly small number of linear corridors.”

Nicolas then mapped train tracks onto these population maps

“The network of rail tracks is easy enough to map out but it’s the stations that are most important for access. I worked through the list of KiwiRail facilities to identify those that are currently, or were formerly, a rail station. New Zealand has a very large amount of train stations in almost all parts of the country. While most of them are now derelict or demolished, they still exist as a station or railyard in a legal sense on land that is still owned by the rail operator. So those station sites give us a good idea of where passenger trains could run if they were operated on the network. If you look at the network, it’s easier to list the places that aren’t on the rail system. In terms of main centres, it’s basically Taupo, Nelson-Golden Bay and Queenstown Lakes that never had rail connections. We can add to that Rotorua, Gisborne, the far north and Hauraki-Coromandel that sit on mothballed or abandoned lines. Pretty much everywhere else in the country with anyone living in it has rail to some extent.”

So a key question for reviving passenger rail is how many people live in the rail catchments?

“From that list I worked out the catchment area of each of current and former station sites. I identified the closest station site to every point in the country, then I ran a fifteen-kilometre service area around each station along roads and pathways to limit the catchments to a reasonable distance. This translates to about a fifteen-minute drive, or about the same on coach or local bus. Intersect those catchment areas with the population grid, and we know how many people live close to each station location. It also tells us which station site has the most people nearby, and which the least, so it’s easy to put together a list of what the first priorities should be.

So the quick answer: 87% of New Zealand lives within fifteen minutes of a current or former rail station site on Kiwirail’s current rail network. That’s about 4.4 million people. Ok grand, myth busted. But let’s dig in a little further into the data and see what a feasible intercity passenger train system might look like.” (emphasis added)

So how would rail serve these catchments? Not surprisingly, Nicolas’s list looks very much like a set of trains The Future is Rail wants to revive.

“For a passenger rail network we’d naturally start where there is the most potential for demand. The stations with the biggest catchment are, not too surprisingly, stations serving our largest cities. Interestingly, you only need thirty stations across the country to serve two-thirds of the population, although these are spread across all the corridors of both islands. In the top thirty sites ranked by catchment, there are six stations in the Auckland region, five in the greater Wellington area, four in greater Christchurch, two each in Hamilton and Tauranga, plus one each for Dunedin, Palmerston North, Napier, Hastings, New Plymouth, Whangarei, Napier, Invercargill and Whanganui.

For a more useful look at the outcomes, I put together a network plan of routes and stations that you might actually operate to serve all these areas. This is based on extending or upgrading six existing intercity trains lines:

· Te Huia, between Auckland and Hamilton, and extended to Tauranga and Te Puke

· The Northern Explorer, between Auckland and Wellington

· The Capital Connection, between Wellington and Palmerston North, extended to Wanganui and New Plymouth

· The Wairarapa Connection, between Wellington and Masterton, extended to Woodville in the northern Wairarapa.

· The Coastal Pacific, between Picton and Christchurch

· The TranzAlpine, between Christchurch and Greymouth

· We add to this two reinstated lines that used to run until the 2000s:

· The Bay Express, between Wellington, Palmerston North and Napier-Hastings

· The Southerner, between Christchurch, Dunedin and Invercargill

· …plus two new lines, which I’ve taken the liberty of giving names to:

· The Northlander, between Auckland and Whangarei

· The Shirelander, between Tokoroa and Hamilton, via Matamata and Morrinsville (this is similar to the old Geyserland Express, but unfortunately the tracks to Rotorua have been ripped up, so Tokoroa it is).

A national intercity rail network of ten lines and 100 stations that would serve 80% New Zealand residents. Six of these lines already exist in some form.

Across these ten lines there are 100 stations that look like a good idea to serve. About half of these are main population centres, and half are smaller places that are on the line anyway. Overall, 80% of the New Zealand population live within fifteen minutes of these hundred stations.

So there we go. Kiwis overwhelmingly live on the rail network, or the rail network goes where Kiwis live. Either way upgrading or extending our six existing intercity train lines, plus adding four extra ones, would result in a intercity rail network that serves eight out of ten New Zealanders.”

My additional thoughts

Both Michael and Nicolas’s articles start from the logical point of existing populations. But if a rail enthusiastic Ministry of Transport and government was wanting to revive passenger rail it would go deeper in its analysis. It would be looking for ways to grow the potential market including through modeshift. So, it should be gathering data - or using models – to figure out.

1. The forecast population growth of these areas and the demographic and socio-economic mix of that population, such as aging of those populations.

2. The numbers of people who would already want to use trains if available.

3. The potential to shift some travel from cars, long distance buses and planes to trains.

4. Unmet demand by those who cannot drive or are not near an airport, and

5. The requirement for businesses to reduce their transport emissions and how this might affect demand.

The issue of a growing but aging population was explored in a Bay Buzz article on bringing back the Bay Express In that article it noted:

In 2001, when the Bay Express ceased operation, just 13% of the Hawke’s Bay population was estimated to be 65 or older. But by 2033, it could be 24% and by 2048 it is likely to be just under one-third. Many will be in their 70s or 80s. While most will be in the larger areas of Napier and Hastings, significant numbers will be in the smaller towns across the region.

At any age not everyone is able to drive or wants to drive. But at some point in our lives, most of us will no longer be able to do so.

There is the potential to rebuild passenger rail in Aotearoa New Zealand. It is not population that is holding this back. It is lack of political will.