Logs and trains

As a child, our family had summer holidays at the camping ground at the base of Mt Maunganui in the Bay of Plenty. Aside from gorgeous days on the beach, one of my strongest memories was seeing the empty caravan next to ours. The family had gone for a day trip to nearby Rotorua. But on the way home their car had collided with a logging truck and the whole family died. It was a very early lesson as to why, where possible, we need to keep logging trucks off our roads.

Trains are the ideal way to carry logs and other wood products. They keep heavy trucks off roads, making our roads safer for other travellers and preventing further damage to our highways. Trains are pothole preventers.

Trains are also a very low emission way of moving freight.

One very busy rail line in the Bay of Plenty is the Murupara Branch. It is a 57 kilometres long line from the East Coast Main Trunk at Kawerau to Murupara, built to support harvesting radiata pine trees from the Kaingaroa Forest. It links to the port of Tauranga and onto Hamilton.

Log trains are loaded directly at KiwiRail’s Murupara rail siding and leave the yard every four hours, six times a day, seven days a week. At Kawerau additional wagons are added for the trip through to Mt Maunganui, KiwiRail’s busiest terminal in the network.

Another railway bringing in logs is the Kinleith/Tokoroa branch line.

While the Bay of Plenty/central North Island is the largest forestry region in New Zealand, many other railway lines support trains carrying logs. In Paekakariki, where I live, it is common to see trains carrying logs to the Wellington port. Logs also come from the Wairarapa by rail.

Until cyclone Gabriel destroyed part of the line, the railway to Wairoa was the key way of taking logs to the port of Napier.

And log movement by rail has also been important in Taranaki.

It is not just logs that will be moved in the future with the Bay of Plenty rail lines especially likely to become even busier.

On October 30th 2024, Air New Zealand and LanzaJet announced the preliminary findings from a study into using woody waste residues and low-value wood products in New Zealand to produce alternative aviation fuel.

Then, on December 13th 2024, Genesis Energy announced it is committed to using biomass to reduce the need for imported coal at its Huntly Power Station. Their calculations indicate around 300,000 tonnes of biomass will be required annually for Huntly Power Station by 2028.

Other regions are also exploring using waste wood as fuel.

If the Air New Zealand and Huntly projects come to fruition, then much of the wood is likely to come from forests in the central North Island. For the greenhouse gas emission benefits to be maximised, we need to use the lowest emission form of transporting wood. Trains will have to be a key part of a supply chain.

This is the time to also begin to reduce emissions further by electrifying the rail link from Hamilton to Tauranga. And as part of improving that rail link and further reducing emissions, it is also time to bring back the Kaimai Express. As Air New Zealand proposes, decarbonising aviation will require alternative aviation fuels. But for relatively short trips such as from Tauranga to Hamilton and onto Auckland, passenger rail could replace many flights. And, when we finally get serious about reducing transport emissions, we will begin to revive passenger rail across all our rail networks, including bringing back a night train between Auckland and Wellington.

Getting logs and other wood products onto trains and reviving passenger rail should be key goals of forward-looking transport policy in New Zealand.