Auckland Transport Consultancy

My history with ships, trains, planes, and coaches.

I guess it started wth a train set my father bought me as a kid then extended when we boarded the "Maui Pomare" in Auckland in 1953 and our family sailed to Rarotonga for 3 glorious years before returning to New Zealand and settling in Christchurch in 1959 to complete my education. In 1961 I joined the Union Steamship Company in their Christchurch office and worked in the freight department often chasing New Zealand Railways for freight on wagons that should have been in Lyttelton to load on ships and finding it scattered around the South Island. I also worked in the passenger department selling tickets for the Interisland Steamer Express ferries plying between Lyttelton and Wellington each night and a prime perk was going to Lyttelton to despatch the interisland ferry each night.

In 1963 I had the opportunity to go to sea and joined the t.e.v. "Maori" interisland ferry as junior assistant purser and during 6 wonderful years enjoyed 2 years on the ferries, including the Aramoana and Aranui when they first arrived, Pacific Island run from Auckland to Fiji, Samoa, Niue, and Tonga on the "Tofua", "Matua" and Taveuni' and finally 15 months on the "Waitaki" to Singapore, Malaysia, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka before returning to the "Maori" as Chief Purser for a year and coming ashore in 1969. After working in the Air New Zealand office and at the airport in Wellington for a year  and gaining my private pilot licence with the Wellington Aero Club decided to form my own tour company to take people to the more exotic parts of the world and shifted to Auckland. I operated tours overseas with groups during winter and around New Zealand in our summer which has enabled me to visit 93 countries, and drive around 2 million km on tour in New Zealand between Cape Reinga and Bluff numerous times in the past 54 years. 

My first major rail journey was in 1966 when on leave between ships I flew to Tokyo and took the ferry from Yokohama to Nakhodka, local train to Khabarovsk and the Trans Siberian 7 day journey from there to Moscow and on to St Petersburg and Helsinki and then took 2 overnight ferries from Helsinki to Stockholm, and Esbjerg to Harwich to compare them with New Zealands offerings, This was to prove useful, along with some later experience of overnight ferries, when discussing with Head Office a replacement for the "Wahine" when I was Chief Purser on the "Maori" in 1969.

I started tour operating at the end of 1970 with tours of New Zealand. In 1975 I had the unique opportunity to pioneer tours from New Zealand to China as it slowly opened to the outside world and have been back 46 times since. Much of the travel was by train and in 1979 I was honoured to be one of the first companies in the world to be allowed to operate tours between Beijing and Moscow on the Trans Mongolian train with stops in Ulaan Baatar, Irkutsk, Lake Baikal, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Kazan and continuing from Moscow to St Petersburg (then still Leningrad), and on to the bright lights of Helsinki and Europe. I have escorted 14 groups on the Trans Mongolian tours, 13 times by regular scheduled trains and once on the deluxe Lernidee private train - a massive upgrade in accommodation,  meals, ands service. I would still be doing them however Covid and the war in Ukraine has put paid to that. China and the Middle East became my speciality areas of the world including 17 visits to Israel and my favourite all time tour to escort driving from Beirut to Cairo via Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel. 

In the late 1970's I saw the potential of the magnificent scenery of the Tranz Alpine route from Christchurch to Greymouth for rail tours and integrating the trains into the New Zealand tourist industry. I put a proposal to New Zealand Railways to charter the "Southerner" train to operate  day excursions to Arthurs Pass. at the weekend. The track was not in a sufficient state to allow trains to operate over to Greymouth and back in one day but I would have operated a coach on the Christchurch-Mt Cook-Queenstown-West Coast-Arthurs Pass run and drop one group of passengers for the train to Christchurch  and pick up another group for the return coach journey. New Zealand Railways raised all sorts of objections which I was able to answer and in the end just refused any hint of private enterprise on 'their' railways. At the time New Zealand Railways (under) employed around 24,000 staff and was losing over $100 million a year. I took it to Colin McLachlan, then Minister of Transport and Minister of Railways. He raised the same excuses fed from NZR and when he had exhausted all reasons and found there were no valid ones finally got me by agreeing to let me do it but gave me an outrageous cost which was almost the same as chartering a B737 from Christchurch to Sydney and back!!. I could sense the congratulations in NZR headquarters that they had finally got me. How dare anyone in Railways alllow private enterprise to be enterprising - and increase their profits!

Richard Prebble was appointed Minister of Transport and Minister of Railways when Labour came to power in 1984. In 1987 New Zealand Railways was changed to an SOE and a highly competent Board of Directors were appointed. By that time the track from Christchurch to Greymouth had been upgraded and the "Tranz Alpine" daily return service introduced. I believed there was a need for a de luxe service to cater for higher end tourists and provide a higher standard of service and meals. I put a proposal to the Board to lease one of the old first class carriages from NZR which they no longer used  and fit it out to a higher standard and operate it on the "Tranz Alpine", "Coastal Pacific", and "Southerner" as required.  The board did due diligence and gave me the go ahead and were completely supportive. For the first year I flossied up the carriage, put sheepskin rugs on the seats, food heating system,  had my own dedicated carriage attendant on the carriage and provided juice and snack on departure and a meal en route including half crayfish put on board fresh as we passed through Kaikoura! The "Connoisseur" service started on January 19, 1987. I cannot speak highly enough of the co-operation of the operations team at NZR in Christchurch in getting the carriage ready and attaching it to the correct train as required during the next 3 years, and the unions who allowed me to choose 2 of their members to specifically work on my carriage and provide superior service to my clients. In 1988 the staff at Addington Workshop did an amazing job of totally refurbishing the carriage  including fitting new seats, soundproofing, installing 4 track stereo with headphones to each seat, and a better food preparation area.

To see the 1988/90 brochure showing the Connoisseur click here

Patronage grew catering for local and international travellers and it was interesting that my best supporter was Contiki tours, operators of more budget tours for young people. Unfortunately I ran into financial headwinds in 1990. I was the biggest operator of tours to China in the late 1980's  with up to 10-12 tours a year and lost over 80% of that business after Tian an Men Square in 1989. I was also caught in the outrageous activities of the New Zealand Government 1990 - 1993 when our Government took over $1 million dollars from Chinese students under false pretences and never paid it back and outright stole around $5 million dollars of Chinese students money. Don McKinnon (then Minister of Foreign Affairs) refused to give it back when I asked him and it was only partly remediated later by a payment of $3.2 million to the Centre for Scholarly Exchanges in Beijing for students to apply for a refund.  

Unfortunately I had to hand the "Connoisseur"  back to New Zealand Railways in 1990 albeit we had developed, along with a Palmerston North engineering company a new form of carriage for these services based on using the deck of almost new FM guards vans with a lounge for 16 people at each end glassed in on three sides with a central services and baggage storage unit. It would have been fabulous!! Typical of Railways continuous mismanagement was the fact they had bought a large number of FM guards vans at a time when guards vans were going out of fashion! In  1993 the National Party destroyed my business and a $4 million dollar a year contract for education and exports and wrecked any chance of a revitalisation of Connoisseur. 

It took Kiwirail almost 20 years to introduce Premier services to its passenger trains.

The mismanagement of New Zealand Railways in all its forms since then has continued to the present highlighted by the current (01 July, 2024) fiasco with the Interislander and failure to maximise revenue and services and minimise costs. National continued their practice of destroying value and supporting big business by selling NZR to an American operator who stripped the cash out of it, minimised maintenance, then sold to Toll who continued railways demise. The Labour government finally bought it back in 2008 for $665 million and changed the name to Kiwirail. The history of incompetent management with no great experience or vision for railways has continued and successive governments have continued to feed vast sums of money into the  bottomless pit of Kiwirail without much obvious improvement.  The last competent Minister of Transport was, in my view, Richard Prebble and the last one before that Peter Gordon!

In 2006, out of frustration at the incompetence of Auckland Regional Transport Authority and the disaster that was Auckland public transport I spent over 2,000 hours developing a template for Auckland Public transport bringing all 5 elements of a maximum performance system (network, schedules, fare type, fare level, and infrastructure) together in SUPERMAXX. I was staggered at the savings to be made by maximising efficiency in the network and schedules and maximising revenue through the introduction of Unlimited Travel Passes. and using my experience of many forms of transport and looking at public transport in many other cities around the world I developed a new template and called it SUPERMAXX. This was presented to ARTA and the Auckland Regional Council in early 2007. It has been presented to all Mayors, Councillors, and Central Government politicians many times since including the latest on 20 June, 2024. No one has proven me wrong.

My approach to the Auckland Council and Auckland Transport has always been to (A) prove my claims are wrong  OR (B) come up with something better or (C) implement SUPERMAXX. They have done none of the foregoing.

My claims are that failure to implement SUPERMAXX  in 2007 has cost Auckland Ratepayers over $1 billion dollars in excess operating subsidies, cost Auckland commuters over  $1 billion doilars in excess fares paid to bus operators and caused over 500,000 tons of excess carbon to be pumped into the air. Implementing it would mean lower rates, lower fares, and lower carbon emissions, all stated aims of Auckland Council. 

Until someone proves my claims are wrong or implements Supermaxx and brings a total revamp of Kiwirail Including Interislander and trains I will continue to advocate for better transport services in New Zealand.   Simeon Brown does not inspire confidence in his abilities as Minister of Transport and the disaster of Nicola Willis cancelling the new Interislander contracts, seemingly with no plans for replacements, means we will suffer greatly as a nation and our transport woes will  not be fixed.