Touring almost every western, eastern and southern suburb, from every single train line in Auckland.
If I catch my train all the way to Britomart after leaving The Spinoff’s inner-west suburban office, there’s always a large queue of people waiting to get in after I’ve disembarked, so many that you have to dart through the crowd to get off the platform. The sign on the train changes to “Destination: Swanson”, and the train gets ready to chug all the way back out west where it came from, and maybe back again, and again. It always makes me think: what if you never got off the train?
So that’s what I did on Thursday, travelling on every train line in Auckland without ever leaving a station. As a 24-year-old who uses public transport for everything, and generally has a positive outlook about it, I feel really uncool. I don’t have a driver’s licence, which is definitely only inspired by climate change concerns and not at all related to my recurring nightmare of dying in a horrific car crash, why would you bring that up? Anyway, suffice to say I’m very fond of my city’s trains and buses.
A year of woeful public transport news – from abuse and attacks to too-hot train tracks to a mayor at odds with his city’s own transport entity – has hardly helped Auckland Transport’s image, but Aucklanders may not realise they’ve got a few things to be thankful for when it comes to their trains. When I moved here from Wellington in 2015, I was astonished that you could tag onto a train with your Hop Card – the capital still relied on paper tickets until 2022. Also, Auckland is a genuinely great place, if you just look out the window.
My journey began at my local, Parnell Station, with my usual route on the Western Line. Not much can be said about this painfully average station, which I fear would land quite low in a ranking of Auckland’s train stations. As expected, the train was a few minutes late.
This line, obviously, takes you through Auckland’s western suburbs and it’s true what they say: west is best. I watched the memories play out on the window: that’s where my best friends flatted in uni, that’s the office, that’s where I survived a 24-hour film marathon, that’s where we used to sleep on Aunty’s couch. Some memories make you want to look away from the window: that’s the place my ex-boyfriend and I used to call home.
It’s one of those areas that often gets a bad rap, but West Auckland has a lot to offer. The greenery flying past the window from New Lynn to Swanson is a reminder that at any time, you could come out here and get lost in the bush, a haven away from the concrete jungle. Also, there are a lot of great thrift stores around here.
Arrival at Swanson, the final station on the Western Line, was met with a group of orange-vested men inspecting the next train. There was a strong smell of something burning, but the workers couldn’t quite put their fingers on the source, so the train was cancelled and the next one delayed by 10 minutes.
The only thing worse than the smell and the slight delay (minor problems, if you’re someone like me who is only doing this all day) was the woman who raised her voice multiple times at the train station workers over the cancellation. It’s another day in paradise in West Auckland.
To make up for lost time, the train sped through stops between New Lynn and Britomart, while the would-be passengers at the skipped stations looked on with annoyance. I have been in their shoes many times. By the time the train parked up at Britomart, it was only a 14-minute wait until the Eastern Line left.
The journey on the Eastern Line from Britomart to Meadowbank is short but one of my favourites, because you pass through Judge’s Bay, Hobson’s Bay and Ōrākei Basin. If you keep your eyes glued to the window, you’ll see the shimmer on the water, the trees on the cliffside and the birds flying overhead, with the Sky Tower slowly falling away into the distance. Onwards, the view from the Eastern Line window gets pretty industrial.
Though many of the sights from the window stay the same (save for a brief pass through the Māngere Inlet), the line hits a few hotspots: Sylvia Park Mall, Middlemore Hospital, and Manukau. You could even get off at Puhinui and catch Te Huia to Waikato, if you forgot that train existed. As for me, I stayed on the same train at the final station in Manukau – 10 minutes later, it headed back to Britomart.
It was now afternoon, and time to catch the longest train line in Auckland: the Southern, with 15 stops between Britomart and Papakura, and four more to be fully opened in 2026 as part of the Ngākōroa railway development. There are signs at most stations promoting Auckland’s new connection to Drury, but other posters were more troubling to me: the vending machines at the stations now only accept contactless payment. My bog-standard eftpos card returned no bottles of iced tea.
The Southern Line blends Auckland’s most and least privileged suburbs, from Newmarket to Ellerslie and Ōtāhuhu to Papakura. The greenery, flash passengers and flashier houses start to disappear when you get to Penrose, Auckland’s industrial cesspit. By then it was just me, elderly Asian passengers, university students and a man whose bag was emitting a suspiciously strong smell of weed left in the carriage.
Like the Eastern Line, this train stops right outside the hospital at Middlemore, which had consistently been the busiest station in the three times (so far) that I had passed it. As the afternoon progressed, more and more school children stumbled onto the train in groups, discussing the events of the school day.
I felt like forever had gone by when we reached the final station, Papakura. I think the security guard thought I must have been a bit lost after I got off the train, waited on the platform for 20 minutes, then went back on the train to go back to where I came from.
I unfortunately did not get the full Southern Line return experience as the train was unceremoniously cancelled at Ōtāhuhu. A station worker revealed the source of the disturbance to the disgruntled passengers: some dork broke a glass wall on one of the platforms, so the station was briefly evacuated. This somehow also caused at least three trains to be cancelled.
After a 30-minute wait, I was back on the Southern Line, and to make up for lost time, I decided to change to the Onehunga Line at Penrose instead of Newmarket. I felt pretty stupid when I watched the train pass from the next station over, and I realised the next train was another 30 minutes away.
I had heard on good authority that the Onehunga Line was the least reliable train line in Auckland, though I’m sure every train-riding Aucklander would argue that theirs was the worst. But for this reason, I chose to ride the Onehunga Line last. The horror stories didn’t manifest themselves: after missing the first train due to my own stupidity, the rest arrived right on time.
The Onehunga Line is the shortest, only hitting two stations that don’t see any other trains pass through: Te Papapa and Onehunga. When I got off at the last stop, I was greeted with a smile from a station worker and reggae blasting through car speakers. Onehunga is a beautiful and truly unsung suburb, but I could only enjoy it for five minutes until the train took off back to Newmarket, my final stop of the day.
What do you learn from catching trains all day? Well, you get a real look at all the highs (scenery) and lows (cancellations), the passengers and workers, and the divisions of this huge city that well over a million of us call home. The same tired walk to the train station to and from work every day can get pretty dull: it’s nice to be a tourist in your own city and rediscover what you like about living here.
With a budget of $50, at least eight hours and a dream, you could catch every train in Auckland, if you wanted. Most people would think, well, why would you? Trying to enjoy a day of train catching while also trying to meet a deadline using an unreliable data connection will take its toll on you. That’s why it’s important to keep looking out the window, to remember there’s a whole world out there.
