Return of The Southerner

If you’ve ever played the NZ edition of Monopoly, you’ll be familiar with the lucrative Balclutha Train Station. Well I grew up just around the corner from the real Balclutha train station, and clearly remember my older siblings being bundled onto the Southerner for trips to Dunedin and Christchurch. However, I never got my turn, as just as I was approaching my teenage years the service got cancelled, in 2002. I’ve had a chip on my shoulder about it ever since.

Hence why I was so excited when Kiwirail announced a couple of months back that they were going to trial a reintroduction of “The Southerner” passenger train service.

I was immediately disappointed though to learn that it wasn’t actually going to Balclutha – the trial stops at Dunedin instead of Invercargill. Personally I don’t think they should be allowed to call it “The Southerner” if it never makes it into Southland. Also disappointing was that it is for 4 days only, in some random Saturday to Tuesday period in May (not school holidays, not peak tourist season, not aligned with any big events as far as I can make out). Thirdly it only starts in Rolleston rather then Christchurch, due to scheduled track repairs.

Then I saw the pricing and got my biggest disappointment of them all. It’s marketed very much at the high end, tickets are $250 per-person one-way for “scenic class” and $500 for “scenic plus class”. Given a bus ticket is $34, I thought the pricing might have been more that sort of ballpark. There are no child fares, so to get the family down to Dunedin and back again on the train was going to cost me $2,500-$5,000. It was a tough job explaining to my wife why I wanted to take out a second mortgage to finance these train tickets, when she felt that we could just drive down instead. In the end I failed to convince her and the tickets remained unpurchased.

It made me wonder what the point of the trial was? I had assumed it was to gauge customer interest, to inform a decision on whether it makes sense to bring back The Southerner on a permanent basis. That’s usually the point of a trial. But bringing it in at an innocuous time where there’s no obvious demand for travel, for only 4 days (Saturday – Tuesday), starting outside of Christchurch and ending well short of Invercargill, and with exorbitant pricing?! The sceptic in me wondered if this was a cunning ploy by Simeon Brown to make it as unattractive as he possibly could so that no one would catch it and he could more easily justify a decision to not fund a permanent scheme.

This morning however I had a quick look at the ticketing page and was pleasantly surprised to see I’d underestimated how much other people love trains.

I’d be interested to know what sort of people are buying the tickets? I thought that I was a unusual in my love of travelling by train, but there’s obviously a whole lot of people out there who love it way more than I do. It does raise the intriguing possibility that perhaps there really is demand for a permanent service. I feel like you probably need to run a longer trial to confirm that though – maybe for a year or two, a bit like what they’ve done in Hamilton. If they do fund a longer trial, which feels politically quite likely now, I hope they can somehow get it to run the entire route (Invercargill to Christchurch), get some decent times and days (maybe try to align with big events), and most importantly get the price down a bit.