Doorrail - when Railways tried to be everything to everyone

 

doorrail leaflet

A new service from Railways

Saves time and storage

Doorrail terminal list

With the corporatisation of New Zealand Railways in 1982 came the deregulation of land transport that saw abolition of the 150km limit on road competition with rail. The more commercially oriented Railways Corporation knew it had to respond to competition or it would lose far too much business, and "doorrail" was a product designed specifically to cater for smaller businesses and consignments of less than a wagon load. It linked the small local road carriers that had for many years hauled freight from railways freight depots to and from customers on contract, to provide a general door-to-door freight consignment service across the country.  

As the leaflet shows, it aims to be customer friendly, enabling quoting for just about anything door-to-door by phone, and NZR would arrange the private carriers to do the road haulage component (and it was even offering to do fully road haulage if appropriate, which would make sense for freight from say Taupo to Tauranga). 

The list of depots is a precursor to the consolidation of rail freight depots in the late 1980s.  The list is instructive, and would be considered excessive today. Otiria for the Far North and Whangarei for the rest of Northland.  Auckland at Beach Place and Britomart Place is a far cry from the construction of the Britomart rail terminal and complete removal of the downtown Auckland rail freight terminal (except for the Port of Auckland).  Southdown would become Auckland's freight hub.  For Waikato, Hamilton is the natural hub, but Taumarunui remained as well, effectively as the central Plateau hub for freight. That role disappeared some years ago.  In the Bay of Plenty, Tauranga, Rotorua and Taneatua were the hubs, and of those Tauranga is the only one that remains. The Rotorua branch line would prove to have insufficient volumes of freight to be economic, especially as its steepness limited loads (and added to fuel use) and its alignment towards Hamilton did not fit into a town that increasingly relied on the Port of Tauranga.  New Plymouth is the natural hub for Taranaki, Whanganui for that town, but it seemed odd to include Feilding alongside Palmerston North.  Likewise Levin for the Manawatu (both Levin and Feilding are no longer general freight depots for Kiwirail). To the east, Gisborne is of course no longer connected to the rest of the network, but Napier and Hastings are both general freight depots (Napier albeit based in Ahuriri and focused on port traffic).  Masterton and Wellington remain the two freight depots in the Wellington region.

Down south, Spring Creek remains the sole depot for the top of the South Island, with Greymouth for the West Coast.  On the Main South Line doorrail depots were at Christchurch, Ashburton, Timaru, Oamaru, Dunedin, Gore and Invercargill.  Today neither Ashburton, Oamaru nor Gore handle general freight.

Doorrail as a product eventually faded away because it was increasingly not commercially viable for the Railways Corporation to seek to be everything to everyone in freight, and consignments of less than a rail wagon lot, or increasingly a container, were simply too costly to handle. Kiwirail today only handles bulk commodities or container-loads of freight.