Quote Originally Posted by Nasi Goreng View Post
If you are wanting a train from Auckland to Hamilton, I would imagine it would need new lines. For it to be a goer, I think it would have to be a pretty fast train around 200 kph, something in the region of 30-40 minutes.

It would be awesome for Hamilton and I'm pretty sure that Hamilton would do quite well out of it with businesses considering being based in Hamilton. However, given all of the half arsed kiwi infrastructure projects that have been done over the last 100 years, I don't see this anywhere on the horizon.
I used to take the train from Kyoto to Osaka (japan) it was nowhere near that fast --took about an hour---If you were starting from scratch though you would want an express and local--if you live at one of the less used stations you simply get off the express at the nearest big station and transfer to the local for your stop----1 hr would be perfectly acceptable from Hamilton to AK and back(while you read the paper or do your computer work)