Thread: Cook Strait Ferry

solar powered whakas tp please all in the sheepshed in wellington.alternate fuel would be provded from decomposing bullshit as spouted by you know who!

There will still be a ferry servoce...Problem is they decided they wanted to go to new mega farrys....Like buying a new dodge ram instead of a normal station wagon....so big it means a new garage (port) new loading areas etc...they decided to milk the taxpayer for everything and seem surprised when the govt says "cant afford that...." . All we need is reliable ferry's the size we have that are reliable and a maintenance schedule that is kept up to date....If the govt (us taxpayers) is financing it then I would sure has hell expect to be free or at least economical and for it not to be charged like a private enterprise seeking proffit and bonuses for the bosses....

Fascinating how a bunch of practical level headed people on here can come up several cost effective solutions in the space of 24hrs. I like the ideas of reinstating the Lytleton route with a couple of new ferries plus 2 or 3 new ferries, similar size to current, on Picton route. If the purchase was correctly scoped they could have common running gear, engines, etc so that would simplify & leverage maintenance costs. No need for massive port infrastructure spend, etc.
Taking a step back, I think the fundamental problem in this situation was a fatal error = giving Kiwirail the responsibility for deciding the solution. They always had their own agenda & bias, which has now been shown for what it is. Farkn wasteful, excessive & useless. Of course some of the KiwiRail “thinking” fitted very well with the last mob & their ideology, so you can see how it started & how it got hijacked. The trick is how to avoid this type of error & waste of tax payer $$ in future.

Originally Posted by chainsaw

Fascinating how a bunch of practical level headed people on here can come up several cost effective solutions in the space of 24hrs. I like the ideas of reinstating the Lytleton route with a couple of new ferries plus 2 or 3 new ferries, similar size to current, on Picton route. If the purchase was correctly scoped they could have common running gear, engines, etc so that would simplify & leverage maintenance costs. No need for massive port infrastructure spend, etc.
Taking a step back, I think the fundamental problem in this situation was a fatal error = giving Kiwirail the responsibility for deciding the solution. They always had their own agenda & bias, which has now been shown for what it is. Farkn wasteful, excessive & useless. Of course some of the KiwiRail “thinking” fitted very well with the last mob & their ideology, so you can see how it started & how it got hijacked. The trick is how to avoid this type of error & waste of tax payer $$ in future.

that last sentence should be in the jokes thread

rail needed why??? to bypass using shipping of containers is my only real guess/reason.... other than that,whats advantage???
what goes via rail can be shipped and reloaded...

Originally Posted by Micky Duck

rail needed why??? to bypass using shipping of containers is my only real guess/reason.... other than that,whats advantage???
what goes via rail can be shipped and reloaded...

It's the most efficient way to shift shipping containers from the major ports (Auckland and Tauranga) to where they are needed elsewhere in the country. Certain shipping outfits are not calling into the south Island at all on some services now I'm told, so the ability to efficiently send cans south and north is required as we don't have a coastal shipping outfit that is fully operating.

bloody silly thing is that the ferries carry things like coal to wellington where its put in plastic bags and sent back to the south island!

Originally Posted by gonetropo

bloody silly thing is that the ferries carry things like coal to wellington where its put in plastic bags and sent back to the south island!

agreed. but still less silly than shutting down coal mines and importing it to be more "green"

I've been reading a fair bit about this today and it's been very interesting indeed. It's also interesting reading some of the comments.

If you go through a blow-by-blow account of the project, with a focus on the extraordinary variations being reported against preceding forecasts and budget requests, it reminds me of what happened with Solid Energy and Don Elder's visions and how he got those agreed to by Treasury (visions which turned to coal dust in no time under John Key's Govt).

Anyway without wanting to get into all that, it's been even MORE interesting to read about all the different ferries available. That's really got my interest and stopped me from doing what I was supposed to be doing on the PC - some amazing engineering out there. I used to love taking ferries, and have done all sorts from the absolutely ginormous, to small ones on Rift Valley lakes that were assembled mostly by hand in Africa after being transported cross-country in parts.

There's no shortage of options for our seas.

All good fun and a real eye opener.

You should as China for a couple of ferries,they love to help developing countries with their infrastructure projects!

do they build unicorn fart powered ones, just to keep it clean and green

The straights between Norway and Denmark gets a bit choppy,but the cats seem to handle that well.

The North Sea is a bit rough and the ferries that ply the coast from Stavanger up to inside the Arctic circle always seem to run ok.

Maybe New Zealand has the wrong kind of water between the two Islands?

Originally Posted by norsk

The straights between Norway and Denmark gets a bit choppy,but the cats seem to handle that well.

The North Sea is a bit rough and the ferries that ply the coast from Stavanger up to inside the Arctic circle always seem to run ok.

Maybe New Zealand has the wrong kind of water between the two Islands?

Short period, steep face with the odd big bastard chucked in. Worse than the south aussie bight and thats a bad bit of ocean... Where the cats are good are is the open ocean swell and not where it's fully exposed to the currents and cross chop and swell - current flow against chop and swell isnt like the North Sea. Don't get me wrong the North Sea isn't flash but its got different characteristics to whats here.

We would not be having this discussion if the maintenance procedures for the equipment and the condition monitoring and reliability engineering on the equipment needing to be replaced were all up to scratch.

As a person with a proven reliability track record in the large marine, fixed plant, mobil equipment and diesel power generation industries I am qualified to make that statement.

But sadly maintenance penny pinching and a lack of ownership of machine reliability, is coming to hit us in the pocket also bringing with it an increased risk of accidents and disasters.

Just today I was looking at some of our haul truck data... over 80,000 meter hours on many trucks.. translated at a slow 50kph = 4 million hard kilometers up hill down dale rain hail mud and heat.... so yes safe reliable on going operation of the ferries is acheivable if best maintenance practices were in place.

But we would rather buy new toys for a billion than porperly maintain what we have for a few million more than we currently spend.

And that is my vent for the day, time for a beer.... btw, this is what I built today...

Originally Posted by LBD

We would not be having this discussion if the maintenance procedures for the equipment and the condition monitoring and reliability engineering on the equipment needing to be replaced were all up to scratch.

As a person with a proven reliability track record in the large marine, fixed plant, mobil equipment and diesel power generation industries I am qualified to make that statement.

But sadly maintenance penny pinching and a lack of ownership of machine reliability, is coming to hit us in the pocket also bringing with it an increased risk of accidents and disasters.

Just today I was looking at some of our haul truck data... over 80,000 meter hours on many trucks.. translated at a slow 50kph = 4 million hard kilometers up hill down dale rain hail mud and heat.... so yes safe reliable on going operation of the ferries is acheivable if best maintenance practices were in place.

But we would rather buy new toys for a billion than porperly maintain what we have for a few million more than we currently spend.

And that is my vent for the day, time for a beer.... btw, this is what I built today...Attachment 239454

You're quite correct - but compounding this problem is the fact that the tubs in question arrived second or 27th hand, no documentation, no manufacturer's support and the requirement to get into service ASAP because something else has cocked up. This is the issue, and also the problem with the two-ship solution - if you need two that means three ships as we have no dry dock facilities in NZ so they have to go overseas to be inspected per maritime requirements. There's a hell of a lot more inside a ship than a haul truck as well - not trying to be a dick with this statement but when you are looking at the amount of systems inside 30,000 tons of ferry it's not hard to miss things especially when the documentation from the manufacturer is sitting in a storage locker in some other country where you can't get to it and even if you could it's likely not in English...