New Zealand First is announcing today that we will be committing to a 12-month trial of commuter rail in Canterbury - from Rolleston to Christchurch and from Rangiora to Christchurch.

We will also commit to bringing back the Southerner Train that connected Christchurch with Dunedin and Invercargill.

We will work with the current operators of the Mainlander train service on that route, to secure a commercially sound agreement that gets more trains running.

We want to see the Mainlander become a more frequent service, reconnecting the cities and towns of the South Island.

This will give Cantabrians a real alternative to sitting in traffic every morning and every evening.

Our ambition is to get passengers from Rolleston to central Christchurch in around 20 minutes by train, instead of spending up to 50 minutes on the road.

And the trains will stop near Colombo Street, bringing passengers back into the heart of Christchurch.

A permanent commuter railway can’t be built on wishful thinking. It needs passengers, it needs to make economic sense, and it needs to demonstrate that Cantabrians actually want it.

We will give Cantabrians the opportunity to prove it works in practice, not just theory.

If hundreds use these trains every day, that will build the business case for a permanent service, and hundreds a day becomes thousands. And more frequent trains then become hundreds of thousands.

That is how we make the case for new stations, better connections, and the long-term investment needed to make commuter rail a permanent feature of Canterbury.

The railway lines are already here and the taxpayer owns them. For decades, they have been passing through the communities without carrying the people who live in them. We believe that should change.

We are not proposing to spend years and millions of dollars studying whether Cantabrians might catch a train. We are proposing to put the trains on and find out.

That is the difference between talking about rail and delivering it.

New Zealand First will give Canterbury the opportunity to prove that commuter rail works.

We will put the trains on. The rest is up to Canterbury.