Bill Mackay

They're underground in terms of under Albert Park, but Albert Park's a hill.

So it's really like a tunnel at street level going through a hill, the whole of branches that you would shelter in.

But one of the main tunnels goes all the way under Albert Park and pops out in the Parnell area.

Yeah, so that would be terrific as a little walking or cycling route rather than going uphill, downhill, which those of us who live in Auckland are used to.

It's going to be good for you, though.

Yeah, so there were some people who were very enthusiastic about reopening them.

Bill Reid has dug out a small portion of one of the tunnels and has spent the past three decades trying to convince council to reopen the rest.

They had various plans and they pitched to the council and all sorts of things like that but nothing came of it.

The tunnels at the moment are actually full of kind of bricks.

They're not particularly well fired if they're fired at all but there are stacks of bricks all the way through there so those would have to come out and the reason why they did that was to stop

tunnels collapsing, that sort of thing.

But occasionally you get a little sinkhole opening up in Albert Park due to one of the ventilation shafts from the tunnel collapsing in on itself and causing a sinkhole.

No, probably in terms of health and safety would require extensive mitigation and strengthening and all of that kind of thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If we were a richer city in a richer country, like our neighbours, for example, I'm sure we'd get round to it, but we've probably got other priorities at the moment.

No, because also just in terms of when you think about the rail tunnels that go through hills all throughout New Zealand, it's just amazing what people were doing by hand.

Yeah, so if you imagine the kind of a hashtag, most of them are in that kind of pattern, except for this one that goes all the way through to the parnell kind of area, fringe parnell.

Because they were shelters and as an anti-blast measure you want to have a few corners in there so you're around the corner from the blast.

You don't want the blast to go straight down the tunnel so the blast carries on down the main tunnel but you're sitting at a branch off that.