Newmarket Lights Up

in Auckland Featured General Trains by Jon C — December 24, 2010 at 12:29 pm | 1 comment

This year saw the new Newmarket rail station come into being and what a nice idea that a special effort has been made to feature the station for a special Christmas display.
It will be lit up like this until New Year’s Eve.

The innovative lighting feature, designed by Opus Architecture (which designed the station), has picked up several awards including a Lighting Design Award of Excellence 2010, and the 2010 People’s Choice Award. This Christmas marks the first time the feature has been programmed to its full capacity. The feature can be programmed to display any image whatsoever, making use of thousands of small LED to illuminate the frosted glass panels. Lighting designers have a choice of 16 million colours in the LED’s spectrum.
The animated four storey Christmas tree currently on show is the culmination of 15 hours of technical programming work; an endeavour by Graeme Burtt, a rail stations operations staff member, who drew on his web design and graphic design skills to teach himself the ropes of the complex system. Now he’s one of only two people in the country with the skills to program the system.

“When I was a kid I used to love coming to town to see Christmas lights on the main street and I was sad to see it stop happening, so this was my opportunity to do something for Christmas” said Graeme.

“This is the first step to better integrating our stations with the local community,” said Paul Jenkinson, Public Transport Facilities Project Leader. “Now we’ve got the facility operating well for rail passengers we are looking at what else we can do with it.”
Well done Auckland Transport.
It’s been a great year for railway improvements and it is a nice way to celebrate that.