KiwiRail is laying on extra trains to protect Auckland's pre-Christmas freight supply lines during a four-day closure of Auckland's container port, which began last night with a strike.
The Maritime Union intends holding two 24-hour strikes, until 10.30 tonight and on Monday, which will be exacerbated by a 48-hour lockout by Ports of Auckland of 327 workers in the intervening period.
That has already disrupted six ships, three of which have been diverted to Tauranga and another to Wellington.
A fifth will wait out the disruption in Auckland and another has yet to decide what to do.
The disruption comes at a busy time of year, and is expected to cost the Auckland Council-owned port company $1.2 million in direct losses, not counting the impact on importers and exporters.
Importers are being catered for to some extent by eight extra trains which KiwiRail will use to bring containers to Auckland from the ships diverted to the other ports.
But the state rail operator confirmed yesterday that it was unable to accept late bookings from exporters wanting to send goods to overseas markets from Auckland via Tau-ranga.
Customs Brokers and Freight Forwarders Federation vice-president Trevor Duxfield said one of his clients agreed to a shipping company's request for an extra payment to load eight containers at Tauranga but these were turned away at a railhead at Southdown. He said officials at the inland Metroport, which KiwiRail runs on behalf of the Port of Tauranga, told his firm it was unable to handle extra exports during the Auckland closure.
Any other freight movements will have to be by road.
KiwiRail spokeswoman Jenni Austin said her organisation was doing its best to minimise the impact of the strikes and lockout but had only a limited number of trains to handle extra containers from Auckland.
Ports of Auckland chief executive Tony Gibson said 4700 containers would be caught up in the present stoppage, and up to 7500 could be disrupted if a 48-hour strike followed by an equally-long lockout proceeded at the end of next week.
He said today's strike would achieve nothing for the union, and if the dispute continued, Auckland risked losing a shipping line service at the cost of its members' jobs.
But union president Garry Parsloe accused Mr Gibson of increasing that risk as well as immediate financial losses to the port by locking out his members while acting in "bad faith" by offering individual agreements based on union-negotiated conditions.
He said the company called off mediated talks set down for Wednesday, after failing to respond to union offers on that issue and another involving a handful of contracted-out jobs.
Port spokeswoman Catherine Etheredge said the company saw no point in negotiating under threat of today's strike, but was willing to meet the union again on Tuesday.
Today's strike is the first on the waterfront in three years.