Southdown, New Zealand

Southdown is an industrial suburb of Auckland, New Zealand. The main company in the suburb was the former Southdown Freezing Works, part of a large industrial zone located near the North Island Main Trunk railway line. The buildings were decommissioned during the 1980s and 1990s, releasing large areas of land to be redeveloped as office parks.

Southdown
Suburb
The containers stacked in the primarily industrial Southdown can sometimes evoke a "table mountains" horizon.
Country	New Zealand
City	Auckland Council
Electoral ward	Maungakiekie-Tamaki ward
Local board	Maungakiekie-Tamaki Local Board
Train stations	Southdown Train Station (closed)

Oranga	Penrose	Mount Wellington
Te Papapa	Southdown	Sylvia Park
(Mangere Inlet)	(Mangere Inlet)	Westfield

For many years the abattoirs located here were discharging large amounts of untreated waste into the Manukau Harbour. This had a detrimental effect on the ecology of the harbour, which at the turn of the 20th century had been a popular and attractive place to swim, sail, fish and gather shell fish. For most of the middle of the 20th century it was a health hazard and its shell-fish a probable source of food poisoning. Since the freezing works were fully closed in 1981,^[1] the water quality has improved greatly.

The Waikaraka Cycleway ends at the bottom of Hugo Johnston Drive, next to the defunct Southdown Power Station.

Hugo Johnston Drive is the site of a historic 2.5ha asbestos cement dump used by James Hardie Industries from 1938 to 1983. The nearby Southdown Reserve (opposite the defunct Southdown Power Station) has been closed to the public since March 1999, after workers discovered asbestos material there.^[2]

Southdown Power Station

The Southdown Power Station was developed by the Southdown Cogeneration Joint Venture, a joint venture between TransAlta and Mercury Energy.^[3] The plant had two LM6000 gas turbines and one steam turbine, fueled on natural gas and producing 114MW. The plant was expected to emit about 410,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually.^[4]

In 2000, Mighty River Power purchased 50% of the plant.^[5] and purchased the remainder in 2002.^[6]

In March 2015, Mighty River Power announced that it would decommission Southdown Power Station^[7] and sell the plant overseas.^[8]

Southdown railway station

Southdown railway station was a station on the Southern Line of the Auckland suburban railway network. It was opened to passenger traffic in 1905 and was closed in 2004.^[9]

Services were withdrawn by the Auckland Regional Transport Authority (ARTA) on 30 May 2004 due to low patronage and safety reasons. In the years immediately preceding its closure, patronage had increased on Auckland suburban trains but Southdown had not followed the trend and passenger usage of the station had declined to only approximately forty people per weekday. Safety concerns were raised due to the poor state of the footbridge used to access the platform, and the fact that to access the footbridge, passengers had to cross an unprotected freight siding.^[10]