Rail Minister Winston Peters will announce the next steps in the journey to replacing the ageing Interislander ferries today.The Government says the announcement is likely to look at aspects of the portside infrastructure and operating model of the new ferries. The announcement will be made at around 12.30pm and will be livestreamed in this story.The journey to replace the ferries has been a long and rocky one. NZ First in coalition with Labour funded a plan to replace the fleet of three Interislander ferries with two new ones. While the new ferries themselves cost about $500m, cost blowouts on the port improvements part of the project saw the budget blow out to $3 billion by the time the government changed in 2023. The coalition declined KiwiRail, the owner of the Interislander, when it requested additional funding to pay for this blowout. This caused the ferry procurement project to stall, while a new model was found. Finance Minister Nicola Willis handed over primary responsibility for the project to Peters, who became the Minister for Rail.The new budget for the project will be $1.87b. Of that, taxpayers would contribute $1.7b, with the remainder coming from the ports. Two ferries will be built in China for delivery by the end of the decade. Port upgrades are still required but these are to be more modest than under the previous version of the scheme.