INLAND RAIL
CEO excited over scope of Inland Rail Richard Wankmuller says the massive Inland Rail project provides a number of exciting challenges and opportunities for the engineering and project management sectors, starting with the substantial contract to take the line through Queensland’s Toowoomba Ranges.
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ICHARD WANKMULLER HAS A mammoth task ahead of him. As chief executive of the Australian Rail Track Corporation’s Inland Rail project, he’s charged with leading the delivery of the $10 billion-plus project to connect Brisbane and Melbourne via a rail line through regional Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. Inland Rail is broken up into thirteen projects spanning three states, each with its own unique challenges, working groups, community engagement, approvals processes and construction timelines. Easily the most challenging stretch of the project is between Gowrie and Kagaru in Queensland. The stretch incorporates three of the defined Inland Rail project sections to navigate Inland Rail’s most significant obstacle: the Toowoomba Ranges. To help manage the complexities and risks of this effort, the section will be delivered under a public private partnership known as the Gowrie to Kagaru PPP. Wankmuller is excited not only by the opportunities presented by the PPP, but the intense demand it will place on modern engineering. “We have some really exciting things going on, and one of those is the PPP,” Wankmuller told the AFR Infrastructure Summit in Melbourne on June
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ISSUE 5 2019 | RAIL EXPRESS
12, 2019. “That’s the biggest piece of Inland Rail, at somewhere in the order of $3 billion, and it has some of the more exciting challenges.” He noted the Toowoomba Ranges transit was historically difficult even for road vehicles. “Trucks and cars struggle, so moving a 1.8-kilometre double-stacked freight train through that is a bit of a challenge,” he said. “To make the gradient a little bit less we’ll have a tunnel, which will be twice the diameter of the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, and twice as long. That gives you a number of ventilation issues, heat control and safety issues. When we come out the other side of that tunnel we’ll have that 1.8-kilometre freight train suspended in the air – we’re not to ground yet. The first thing the train does is go onto a bridge the height of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and as long as the Story Bridge in Brisbane. “These are engineering challenges unto themselves, and that’s just one piece in this section; there’s fifty-one bridges in this section.” He said a global expressions of interest phase for the PPP, which recently closed, yielded many “great” candidates. Shortlisting and a formal request for proposal is expected by the end of this year. “We’d like to really stick to this challenge. This
Inland Rail CEO Richard Wankmuller.
The Inland Rail project will deliver an economic stimulus to QLD.
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