Wankmuller provides project update

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.

RICHARD WANKMULLER HAS A m ammoth 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

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.

PPP is in Queensland, which is one of the areas where we don’t have a lot of work underway at the moment, and Queensland could use the economic stimulus.”

Reference design and de-risking Solid progress isn’t just contained to the PPP, with Wankmuller describing a forward push across the entire Inland Rail route. He said reference design for the project as a whole should be complete by the end of 2019. “When you finish reference design you know what you’re actually going to be building,” he explained. “We’ll know exactly how we’re going to solve some of these challenges. [For example] getting through the floodplains: what the structures look like; whether there’s bridges or viaducts; how robust they are.”

Another critical component of this reference design is how risk is to be managed across such a diverse and expensive project. “[Through the reference design] we’ll know how to package the work and get the knowledge out to the community. We’ll know the best way to de-risk our projects, because we’ll know how to attract the best companies in the country, and we’re going to do that through a de-risking strategy,” Wankmuller said.

“We take some of the traditional risk that the contractor would take, but very knowledgeably, and in a very programmatic way, so as to de-risk it for ourselves and the contractor.”

Benefit to the supply chain Wankmuller also believes the Inland Rail team will progress towards a clearer picture by the end of the year around intermodal terminals along the line.

This, he told the Melbourne audience, is key to achieving what should be the real goal of Inland Rail, as a nation-building project. “The project goes beyond rail … those intermodal sites are very important to the big picture of what we’re trying to accomplish here,” he said.

“We’re going to build a railroad, but that’s really just the tip of the iceberg to the difference this can make to the country. The big picture here is the truly added value, which isn’t about the rail at all – it’s about the supply chain. It’s about greatly enhancing the supply chain and making it much more efficient, starting to bring it up

to world standards.

“Supply chains in other parts of the world are heavily reliant on rail. Usually it’s 70 per cent rail, 30 per cent trucks; it’s the exact opposite here in Australia, and there’s a lot of history to that. Bringing the supply chain up to speed … it’s going to make a huge difference. We can bring down the cost of producing goods in this country tremendously.”

To realise this potential on a national scale, Wankmuller said governments and stakeholders need to work together. Happily, he noted, some of this is already taking place. “One of the things I’m proud of is we’ve catalysed some really good work between federal and state governments and that isn’t always done well,” he said. “This effort goes beyond what we’re building. We need help from the entire industry. We need people to step up and step in. We see state governments doing that very well.” One example of this is the NSW government’s $400 million investment in its Country Rail Network, which Wankmuller explained the benefits of: “When they connect to the spine [of Inland Rail] they’re going to have the same axle loads, providing interconnectivity and interoperability from the state lines to the spine. We’re looking to do the same thing in Queensland as they come onboard.”

Legacy for regions Beyond simply providing freight connectivity for regions, the Inland Rail

team is aiming to provide significant legacy benefits to the regional centres visited by the project.

“We have a number of sustainable enabling programs, which are really legacy programs for the community,” he said. “They look at how do we provide some of the things that are very difficult in the regions.”

As one example: “We’re going through regional Australia which is drought-ridden. When you build rail you need a lot of water, particularly for dust suppression, so one of the things we’re looking at is how can we solve our problem, but leave a legacy of a water supply for the communities out there if we can do it.”

As another: “We’re building the line but we also have to operate it. We have a telecom network that works for our control system. Can we augment that to provide better connectivity out in the regions? We think we might be able to leave a legacy in that regard too.”

Ultimately, these legacy initiatives will help drive positive sentiment among communities impacted by construction work – a positivity Wankmuller said must be promoted by all stakeholders for the project to be a success.

“Enthusiasm in the community is very important, and the community needs to see the vision of the whole project,” Wankmuller said. “We can’t be the only ones talking about it.”