Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

G’Day,

My first week at work has come to an end and I feel very Health and Safety conscious! The Glenfield to Leppington Rail Line project at the moment contains no actual rail line and I am part of the structures team responsible for delivering all of the structures along the 11Km alignment. My part in this is working under the Section Engineer where together WE will (he already is) be responsible for the 4 bridges from Leppington station to the stabling yard at the end of the site. The bridges consist of 2 underbridges and 2 overbridges with 3 of these ranging from 70-80% complete. The remaining overbridge at Dickson road is yet to be started and this is what I will be giving most of my attention to over the next 6 months.

Despite the lack of tracks, signals, overhead lines and of course trains the site has kind of, but kind of not been designated a rail site – it depends on who you talk to and what day of the week it is! Despite this uncertainty I have attended RailCorp’s induction which is the ‘white card’ version of rail, along with doing my white card and the site specific induction all of which took a day to complete and all of which issued me with a seperate photo ID card to fill my wallet with. I also have another card to obtain called a Rail Worker Safety card which is again a card but has a chip that says I have the other 3 cards but because the rail safety supervisors don’t have chip reading machines they won’t have a clue what’s on it so we have to carry all 4 cards around with us anyway.

Getting back on point, the Dickson Rd overbridge is a fairly straight forward beast but the Section Engineer is looking at me as the focus for the construction and it seems I have come at a good time so that I will be involved from start to finish with an estimated 5 month build duration. The bridge is very similar to the other overbridge at Eastwood Rd but where that was a pad foundation the design has been made to change to piles in an attempt to reduce excavation works and the amount of concrete in order to speed up the construction and save in the region of $200,000. The project as a whole seems to be doing well and is 6 months ahead of schedule, but the pace is being pushed all the time in a hope to increase this further and receive the associated financial bonus. The bridge is an 18m single span pre-stressed concrete structure which is due to start at the beginning of April. Construction can’t start however until the Eastwood Rd bridge is complete which is on the critical path. We have an unmovebale deadline of 25 Mar to complete this bridge so that the road can open before easter and so we can close Dickson Rd to start on the final bridge.

Overall, this first week has been thoroughly enjoyable but blurry! We have settled into our apartment in the eastern suburbs (exactly 950m from front door to sand on Coogee beach – down from bondi!) and the commute is only 45mins each way or 90 mins if it’s footy night as I discovered last night! I have also found that the last 7 months at Chatham seems to have prepared me well despite feeling at the time I was being punished but I didn’t know why!