The Mernda Rail Extension project team has come up with some innovative ways to re-use material and reduce the number of trucks on local roads while building the 8km of rail from South Morang to Mernda.
Over the past few months, the team has excavated around 80 thousand tonnes of basalt rock from underneath South Morang Station and McDonalds Road. This was crushed on site, using a rock crushing machine.
Using this method on site meant that:
- trucks could use the rail corridor to travel between the cut and the rock crusher via the new rail alignment, and not public roads.
- we reduced truck movements on local roads as trucks did not need to travel back and forth from a quarry.
Our crushed rock was also placed underneath the new rail line. This was an efficient use of resources, as we didn’t have to order new material from a quarry.
We’re also using the crushed rock in other locations along the Mernda rail alignment, including for haul roads, and along the combined services route (CSR) – the power, signalling and communications cables that run along the rail line.
Our first rail delivery train also pulled into South Morang Station over the weekend.
The rail, which has already travelled from Whyalla in South Australia, was welded into 165m long ‘strings’ at a Spotswood factory. It was then loaded onto a rail train and brought up the South Morang Line in the early hours of Monday morning.
More than 2000 tonnes of rail will be delivered over 5 nights throughout March and April, after passenger trains have stopped running.
Each day, around 25 rail workers – including a group from Aboriginal business, Mooney’s Corp – will lay tracks, by hammering clips into place to connect the rail to the track sleepers. A slow and methodical process, the rail workers will follow a hi-rail excavator as it places rail on the sleepers in front of them.
In order to build the track from Plenty Road to Mernda whilst we continue to construct the Plenty Road rail underpass, rail track will be off-loaded from the delivery train and dragged across Plenty Road using rubber mats.
There will be localised detours in place at night while we drag rail across sections of road.
Detour routes will be clearly signed to motorists and traffic controllers will be on site at all times to guide traffic.
Further north, works are progressing well, with the last sections of the ‘u-trough’, or elevated structure, installed at both Mernda and Hawkstowe stations.