Railway Digest Magazine July 2019 Back Issue

Automated for the People: Sydney Metro Northwest Opens
On Sunday 26 May, Australia’s newest and arguably most significant public transport service in several decades opened for business. Significant for it is Australia’s first automated passenger rail service, significant for it is merely Stage 1 in an ongoing program to build an entirely new heavy rail network in Sydney. Owen Roberts reports.

ARTC’s latest Hunter Valley Strategy
The ARTC has just released its latest Hunter Valley Strategy document, the twelfth in the series of annual strategies. The 2019 Strategy identified a preliminary scope of work on the network to accommodate contracted plus prospective coal volumes of up to 253 mtpa. However, with a possible decline on the horizon major infrastructure investment becomes problematic, so existing assets must be ‘squeezed’ to increase short-to-medium term capacity, as John Hoyle reports.

The Authority Gradient
The authority gradient has been extensively researched in aviation, and examples leading to tragic outcomes have featured in TV shows such as Air Crash Investigations. It has had little focus, however, as a contributing factor to incidents in rail. Former network controller, now an MSc Candidate at CQUniversity, Bridie Luva and her colleague Professor Anjum Naweed took a closer look as part of their ongoing research into rail safety.

Replacing Humbug Creek Bridge
By the late 1980s it had become increasingly difficult to maintain timber bridges on NSW branch lines to a satisfactory standard. As Neville Pollard explains, the bridge over Humbug Creek near Ungarie on the Temora–Lake Cargelligo line, serves as a case study of a relatively cheap maintenance free replacement bridge.