Nice to read a story like this. If this were the norm much of our work would be over.
Carleton
Long train coming
December 20 2002
A grand vision, a harsh reality. Penelope Debelle meets the men laying
steel across the outback.
By 5am the desert sky south of Tennant Creek has lightened to a dull grey. The railway crew has been at work for four hours and still has six to go. They eat and drink on the job, knowing they will not get back to the air-conditioned camp until the daily quota of 2.2 kilometres of track is laid.
A work train carrying more than 3000 concrete sleepers winds back over a kilometre of railway line that did not exist 24 hours ago. At the front of the train, the track-laying machine feeds lengths of tempered steel rail along its sides and lays them on the ground. The steel is surprisingly flexible as it feeds along the runners, then arcs down towards the dirt.
Before the lines have time to settle they are lifted back up, so the sleepers can drop into position on the red earth below. Australia's newest railway line leaves the smelters at Whyalla in South Australia in 27-metre lengths, which are welded into 360-metre pieces of track at the Tennant Creek camp. These longer pieces are joined on site by welders using small mobile furnaces that heat steel to temperatures of more than 2000 degrees.
Behind the welders, a second train of 55 wagons carries 3800 tonnes of ballast. A tamping machine follows and settles the gravel around the sleepers. No matter how hard the tampers work, they are last in at the end of a long day that ends when the nation's normal business has barely begun.
About 60 men work the night shift, carving a new transport route from Alice Springs to Darwin. They work 13 days on, one day off, and every six weeks they have a week off when they are given a flight home. They work at night in country where daytime temperatures reach 50 degrees. "It's not too bad this morning," says track controller Dennis Bailey as the first rays of pink signal the start of another desert day. "The machines become so hot in the daytime (the men) can't operate them because they are unbearable to touch."
As the sun rises, shapes become more defined. Metre-high termite mounds rise randomly from the ground and the oddly delicate foliage is pale and pretty against the deep red of the earth. The view of the outback after sunrise, before the scorching heat blasts all the colour away, is priceless.
"Yeah, it's not bad here," observes track supervisor Eric Downing, 22, whose laconic manner is typical of these parts. "It gets warm during the day though. Well, it gets bloody hot."
The modern railway track is the creation of machines. Gone are the days when gangs of labourers hammered sleepers into the ground then bolted the rail on to the top. Modern rail construction is not exceptionally complicated, but this project is enormously complex logistically because of its location and scale. "This is a simple job; it's just the size," says Gary Sharpe, the technical officer for Trackwork South, which is building the southern section of rail. "It's not as hard as doing track maintenance in a metropolitan railway system."
But building a railway from Australia's red heart to its tropical north is expensive beyond belief. This part of Australia is so remote from normal services that getting a photocopier fixed costs $900 in call-out fees. To build and service the project, everything - portable toilets, rail lengths or gym equipment - has to be trucked in.
It takes a certain kind of man (and yes, they are all men building the railway) to work a job like this and employers - in this case John Holland, which is managing the southern section of track for AdRail - do what they can to make it bearable. "We've got 100 guys at the camp and they need to be fed well and they need to sleep well because they have to work hard," says project manager Vince Ferritto. "They need to be, most of all, motivated."
If that means doing a 200kilometre round trip because the supply truck offloaded the mealtime staple, watermelon, at the wrong camp, then it has to be done. "They'd go on strike if they didn't get it," says Sharpe.
The typical menu includes a roast, chicken, pasta and possibly a curry with a choice of vegetables and salad. There is a gym and the men sleep in portable, air-conditioned huts that are comfortable, but basic.
"You're there to eat, sleep, work and enjoy each other's company," says Ferritto. "The philosophy I try to bring in is that this is something different."
It is. This $1.4 billion line is Australia's last great transport route. It was legislated for 130 years ago by the South Australian Parliament and mentioned by the first governor-general, John Hope, at the opening of the first Federal Parliament. Hope suggested a rail link between the Northern Territory and the southern states would soon be of national importance. It has been a long time coming.
Five years ago, agreement was finally signed, and a year ago AdRail began work on what some see as Australia's land-bridge into Asia.
Instead of starting at the top and heading down, sleeper factories were set up at Katherine and Tennant Creek with crews laying track south and north. The 642-kilometre section between the two towns was finished earlier this month and represents just under half of the 1400 kilometres of track to be built from Alice Springs to Darwin.
The Tennant Creek crew, which has a slightly longer section to complete, is continuing to build south, while the northern sector has broken for the wet season and will not be back until March.
Some of the men have come into the project to be part of history - this is Australia's biggest construction project since the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme. But most are just chasing work. An average worker can expect to make $80-$90,000 a year with overtime and allowances.
If you work in rail, Alice Springs to Darwin is the big one. "As a railway engineering-type person, this is the biggest railway project in Australia; it is never going to happen again," says Sharpe. "They did a documentary on the Snowy Mountains scheme a year ago and a lot of those guys got killed and they imported a lot of the labour from Europe. This is the biggest (project) since then and I am bloody rapt to be working on it."
The men building the track from Tennant Creek to Alice Springs are Chris Blair's boys. Blair, 53, a tough, contained man in shorts and a cowboy hat, is a track superintendent for John Holland. He finds the work, then brings in men he knows and trusts.
"I've been working for Chris for six, seven years," says tracklayer Patrick Andrews, 48, who lives in Perth but comes from Burma. "So wherever he goes, he gets us a job. We always go wherever he goes."
Blair works his men by setting them targets they know they must achieve each day. Away from the track he acts as a kind of guardian, responsible for defusing tension and making sure these men, all of them tough individuals, know how to behave. They drink, of course, but not in a way that puts safety at risk. Random breath tests are conducted and anyone registering .02 or more is stood down not just for that day but for the following Sunday when the pay rate doubles. Anyone blowing 0.1 faces the sack.
"We try to make it as relaxed and as easy as we can, only because we've got another 10 months to go and we don't want to be going through a workforce," Blair says. "Two guys have left because of the isolation, wanting to get home to their wives. Other than that, we're very stable."
Under the land management agreement with the Northern and Central Land Councils, a commitment was made to train and employ significant numbers of Aborigines. Three hundred have been employed in the hospitality side, helping to run the camps, and a few are building the track.
On the northern section of line, four Aboriginal workers from Darwin and Katherine came on to the project having never seen rail track before. "They had never seen a train," said Clinton Pearson, an Aboriginal rail worker from Townsville who is based at the Buchanan camp.
"I thought they were riding me, having me on, but no, they had never seen a train."
Although the cost of the project has crept up from $1.1 billion to $1.4 billion, there have been no major problems, serious injuries or loss of life. Quality control is paramount and is continually tested.
"The quality assurance side of it is big," says Sharpe. "This track is almost millimetre perfect and you can do that on brand new track - brand new rail, brand new sleepers, brand new formation."
Over 150 years, Australian rail construction has evolved into an exact art, with only a three-millimetre error range maintained over hundreds of kilometres. It has to be built to last and to withstand buckling from cold and heat. "I think there is a bit of black magic to it," says Ferritto.
But some of the romance of rail has vanished along the way. For a start, the soundtrack has gone. Modern track joints are smooth and silent, so "the clickety clack, clickety clack does not exist any more", Ferritto says. "It is now a kind of 'whoosh'."
For passengers, the eventual rail trip - more than 3000kilometres from Adelaide through Alice Springs to Darwin - will be one of the nation's great train journeys. Certainly its scenery will surpass in splendour the two-day journey across the Nullarbor. Tickets will be priced at up to $1700 and a Ghan Top End club has been formed to allocate priority tickets on the first trips early in 2004.
But the main purpose and benefit of the new link will be freight. Temperature-controlled containers containing produce from South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales will be transported effortlessly through the desert and offloaded at a container terminal being built in Darwin. From there, Asia awaits.
For Territorians, who pay enormous freight penalties to bring in the most basic goods, a reduction in the cost of living is expected. "We won't see it as cheap as Melbourne, but we will see it reduced," says Northern Territory Chief Minister Claire Martin.
But the biggest social benefit will be the removal from the Territory's roads of the giant, lumbering road trains.
Claire Martin says the road trains are a colourful part of Territory life and no one wants to see them go. "They are the most courteous and helpful drivers you can find," she says. "They know how big they are, they tell you when you can overtake them, they don't speed up, they really work hard to work with your ordinary little sedan drivers."
But they are a danger, particularly for visitors to the Territory who are unaccustomed to negotiating traffic of such scale and are too frightened to overtake.
"In that sense, to get less road trains on our roads is an advantage and a safety factor," Martin says. "But we will miss them. The first time you overtake a road train it's a certificate of honour. They are part of life."
At the close of an early morning ceremony last week, to mark the joining of the Katherine and Tennant Creek sections, near the Buchanan Highway, a train started up its engine. People in these parts are accustomed to Kerry Packer's Lear jet landing on a specially constructed extra-long landing strip at his nearby cattle property, Newcastle Waters. But in this part of the country, the sound of a train was a new noise that signalled, as it has for the past two centuries, the coming of prosperity and progress.
Northern Land Council chief executive Norm Fry started as the train roared to life. "God's that's nice to hear," he said. "We don't hear trains start up around here. That's a new sound."
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/12/20/1040174394615.html
