Following up on the excursion of the construction of the new Sydney Metro in the morning, a visit to the headquarters of Mott Macdonald Australia was planned. Mott Macdonald is one of the largest employee-owned consultancies in the world with expertise in engineering, management and development. Together with Sydney Metro in a Public Private Partnership, Mott Macdonald is contributing to the new metro lines and accompanying structures such as stations.

The construction of the metro system is a large operation as it includes four new lines called Metro in Figure 1. This project is the largest public transport project in Australia with 46 stations and Northwest, Metro City & Southwest, Metro West and Metro Sydney Airport. The last one is situated in the West of Sydney and is not directly connected to the other parts of the metro system as can be seen 113 km of rail that needs to be build, operated and maintained. Mott Macdonald has worked on the design, construction phase support and procurement support on different parts of the metro project.

The presentations at Mott Macdonald kicked of with a small introduction about the metro project by Mark Perry. With the facts provided above this project is indeed a very large operation in which Mott Macdonald has a large stake. Michael Barron, technical director transport, gave an overview of the elements that Mott Macdonald has worked on for the Sydney Metro. For example, the station design of Victoria Cross and Martin Place, which we have come through with the study tour, are made by Mott Macdonald. To check if the station design actually works, a virtual reality run through the station was done with real customers. Afterwards the customers were interviewed to determine if things such as the toilets or other modes of transport were easy to find. The latter is especially interesting for the Micro Study on Seamless Transport. The design and construction phase are a bit different in comparison to the Netherlands. Mott Macdonald would design 30-35% of the station, this would include ventilation space, structural and system design and development on top of the station, while contractors would then do the full detailed design and actually build the station.

There are other striking differences such as the fact that for the metro stations, a hole is literally being dug in the ground while the plans for the design and who is going to build the station do not necessarily have to be finished yet but purely so it is ensured that something will be built. This is because politics in Australia is very time consuming when implementing plans and providing permissions as became clear from the Macro and Meso studies as well. Another fun fact about politics is the design of a transparent ventilation shaft so the park in which it is situated is not obscured by it because a politician, who was the driving force behind the park construction, did not like it. This once again shows that politics play a very important role in the construction sector of Australia.

Chris Knight-Hassell, also Technical Director Transport but than focused on tunnels, told us a bit about the different tunnelling packages and the procurement approach of building these tunnels and stations. Early Contractor Involvement (ECI) is used to engage contractors at an early stage to enable the contractor to provide input on the planning and design phases to test the feasibility and constructability. Usually this results in three potential contractors of which eventually one will win the contract. The benefits of this system are that opportunities and challenges are identified quicker, and alternative solutions can be tested.

Overall, it was a very informative and interesting excursion which provided insights into the construction and tendering phases of the enormous operation of the Sydney Metro. It also underlined once again that the workings, at least in the engineering industry, are heavily dependent on the government(s) and are just time consuming. Most of all it showed that although Sydney is relatively late with the construction of a metro system, it wants to do it right by making it fully automatic on the first try and also providing a good public transport network for future Central Business Districts. For now, some metro lines will be a bit empty, but we’ll see what Sydney’s future brings.