With Australia’s current boom of rail infrastructure projects, the need to grow the skilled workforce has never been greater.
The current facilities
The Rail Academy, located at Newport in Melbourne, is currently the largest facility in Australia and includes more than 500 meters of off-network tracks, track vehicle operator and certification, tram and train overheads, signalling rooms, workshop space and ten classrooms.
While the condition of the facilities and the training provided are high quality, the facility needs further upgrades to simulate a live network and real-life signalling scenarios. Upgrading the signalling systems in place substantially enhance the Rail Academy’s ability to train the next generation of rail signalling engineers, at Victoria’s only specialist rail training facility.
This project is an exciting opportunity for Omada Rail Systems to enhance the development of our own engineers, and once completed, all engineers who train there. While under the mentorship and strict guidance of our more senior staff, our junior engineers will be involved in all aspects of the work. This ensures they gain valuable hands on experience and develop a well-rounded set of skills, whilst also completing work to our usual high standards.
What work are we doing?
As a part of the works to upgrade the facility, we will firstly be conducting a full correlation and update. From this, we will create designs based in the relay room, showing the removal and addition of points, signals and train stops. Doing this will provide students with the opportunity to perform multiple installation, testing and commissioning scenarios. Alongside these designs, there will be duplicates made with intentional faults to provide experience in fault finding. Further designs include, three interlockings which will be connected to the outside track equipment, the removal/addition of a Level Crossing and an interlocking change in the CBI room. The latter two in this list will also have duplicates made with intentional faults. Finally, we will be designing a fault frig box which will give the experience of real-life testing & commissioning scenarios.
Omada is extremely proud to be playing a major part in this project, as upon completing the works, we believe the Rail Academy will become one of the best equipped training facilities in the world.
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