Cross River Rail

Overview

Cross River Rail is a 10.2 km rail line running through central Brisbane, Australia, at a cost of roughly £3 billion. At the centre of it are 5.9 km of twin tunnels beneath the CBD and the Brisbane River, plus four new underground stations at Boggo Road, Woolloongabba, Albert Street and Roma Street. The programme also covers upgrades to existing surface stations and new stations on the Gold Coast line. Services are due to start in 2026.

I led a team of six engineers and four drafters on the Woolloongabba Underground Station, working alongside CPB Contractors. The work covered construction-phase engineering, build sequencing and temporary works. The station sits in a live rail corridor, so each stage of the sequence had to hold the surrounding ground and structures while trains kept running a short distance away.

On the design side I worked on the initial retention systems and the temporary steel decking platforms that carried the plant and equipment used to excavate the station caverns and tunnels below. Before any of that, I ran condition assessments on the existing infrastructure in the corridor and set out how each structure would be propped or supported as the works moved around it.

A lot of the job was talking to people rather than designing. I met regularly with architects, site teams and subcontractors, and spent time on site checking that what had been installed matched what we had designed. Where the drawings and the site disagreed, it was either sorted there and then or fed back into the next stage of the sequence.

Public safety shaped most of the sequencing decisions. The rail network stayed open throughout, so I worked with the network departments on access, staging and protection of the operating railway, and took part in the safety briefings that went with each phase of the works.